Week 13: In Defense of Simile and Metaphor

If you're a writer, you must be on a glorious mind vacation if you've never heard of AI. AI is everywhere. If it's not in the oddly specific, too-perfect, ranging into the uncanny valley advertisements, then it's in the all-hands office meetings in which stakeholders discuss a company's trajectory. It's in cautionary tales of employment seeking, jobs that seem too good to be true and, when the recruiter asks a candidate to complete an AI screening interview, one realizes it is.

Now AI has become pervasive in the publishing world. Recently, an agent's critique of a writer's manuscript is going viral. In short, a writer received feedback from an agent to remove all similes and metaphors from their work, as figurative language use has, apparently, become a tell for AI writing.

Some further context: the publishing world is nervous after the scandal of Shy Girl, a horror novel from Hachette pulled from the shelves in the UK after realizing the book had been written, at the very least, in collaboration with AI. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/20/hachette-horror-novel-shy-girl-suspected-ai-use-mia-ballard

When reading the agent's critique, it gave my writer spirit pause. First, human writing is being used to educate and train AI. AI actively uses (and has used) the work of human writers to learn how to write. Now, we are meant to strip our writing of any humanity in order to ensure that our work in no way could ever seem close to AI writing.

In effect, we have bestowed our humanity onto AI and, as a result, we must then become robotic in our storytelling. No figurative language. No departure from reality through poetry. In its place, we'll have rote recitation of fact. Story event after story event. Literal iteration of concrete feeling. What could once be described as "telling" would now be "marked safe from AI writing."

As a published poet, learning about this trend left me feeling as if I'm staring into a black hole, watching the centrifugal haze until I could no longer discern where existence ended and fathomless nothing began. But then I opened The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and read this:

“They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence and shrouded the dead.”

In this metaphor, biscuits become a manifestation of innocence. They became an object that only contains the purest of intention and need. Imagine if Toni Morrison received a note that she should cut this metaphor from her writing.

Or Gabriel Garcia Marquez with One Hundred Years of Solitude:

"For several weeks José Arcadio Buendía let himself be overcome by consternation. He took care of little Amaranta like a mother. He bathed and dressed her, took her to be nursed four times a day, and even sang to her at night the songs that Úrsula never knew how to sing."

The simile used in the above example challenges our own perceptions of what this character, José Arcadio Buendia, was capable of. He cared for a child like a mother--something believed to be impossible for him.

So, what's the next step for a writer looking to be published? Cut all humanity from your work? Strive to remain emotionless in your description? Recite fact, nothing more? Absolutely not.

Or do we retain our humanity through the love of craft, the grit of determination, through the resilience of tenacity only a human is capable of? Yes. Please allow your words to flourish. Do not cower to this call to dull your brilliant shine, to cater to the fickle market, to recoil from the threat of erasure by AI.

Me? I'll be clinging to this sheer rock face like a mountain goat, a millimeter of stone enough to remain steadfast in my mission: achieve verisimilitude, commit words to paper, and reinforce humanity despite the threat of a prolonged fall into darkness.