Part 7: Conclusion (Bakhtin and model collapse: How to use AI with expressive writing without generating AI slop)

by Tom Johnson on Jan 30, 2026 comments
categories: ai • ai-book-club • writing

This post is part of a series. See Part 6: Use AI for the alien context for the previous section.

• Part 7: Conclusion
• Works cited
• Related resources

Part 7: Conclusion

In conclusion, I’ve argued that AI can be helpful to expressive writing in at least three ways:

• Research assistant: helping us weave in the “alien” voices that bring prose to life and stop it from becoming a monologic “specimen.”
• Verifier: grounding our work in “active understanding” so we don’t accidentally silence the sources we’re trying to engage with.
• Alien perspective: providing the “responsive understanding” we need to see our own arguments from the outside.

Just as I’ve argued here in my essay, I used AI to help verify or identify quotations, and make sure I’m accurately representing and interpreting Bakhtin and others. I still spent hours reading Bakhtin at the kitchen table. I probably need to read the entire text again, to be honest. But AI helped me engage with him in a way that was fun, and I’m confident that I’m relaying his points well here without giving up my own voice.

All of the techniques I’ve described don’t result in AI slop. Instead, they help take writing to the next level. Some of my most popular posts in 2025 (such as The isolation and loneliness of tech writing may get worse as AI accelerates and 12 predictions for tech comm in 2026) used these methods. I encourage you to experiment with AI not to replace your voice, but to expand the social atmosphere in which your voice lives. Try it out, experiment, and engage with these other voices, even, and perhaps especially, when that voice is an alien one.

Works cited

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981. See The Dialogic Imagination (Excerpt).

Warner, John. More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. Basic Books, 2025.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. Viking, 2024.

Mollick, Ethan. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin, 2024.

O’Gieblyn, Meghan. God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Doubleday, 2021.

Related resources

Also relevant but not used, AI Can Teach Our Students the Art of Dialogue, by David Weinberger, MIT Press.

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