Hillary Grace has taught college English for decades. Her students — sentient, human, occasionally exasperating — have always been brighter, funnier, and more interesting writers than any machine could be. But in 2026, she found herself with an unusual second job: training large language models how to write.

"The LLM I'm training is more educable than a sentient being, because it's utterly open to feedback," she writes in The Saturday Evening Post. "I don't have to worry about hurting its feelings because, lo, it has no feelings. I can tell it what it's doing wrong, and it has to listen."

Many of her friends are alarmed when they hear what she does for a living. "Aren't you worried?" they ask, like passengers in a car she's driving at speed toward a red light. They inform her, in knowledgeable and well-modulated voices, that AI could take her job.

Her answer might surprise you: she's not worried. Much.

"I don't think I'm about to be replaced by AI when it comes to writing novels and short stories," she says. "For one thing, AI is a pretty sucky writer. Even after all it's read — basically, every book ever published — it has yet to compose a meaningful metaphor. It has no sense of humor. In fact, it's so artificially unintelligent it doesn't even understand sarcasm."

She's been reading AI-produced textbooks, fiction, reports, poems, diatribes, encyclopedia entries, and hallucinogenic memoirs for years. In all that time, she's laughed exactly twice. And she cries at almost anything — cat food commercials, drivers pulling over for ambulances — but so far, despite AI's best efforts, she hasn't wept once.

There's another reason she doesn't lose sleep over AI: she doesn't have a traditional writing job. She's had novels published and plays performed, but those were freelance gigs done for fame, not fortune. And she knows that the only books AI is currently threatening are the ones that are already formulaic and soulless — ones where no one would notice any difference if they were propagated by a robot.

"If I were paying my mortgage from the royalties I earned from heartwarming tales of how a gutsy single gal from the Midwest stumbled into magic with a strong-jawed, emerald-eyed billionaire, I might feel consternation knowing AI could string clichés together as well as I could," she admits. "But I'd deserve it."

Still, there's a question that haunts her. What if — say, two months from now — AI composes a book that she can't distinguish from work by real authors she loves? What if she reads it, laughs, sobs, and at the end sets it down with a silent exhalation of surprise?

"In that liminal moment of appreciation and wonder, will it matter that the story was written by a machine, in a few seconds, instead of by a person laboring for years?" she asks. "I don't know. I don't think so. If I can get from a piece of writing what I want to get from it — a hearty, hiccupping laugh, a solid cry, a swelling feeling of belonging to something bigger than my own world-view — I don't care who (or what) will have written it."

For now, she keeps training the machines. The LLMs remain terrible writers, and she remains a teacher — just of a different kind of student.