Mention AI in a writing group and stand back.
Within minutes you’re a thief. Within the hour you’re a fraud, a talentless hack, a destroyer of art and an enemy of every human who ever picked up a pen. By the next morning somebody has informed you that there’s a special circle of hell reserved for people like you, the devil has your name on a waiting list, and you’ll be roasting next to the guy who invented spell check.
The crime doesn’t need to be much. A writer admits she asked a chatbot to suggest a title, or to find the comma splices in chapter three. Another gets accused because a paragraph felt too smooth, or because he used an em dash, a punctuation mark older than the typewriter. Nobody asks what the tool did. The word alone lights the torches.
From inside the group, this all sounds perfectly reasonable. Everybody’s nodding. Pitchforks are a normal accessory.
Outrage is hard to measure when you’re standing in the middle of it. Distance helps. So I did an experiment. I took the exact shape of a writing group pile-on and moved it to a hobby nobody gets this worked up about: hiking.
Same outrage. Same insults. Same purity tests. Just boots instead of books. It went about how you’d expect.
The original sin
The post that started it was innocent enough, the way they always are.
“Hi everyone! First post. I’m new to hiking and I was nervous about getting lost, so I asked an AI app to plan a route to Hidden Pine Falls and make me a packing list. It suggested an easier trail than the one I was looking at, told me to bring more water than I thought I’d need, and reminded me to tell someone where I was going. I went yesterday and had the most beautiful day of my life. The waterfall was incredible! Anyway, any tips for a beginner?”
She attached a photo of the waterfall. She was smiling in it. That was her second mistake.
Nojoqui Falls, near Solvang, California, July 2, 2005. The falls run about 164 feet, too tall for one frame, so this is eight photos I stitched together by hand. The pool was full of people that day, and I spent several hours removing them in Paint Shop Pro. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
What happens when a hiker admits to using AI?
The first reply landed in four minutes.
TrailPurist1974: “So you didn’t hike that trail. The machine hiked it. You just walked along behind it like a dog on a leash.”
MossReader: “Real hikers find their way by reading the moss on trees and the position of the sun. Also by suffering. Mostly the suffering.”
GraniteSoul: “Every step you took on that trail was stolen from a hiker who mapped it by hand in 1974 with a pencil and a broken heart. Did you even spare him a thought? Did you?”
SwitchbackSally: “I’m so tired of this. Hiking used to mean something. Now anybody can just walk to a waterfall. What’s next? People enjoying the outdoors without earning it?”
The beginner, poor thing, tried to explain. She said she was just trying to stay safe. That was like throwing a steak into a kennel.
TrailPurist1974: “Safe? SAFE? Hiking isn’t supposed to be safe. It’s supposed to be authentic. If you didn’t nearly die of dehydration, did you even see the waterfall?”
RidgelineRon: “I’m reporting this post to the moderators. And to the waterfall.”
A hiker let an app plan her route to a waterfall. The forum decided she hadn’t really hiked it. The waterfall didn’t care. Neither should you. It’s a tool. Use it or don’t. – Richard LoweShare on X
Do hikers who use AI go to hell?
By comment forty, the theology arrived.
GraniteSoul: “There’s a special circle of hell for people who use trail apps. It’s uphill both ways, the water bottles are all empty, and the devil is waiting at the trailhead with your hydration pack.”
MossReader: “Dante missed one. The Tenth Circle: Those Who Let a Machine Pick Their Switchbacks. They wander a parking lot for eternity, forever recalculating.”
SwitchbackSally: “May your boots always be damp and your trail mix forever be all raisins.”
Somebody demanded she return the view. Not delete the photo. Return the view, because she hadn’t earned it. Another member suggested she should be required to hike the trail again, blindfolded, as penance, and then write a five-hundred-word apology to the mountain.
The mountain declined to comment.
When does an anti-AI pile-on turn on its own members?
And then, the way it always does, the mob turned on itself.
RidgelineRon: “Funny how Sally talks about authenticity when I can see a fitness watch on her wrist in her profile picture. That thing counts your steps, Sally. A COMPUTER counts your steps. How many of your hikes were really yours?”
SwitchbackSally: “It’s a WATCH, Ron. It doesn’t hike for me.”
TrailPurist1974: “That’s exactly what the AI people said. First it’s a watch. Then a GPS. Then one day you wake up and a robot is carrying you up Mount Whitney in a sedan chair.”
Ron was banned for owning a compass. The moderators ruled it a “gateway device.” GraniteSoul was exposed for wearing boots made in a factory, by machines, instead of hand-stitching his own from the hide of an elk he’d tracked using only his intuition. MossReader admitted, under questioning, that he’d once checked a weather forecast. Created by computer models. The group went silent for a full hour out of respect for the fallen.
By the end of the week the moderator announced new posting rules. Only hikers who were born on a trail may share trip reports. Freeze-dried food is out, because it was “processed by industrial technology.” Maps are allowed only if they were drawn by hand, ideally on bark. And any photo of a waterfall must include a sworn statement that the photographer arrived exhausted, lost and at least mildly injured.
Membership dropped by half. The remaining members called it “a purification.”
Meanwhile, at the waterfall
The beginner, by the way, went hiking again that weekend.
She used the app again. It found her another easy trail, reminded her about water, and told her the weather would turn in the afternoon, so she started early. She saw a family of deer, ate a sandwich on a rock, and got home before the rain. She didn’t post about it. She’d learned her lesson, and the lesson was that the hiking was wonderful and the hiking group was not.
Every one of these pile-ons loses sight of the same thing. Somebody out there wanted to enjoy a thing. They found a tool that made it easier. They had a good time. And a crowd of strangers decided that the good time didn’t count, because it hadn’t hurt enough.
Why do writing groups react to AI this way?
Now swap the boots back for books.
Replace “trail app” with “AI.” Replace “waterfall” with “finished novel.” Replace “the moss” with “the struggle.” Every line above has been typed, nearly word for word, in a writing group about a writer. “You didn’t write that, the machine did.” “Real writers suffer.” “There’s a special place in hell for you.” The purity spiral is identical too. Writers have been accused of AI use for using spell check, a grammar tool, a thesaurus, or an em dash.
Out on the trail, it all sounds absurd. Of course she hiked to the waterfall. Her legs did the walking. The app pointed the way, the same way a guidebook or a friend would have. Nobody would seriously argue that a hiker with a map didn’t climb the mountain.
Writing works the same way. A writer who uses AI to brainstorm, outline, check facts or catch typos still has to make the book good. The tool points. The writer walks. I’ve written about why writing groups get so hostile and about the “you’re not a real author” pile-on, and the pattern never changes. People who’d never call a stranger an idiot to his face do it to a newcomer in a comment thread, over a tool, and then congratulate each other for protecting art.
That isn’t protecting anything. It’s cruelty with a cause stapled to it.
See you at the waterfall
My position on AI hasn’t changed. It’s a tool. Use it or don’t. Some writers will love it and some will never touch it, and both of those are fine. What isn’t fine is chasing a beginner out of a group because she found an easier trail to something beautiful.
The waterfall doesn’t care how you found it. The reader doesn’t care what software you had open. Go write your book. If somebody in a group tells you the devil’s waiting at the trailhead, tell them to bring water. It’s a long walk. And if you want help getting your book to the finish line, the Dogpile series has more on surviving the comment section, and my book coaching is built for writers who’d rather write than argue.
