Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham stated that AI is particularly lethal to writing that takes too long to get to the point: there will always be shorter alternative texts, and 99% of readers will choose the shorter version.

This aligns with his consistent view on writing. He advocates writing like speaking, reading aloud, and then removing any sentences that do not sound conversational; he also mentioned that he writes articles to the point of being nearly impossible to cut, and summarizing often loses key points. In his 2025 article "Writes and Write-Nots," he predicts that as schools and workplaces hand writing tasks over to models, fewer people will write, separating those who can write from those who cannot, while "writing equals thinking."

He also expressed disdain for another type of AI tone. This year, he received numerous emails from founders that suddenly turned into a "hard news style," which he judged to be written by models, as the founders had never written this way before; once he recognizes it as AI, it becomes difficult to read seriously. He also predicts that the term "writer bottleneck" will disappear: 99% of people will let models produce first drafts after a few days of struggle.

In contrast to the tradition of long articles, magazine editors still require several thousand-word reports to place the sugar at the end, allowing readers to walk a distance. Generative models are tuned to excel at summarizing and keeping every sentence "on point," making short posts and memos popular, while novel-like delayed revelations become harder. The term "work junk writing" has emerged on the corporate side: models can write long but not accurately. He views programming as the same logic—previously limited by how much valuable text a person could produce, AI has now exploded in coding.

Reader attention is thus being repriced. Emails, memos, and fundraising materials must prove within the first few seconds that they are not fluff; authors willing to revise each sentence fifty times treat density itself as a barrier against summarization. On the other extreme is complete outsourcing of thought, retaining only the send button.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are time-strapped readers and investors, while the sellers are secondary texts that can be generated infinitely. Funding is shifting from content factories that pay by word count to those that charge based on "whether it can be skipped." Beneficiaries are authors and product copywriters who can compress thoughts into non-removable paragraphs; those under pressure are media and PR drafts that rely on padding, background, and parallelism to fill space. The event-driven nature comes from models making "shorter alternatives" the default option.

Additionally, he did not provide a sample for the 99% figure, nor did he differentiate the speed at which literary, academic, and business styles are being replaced.

Source: Public Information