A thermostat can tell you the room is cold. It’s never been cold. Ask a model to write something moving and it produces a passage where the emotions are correctly identified, properly escalated and accurately named. It’s competent. It’s also inert, and most readers can feel that within a paragraph even when they can’t explain it.
The gap is stake. Feeling on a page comes from a writer who had something to lose, and a model has never lost anything. I get annoyed every time somebody sells AI as the fix for a memoir that feels flat, because the flatness came from leaving the cost out, and a machine can’t put back what it never knew.
What does emotion on a page consist of?
A cost the writer paid, visible in what they chose to include.
The signal rarely sits in the emotional language. It shows up in a detail somebody would only include if it mattered to them, in a sentence that stops short because going further was hard, or in a refusal to soften something a careful writer would’ve softened.
When I wrote about a marriage ending in The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For, the sentence that counts is that I won’t pretend I was devastated. That’s a handful of words admitting something unflattering, and it works because there was a reason not to write it. A model has no reason not to write anything. Every sentence available to it costs the same, which is nothing, and that uniformity is what a reader is detecting.
I see the other side of this in my own work. A memoir client of mine read her first chapter, started crying, and told me I’d caught her perfectly. That reaction came from her own life on the page, built from the particulars she gave me in interviews, and a model couldn’t have produced it because it never had those particulars.
The book on this: The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For contains the sentence this piece is about, and I nearly cut it.
Why does the generated version feel padded?
Because it reaches for intensity where a person would reach for a detail. Asked for grief, a model supplies the recognized markers of grief. Asked the same thing, a person who has been through it usually produces something oblique and specific: the abundance of food at every meal, a shirt kept in a drawer, a case of pins put back on a shelf. The oblique version carries more because the reader has to do the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the feeling. The direct version tells them what to feel and they decline. AI-drafted emotional writing tends to run long for the same reason. With no specific detail to rest on, it piles up correctly named emotion, and readers call it fake because it is. I’d much sooner see three flat sentences and one true detail than a page of grief assembled from the vocabulary of grief.
The book on this: My Life in Crazytown is 19 years of material where the restraint is the technique and the naming of feelings would have killed it.
Can you fix flat AI writing in editing?
Every sentence available to it costs the same, which is nothing, and that uniformity is what a reader is detecting.
Partly, and the fix is always subtraction plus one true thing. Cut every sentence that names an emotion. Most drafts survive this without losing anything. That tells you what those sentences were doing. Then add one concrete detail from what happened, and the passage usually works. What you can’t do is edit stake into a passage where there’s none. If the writer had nothing invested, no amount of revision produces the thing, and the conclusion is that this section should be shorter and plainer and not emotional at all.
A flat factual paragraph is respectable. A paragraph performing feeling it doesn’t have insults the reader, and I’d cut it from any manuscript I touched, whoever or whatever wrote it.
Can a business book handle emotion well?
It’s where most of them fail, though nobody frames it that way. Business books rarely attempt emotion directly. What they lack is the smaller version: any indication that the author minded. A chapter about a failed project written without the slightest sense that it was unpleasant reads as a case study instead of experience.
The fix is one sentence admitting that the quarter was miserable, or that you were wrong and it cost somebody their job. You don’t need a moving passage. That single admission changes the temperature of a chapter in about eleven words, and it’s the sentence executives are most tempted to cut because it makes them look less than perfect. I think they’ve got that backward, since a reader trusts the author who minded.
A model won’t write that sentence, because it doesn’t know it happened and wouldn’t consider it necessary.
The book on this: The Ethical Workplace is a business book that works because one sentence in it admits the author minded.
How do you tell if a passage has real emotion?
Look for what the writer risked including.
Every page with real feeling on it has at least one line the author could reasonably have cut for comfort: an admission, an unflattering detail, a conclusion that doesn’t resolve nicely. Read a chapter and ask which sentence was difficult to leave in. If there’s not one, the chapter is informational. That may be correct for that chapter and is worth knowing on purpose instead of by accident. The test works on your own manuscript and it works on anything you’re assessing, whether or not a machine was involved.
My take
Readers can tell a passage that names grief from one written by somebody who grieved. A model gives you the first kind every time. Cut every sentence in your draft that names an emotion and see what’s left. Then add one true detail from what happened. If you had nothing at stake, keep the section short and plain. A flat factual paragraph is respectable. A paragraph faking feeling insults the reader.
Where does that leave AI as a writing tool?
Useful everywhere the temperature is meant to be neutral. Explanation, procedure, background, structure. Large parts of any nonfiction book are supposed to be flat, and a model is very good at flat and never gets bored, which a human writer does. What it shouldn’t be handed is the two or three passages in a book where the reader finds out what it cost you. Those are short and essential, and they’re the reason anybody finishes. Handing them to a machine because they hurt to write is the one shortcut I’d talk any client out of.
| Passage | Who writes it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Explanation, procedure, background, structure | AI is fine | Meant to be flat, and a model never gets bored |
| The few passages showing what it cost you | You | Short and essential, the reason anybody finishes |
| The admission that you minded | You | A model doesn’t know it happened |
| An emotional passage in an AI draft | You, by editing | Cut sentences naming emotions, add one true detail |
| A section where you had nothing at stake | Either, kept short and plain | Stake can’t be edited in |
The rest of this series covers the other gaps, including why AI never writes in your voice and when to bring a human back into the work. The AI and Writing Hub collects them, and my ghostwriting service spends much of its time finding the sentence a client nearly left out.
Use AI for the flat parts of a book and I’ve got no complaint. Ask it to supply the feeling and you’ll publish a book that reads as hollow to the people you most wanted to reach, and most of them will stop reading without ever telling you why.
An emotion named outright is telling. Show Don’t Tell is my book on giving the reader evidence so they feel it themselves, with over a hundred before and after examples.
