Why AI Is Ruining The Creative Writing Industry (And Why You Should Care!)

1st September 2026

I’ve realised, a bit worryingly, that the only media I can actually enjoy without ads or a paywall is books. How wild is that?

Anyway, bigger fish to fry today!

I’ve been submitting poetry to competitions for the past two years. Now, I’m no Carol Ann Duffy (I wish!), but I’ve noticed that a few of my rejections lately seem to be down to suspicions about AI.

For a long time, I’ve been pretty neutral about AI. Sure, I’ve watched enough Terminator and Black Mirror to be a little skeptical, but I didn’t mind students using it to polish up their essays.

But the first time I got a rejection for supposedly using AI in my poetry, I was genuinely confused—and honestly, pretty pissed off!

I’d never touched AI for my poems, so I couldn’t understand why anyone would think I had.

So, naturally, I went down a rabbit hole!

Turns out poetry competitions use AI detectors (which, to be fair, makes sense). The problem is, these detectors are famously unreliable.

I thought this was a bit ridiculous, but just to see, I ran one of my poems through Grammarly’s AI detector—and it came back as 99% AI.

So I tested it out with some of my favourite poems:

Carol Anne Duffy (Warming Her Pearls) - 22% AI

Siegfried Sassoon (Suicide in the Trenches) - 99% AI

W.B.Yeats (Aedh Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven) - 99% AI

Maya Angelou (Phenomenal Woman) - 28% AI

William Blake (The Garden of Love) - 68% AI

I couldn’t make sense of it. None of these poets could possibly have used AI, so why were some poems flagged more than others?

From what I found, poems with a steady rhythm (think of Shakespeare’s love of iambic pentameter) and a predictable rhyme scheme (like AABB or ABAB) are actually more likely to get flagged as AI.

Here’s the thing: I learned how to write poetry from these classic poets—the ones who used rhythm and rhyme on purpose. I’ve never been much for free verse (think Milk & Honey and the like); I like the challenge of structured poems, and usually there’s a reason for the structure. For example, I wrote a poem called ‘Midas’ from the perspective of Midas’s daughter. The whole poem keeps a consistent rhyme scheme until the last stanza, where I purposely break the pattern to match the story. The structure is part of the meaning!

When I dug deeper, I actually found websites advising writers to make mistakes, use bad grammar, skip em dashes, avoid rhyming, and generally mess with rhythm—anything to make your work seem ‘less advanced’ and not set off the AI alarms.

This is what AI is doing to the creative world—it’s making everyone paranoid and suspicious of actual human work. For most of history, poetry has had form and structure, so if you write like that now, it apparently looks ‘too much’ like the data AI has been trained on, and you get flagged. Strangely, I noticed the poems I spent the most time and care on—the ones I really poured effort into—were the most likely to be called out as AI. It’s honestly disheartening. The more love you put in, the less ‘human’ it seems to the bots.

So, I’ve decided to start posting my poetry—good, bad, and everything in between—right here on my blog. I’m done waiting for competitions to notice.

I don’t have any real regrets—I have a good job and I write because I love it. But I do worry about future generations of creatives. I hope they keep writing for the joy of it, and don’t let all this tech stuff dampen their passion or their style.