The use of AI to generate written content is not limited to social media posts. In classrooms and universities, AI allows written assignments to be produced rapidly and in grammatically correct language – even as students, according to international studies, are increasingly struggling to master it. Do they even understand the work they are submitting? The process of acquiring knowledge is giving way to a technical process – entering a prompt, copying the result – that requires minimal skill and guarantees a standardized outcome, admittedly mediocre, but often quite acceptable.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish one assignment from another. While an average, reasonably diligent student will draw on their own reading – and therefore inevitably produce something original – for an essay, two students using AI will draw on the same source: data collected and recombined at the algorithm’s discretion. Standing out becomes a genuine challenge. Most will not bother.
In the media, the issues surrounding the use of AI are not so different. For a journalist, AI functions like a powerful search engine that can scour the web’s archives, compile data that would otherwise be tedious to collect and synthesize it with remarkable efficiency, providing material to support an argument. All of this is well and good. The difference between an entirely AI-generated article and an authentic piece of writing will ultimately lie in its structure and phrasing, its ability to present an argument and the rigor of the analysis based on the data collected.
Words Without Writers
Style has therefore never been more important. The French novelist Marcel Proust, author of the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, believed that style was a matter of vision. A text produced by AI will have the style of AI.
Just as Ancient Greek rhetoricians had their own linguistic quirks, Claude and ChatGPT are no exception. AI-generated content is fairly easy to recognize by its style: short, choppy sentences; an excessive use of catchphrases that sound like advertising slogans; syntax simplified to the extreme, favoring the juxtaposition of independent clauses over the subtleties of complex subordinate clauses; short paragraphs that often follow one another without logical connectors; an inability to employ elaborate figures of speech. The style of Marcel Proust, Henry James or Thomas Mann is undeniably incompatible with AI.
Some will argue that this is merely a matter of time. One day, Gemini will compete with Robert Musil. Or perhaps not: AI systems feed on what is produced and consumed. As engagement with classic texts falls sharply, it is hard to see by what miraculous process enough of them could be fed into the machine for it to improve sufficiently in this regard. The same cannot be said of computer code, which is constantly evolving and improving thanks to an endless stream of input from all kinds of users.
The problem becomes all the more acute when it comes to writing a book. Today, publishers must legally protect themselves against the risk of publishing a text written entirely by AI, to the point of having to state this explicitly in their contracts. The issue is far from trivial, since AI cannot hold copyright in the content it generates.
The Politician Without a Voice
And in politics? The days of Disraeli and de Gaulle, with their fluid writing styles, or of Churchill, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature, are gone. Their ability to write with ease and brilliance reflected a deep-rooted culture and a desire to convey their patriotism and values through images that spoke to the heart.
Time, then, for a little deploratio temporis acti – “lamentation for times past”. Today, statesmen and political figures are being caught red-handed using AI. In early June 2026, irregularities were uncovered in an op-ed published in the German daily Welt and co-authored by Mario Voigt, the CDU Minister-President of Thuringia, and Sven Schulze, his counterpart in Saxony-Anhalt. An investigation revealed that the text had been drafted with the help of artificial intelligence.
Faced with the controversy, a spokesperson for Voigt’s government had to acknowledge that “modern digital tools, particularly AI applications”, had been used to draft the minister-president’s texts and speeches. This revelation triggered a new wave of scrutiny of his previous speeches and op-eds, to the point that the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung decided to remove an op-ed Voigt had previously published in its pages in its entirety, after it emerged that AI had been used to generate it.
Voigt’s particularly heavy reliance on artificial intelligence is drawing even more criticism given that Chemnitz University of Technology had already revoked his doctorate after finding substantial evidence of plagiarism in his work.
Politicians’ credibility is seriously undermined when they rely heavily on AI. In France, Socialist Party Secretary-General Olivier Faure recently discredited himself by commenting on the PISA rankings in a lengthy post written entirely by AI. On a subject such as the collapse of academic standards, this created a deplorable impression and seriously undermined citizens’ confidence in the leader’s ability to think independently about how to reform the country.
In politics, just as in literature, style and writing are matters of vision. When politics limits itself to stringing together a few politically correct principles with one or two technocratic measures, is there still any need to refine one’s rhetoric?
