At Quillette, freelance writer Matt Johnson, draws attention to George Orwell’s comparatively unknown 1946 essay, “the Prevention of Literature.” That’s where we find a highly quotable quote, “… freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”

Revisiting Orwell’s essay raises a question: Is outright censorship even relevant to the issues we face now? What about the widespread takeover of writing by chatbots? They don’t censor their users. Au contraire, they usually flatter, sometimes with embarrassing results. But distortion is distortion.

Developing his argument, Johnson quotes an Orwell biographer: “Books are not written by machines in sealed compartments.” And Johnson responds,

But we have now entered an era in which books can, in fact, be written by machines in sealed compartments. Large language models (LLMs) generate billions of words a day and are increasingly capable of producing long, structured, and sophisticated texts. While Orwell could not have foreseen the AI revolution, he predicted that synthetic text could someday replace human writing. In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” he observes: “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” Although he doesn’t linger on this possibility, he laments the depersonalisation and mass production of writing already underway in the 1940s, and these arguments are just as applicable to AI-generated writing today.

“Reading Orwell in theAge of AI,” Quillette May 4, 2026.

Yes. The trend that resulted in the ChatGPT-driven verbal swamp was not a recent burst from Silicon Valley. It was well under way in the 1940s. It lacked only current techniques.

As Johnson notes, Orwell’s famous dystopia Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) reflects this cultural trend. The hapless Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical documents in line with current propaganda needs. He then feed the originals to an incinerator, “all with the help of his speakwrite dictation machine.”

Johnson might have added that Winston’s girlfriend Julia babysits a machine that writes potboilers for the masses:

“Julia was twenty-six years old… and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

And today, he notes,

As I write this essay, I’m receiving constant prompts from AI to “help me write.” When I type an email, words and phrases are now highlighted for AI revision. AI-produced content has become a scourge in universities, and it is rapidly displacing human writing in new articles online. Elon Musk recently declared: “AI content will vastly exceed all human content.”

While many worry about the rapid decline in the ability of students to assess and process information independently, some are unruffled. For example, English professor Yohei Igarashi contends that most writing is predictable and it can therefore be automated.

But that is surely an error in reasoning. Bipedal human walking is highly predictable too. But does anyone think that automating our everyday walking would convey an advantage? If automation led to a general decline in motor skills, would we even be surprised? Then we should no more be surprised to learn that automated writing leads to a decline in comprehension and expression skills.

AI and the total surveillance state

AI does not make a total surveillance state inevitable but it would certainly make it easier. Orwell (1903–1950) saw that in a world like that of Nineteen Eighty Four, individual thinking without assistance posed a deadly danger for a man like Winston. That was precisely how Winston ended up in the hands of O’Brien, his betrayer and torturer: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” And he had disobeyed. He had thought for himself.

There is a lesson here. Those who don’t want to drift aimlessly into a surveillance state where “Freedom Is Slavery” and “Ignorance Is Strength” (Party mantras) would be wise to avoid or reduce dependence on Winston’s speak-write machine, Julia’s autobabble, and the incinerator.

Whoever is controlling all that isn’t you.

Note: Johnson is the author of How Hitchens Can Save the Left.