The Cognitive Revolution · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Novelists like Joel Borgen, who co-authored a book with AI models, find that while models are improving, their raw prose can be unreadable. He emphasizes the need for human authors to 'scaffold' the AI's output and perform significant editing to achieve a coherent and quality final product.
“The models are good at certain things. They're getting better at everything. But as far as just prose writing itself, even if you tell it exactly what you want and you have a plan for a chapter, you often get something that's unreadable.”
“unless you know how to scaffold it and then edit it yourself.”
“So the book is definitely a lot better for having done it alongside the AI. But I'm cognizant of the fact that AI writing will be controversial for a lot of readers to engage with it.”