It's happened. Grok is improving my own prose: snappier, more clever, more charming, a more varied vocabulary. I've been testing this for months – comparing my original with Grok's suggested improvements. At this point, the machine learning is happening so fast that we seemed to have turned that feared corner. The writer's conscience stops from me accepting the version though I understand the temptation. I'm beginning to feel the way chess players must have felt when the computer won. You can give up the game or you can learn from the master. This is a huge issue. If 20 percent of what you read is AI now, it will rise to half then 90 percent before next year is over. The heck of it is that this will vastly improve the literary culture. The machines are just better. But it genuinely raises the problem: will there be any human writers remaining ? And how can we tell? All that is stopping this now is the writer's conscience and the desperate desire to retain some sense of human dignity. Speaking for myself, I do pledge the following. Nothing with my byline is authored by AI. Have I learned from its skill? I'm starting to do so now, while being aware of the grave dangers associated with turning over creative powers to a nonhuman thing. Part of me hates this thing but part of me simply stands in awe of its power.

Doesn't it seem like cooking and lifestyle is taking over ever more of the NYT front page? I guess they are working to find their niche following their Covid/woke disaster. Survivors!