Every time that joke didn't work, it made me a comedian.
In the quiet act of opening a word processor, a journalist in Ireland found herself confronted not with a blank page but with an instruction — a machine assuming her consent to be replaced. The moment crystallises a tension as old as craft itself: whether the struggle to make something is merely inefficiency to be optimised away, or whether it is, in fact, the whole point. What the technology industry frames as assistance, those who live by language increasingly recognise as encroachment — a slow erosion of the very process through which a person becomes skilled, distinct, and human.
- Microsoft Copilot appeared unbidden in a journalist's Word processor, offering to draft her work for her — a presumption she met with unambiguous rejection.
- The intrusion is not isolated: AI tools now interrupt reading, rewrite emails unprompted, and frame every act of independent thought as an inefficiency to be corrected.
- Journalists are ethically barred from using AI to draft or rewrite content, yet many suppress their misgivings to avoid appearing obstructionist in newsrooms led by tech enthusiasts.
- The deeper alarm is structural — these tools are not neutral offerings but deliberate nudges, designed by an industry that profits from dependency and frames resistance as futility.
- The only meaningful refusal, the columnist concludes, is not anger directed at software but the quiet insistence on doing the work — failing, learning, and becoming through the struggle itself.
The columnist's confrontation with Microsoft Copilot began with a simple act of opening Word and being met with an assumption: that she wanted the machine to write for her. No request had been made. No consent given. The intrusion felt less like a feature than a repossession notice — a signal that her labour was now considered optional.
The pattern repeated. A press document prompted a suggestion to skip reading it in favour of an AI summary. An email invited a Copilot rewrite. Each interruption carried the same implicit message: your effort is quaint, your words insufficient. She sees in this a dual ambition — to flood the world with generated text while reducing everything else to flattened bullet points, stripping out the precise details and exact quotes that only careful human attention can catch.
Journalists, she argues, must not use AI to draft or rewrite. It violates professional ethics and hollows out the craft. Yet she suspects many colleagues share her alarm privately while performing enthusiasm publicly, unwilling to be seen as resistant to the inevitable — an inevitability, as a character in the HBO series Hacks pointedly observes, that is being manufactured by the very people insisting it cannot be stopped.
The more searching argument comes from a fictional comedy writer who refuses an AI writing tool not on principle alone, but from experience. Every failed joke, she explains, didn't just improve the material — it made her a comedian. Mastery is built from repetition and failure, from the slow accumulation of judgment that no shortcut can replicate. The struggle is not the obstacle to the work. It is the work.
Copilot was never installed by choice and resists uninstallation, hovering at the screen's edge like an unwanted thought. The columnist's real error, she reflects, was treating it as something capable of being offended — as if the argument were with the software rather than with the industry behind it. The only lever that matters is refusal: not rage, but the insistence on one's right to do the thing badly, repeatedly, until it becomes one's own.
I told Copilot to fuck off the other day. No asterisks, no restraint. It was a mistake, though not for the reason you might think. In a BBC comedy called Amandaland, a character named Anne worries aloud that by being rude to AI assistants, she's forfeiting her place among the good humans—the ones the machines might spare when the reckoning comes. I've now disqualified myself from that mercy.
The provocation was simple enough. I opened Microsoft Word and was met with an instruction: "Describe what you'd like to draft with Copilot." No please. No thank you. Just an assumption that I wanted help doing the thing I do for a living. The intrusion felt like a repossession notice. Later, while reading press material for a Netflix show, another message appeared: "This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant." The software was suggesting I skip the very thing I needed—the precise details, the exact quotes, the things a human might notice that an algorithm would flatten into bullet points, each one written in the same deadening rhythm.
This is the dual mission of the tech industry as I see it: generate mountains of unreliable text while reducing everything else to bland summaries. Don't read this. Don't write that. We're doing it for you now. Stop thinking. Stop choosing. And if you somehow muster the will to compose your own email, here comes another pop-up: "Rewrite this paragraph with Copilot." The message is clear. Your words are insufficient. Your effort is quaint.
Journalists are not meant to use AI to draft or rewrite anything. To do so violates the ethics of the profession and drains the joy from it. Yet I increasingly suspect that many in the media harbor deep skepticism about these tools and alarm at their intentions, but keep quiet. The pressure to seem like one of the good humans—compliant, forward-thinking, not resistant to the inevitable—is immense. In a final-season episode of the HBO show Hacks, a character named Ava confronts a pusher of an AI writing tool called QuikScribbl. "People like you are always saying that it's happening whether you like it or not," she tells him. "But you're the ones making it happen, okay, and you could easily stop it if people could say that they didn't want it, but you don't want to give people a choice."
Later in that same scene, Deborah, a comedy writer, refuses to use the software. "I want to write the jokes," she says. "I like doing the work." She explains that she arrived at a particular punchline only after trying a million other versions first. "Every time that joke didn't work, not only did I make it better, but it made me a comedian. Because to become one you have to do it and fail, and do it and fail over and over and over, until you figure out who you are." This is the thing the tech industry doesn't want to acknowledge: the struggle is the point. Mastery requires repetition, failure, the slow accumulation of judgment. You cannot shortcut your way to knowing what you're doing.
I didn't choose to install Copilot. I tried to uninstall it, but it lingers, hovering at the edge of my screen like a persistent thought I can't quite shake. The real solution might be to abandon Word altogether, to write in the clunky content-management systems that newsrooms use, the ones that only psychopaths supposedly prefer. But that's just evasion. The deeper error I made was treating Copilot as if it were a being capable of being wounded by rudeness, as if engagement with it mattered. It doesn't. It's just the visible tentacle of an industry we can only hurt by refusing to use it, by insisting on our right to struggle, to fail, to become whoever we're meant to be through the work itself.
Notable Quotes
Every time that joke didn't work, not only did I make it better, but it made me a comedian. Because to become one you have to do it and fail, and do it and fail over and over and over, until you figure out who you are.— Deborah, character in HBO's Hacks
You're the ones making it happen, okay, and you could easily stop it if people could say that they didn't want it, but you don't want to give people a choice.— Ava, character in HBO's Hacks, confronting an AI software vendor
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does it matter so much that you write the thing yourself, rather than having the machine draft it and you editing it?
Because the drafting is where you discover what you think. Every sentence you discard, every word you replace—that's you learning the shape of the idea. If the machine does that part, you're just a filter at the end. You're not a writer anymore, you're a quality-control inspector.
But couldn't you argue that writers have always used tools—typewriters, pens, spell-check—and those didn't destroy the craft?
Those tools didn't do the thinking. They just made the thinking faster or cleaner. Copilot does the thinking. It generates prose. That's a different category entirely. It's like the difference between a hammer and a robot that builds the house while you watch.
The tech companies say this is inevitable, that resistance is futile. Do you believe that?
No. I think it's a sales pitch dressed up as prophecy. They say the train is already on the tracks, but they're the ones driving it. If enough people said no, the train stops. The problem is that saying no requires you to look like you're not a good human, not a team player.
What's the actual fear underneath all this?
That we'll forget how to do the work. That a generation of writers will grow up thinking that writing is something a machine does and you edit, rather than something you have to earn through failure. And that we'll lose the people who could have become great because they never had to struggle enough to find out who they were.
So this is about more than just your job.
It's about what happens to human judgment and skill when we decide that speed and convenience matter more than depth. It's about whether we get to choose, or whether choice gets made for us while we're told it's already too late.