What matters more in writing, style or substance? It is an age-old debate, and there is no clear answer, other than “it depends.” It depends on what type of piece you are writing and the ultimate intent of the writer. A literary poem is heavily weighted toward style, while a technical essay is heavily weighted toward substance. However, some essays can be highly stylized, such as those by David Foster Wallace. Fiction sits somewhere between poetry and essays. Some fiction is much more about the style of the prose than the substance of the plot, as in most literary fiction. The unique voice of the writer is more important than the plot, which sometimes doesn’t even exist. Meanwhile commercial fiction (romance and page-turning thrillers) is much more about the substance of the plot and characters. Readers of commercial fiction don’t care about highly stylized prose—in fact that is a distraction. They prefer straightforward, journalistic essay-like prose that delivers the story clearly.

Of course the greatest fiction books contain both style and substance. As I said, David Foster Wallace wrote highly stylized prose, but his fiction was also deep with substance, most prominently in Infinite Jest. Personally, I care about style and substance. I like literary fiction and genre fiction. My favorite books are a combination of the two (literary and genre), high in both style and substance. A great example is Raymond Chandler, who wrote genre detective mysteries, but in a unique literary style. Another example is the highly literary horror of H.P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti.

The debate between style versus substance rages on because there is no right or wrong answer. Literary fiction isn’t objectively better than commercial fiction, or vice versa. It all depends what the writer wants to convey, and what the reader wants to consume.

It is precisely this tension between style and substance that gets to the heart of the debate about AI writing. For a straightforward how-to explainer essay, AI seems like a no-brainer (no pun intended). The same for a legal brief, business email, or any other kind of technical writing, where the style does not matter at all—only the substance.

The real debate comes with more literary writing, such as personal essays and fiction in particular. There is a large contingent of fiction writers (and readers) who abhor any use of AI, and there are commercial fiction writers who shamelessly use AI to churn out slop. I am somewhere in between. I think AI can be used to write certain types of fiction, but I would not use it for other types of fiction.

If the substance of a fiction story is what matters, then AI can help write your content faster and easier. Whatever ideas or story you want to tell, AI can write it for you in a straightforward style—or in a literary style that has been established by any writer from history. The primary advantage the human writer has over AI is in developing a new writing style that is unique to yourself. So if you are writing the kind of literature where style does matter, and you want to create a style of your own, then you should avoid AI. But if you don’t care so much about style, or you would rather emulate an established style, then AI can help you write faster and be more prolific.

Keep in mind, when I say “use AI,” I don’t mean let AI write everything. You must first put effort into constructing a detailed prompt, then you must put further effort into editing the AI’s output. The first draft written by an AI based on a one-sentence human prompt is the type of slop no one wants to read.

I said before that style doesn’t matter in business and technical writing, but that’s not entirely true. Clarity matters, and writing clearly is a type of style in itself. The ultimate form of substance writing with zero style is code. No one reads computer code; all that matters is the output. That is why coding is perhaps the best use case of LLMs.

I have written some stories almost entirely with AI, some stories without any use of AI, and some stories somewhere in between. It all depends on the type of story and my ultimate intent. If the substance is all that matters, then I’ll use AI. If the style matters, then I may still use AI—if the story is meant to be in the style of someone else (such as a CIA document). But I also have more literary stories that are deeply personal, in which I want to create my own style. AI cannot write that, so I must write it myself.