I’m still wrapping my head around Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft’s First Opinion essay, in which she writes about starting medical school at 69 after more than 40 years as a neonatal nurse practitioner. She will start residency this summer — just days before turning 73. “I went to medical school at 69 to learn what I did not know,” she writes.

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This week, I tightened the First Opinion guidelines on use of AI. A few months ago, I wrote here that I strongly discourage the use of AI for a variety of reasons. Now, the guidelines explicitly state that AI should not be used to generate any text, including short snippets.

I’ve made this change because authors would often write in their disclosures that they used AI for “light editing and formatting.” But one person’s “light editing” is another’s “rewriting.” I would have to dig deep to find out exactly what that AI did, why the author used it, and how we should disclose it to readers per STAT’s AI use policy. It wasn’t a great use of my time — or the writer’s.

I’ve received some pushback on this, but I think it’s the only way forward. There are three key reasons why I don’t want you to let AI write:

1) Reader trust: Readers come to STAT because they have faith in the humans behind the publication, including opinion writers. Using AI undermines that trust and makes readers question the accuracy and originality of what they read.

2) Potential plagiarism: Authors will often emphasize in their disclosure that while AI did some “editing and formatting,” the “ideas are original.” Original ideas are great! But that doesn’t mean a piece won’t include some inadvertent plagiarism. There have been two high-profile examples recently of AI use in journalism leading to plagiarism: a New York Times book review that plagiarized the Guardian (the Times has now cut ties with the freelancer responsible) and an “AI local news network” that ripped off local publications. I don’t trust AI not to accidentally steal language from previously published pieces on the same topic.

3) Quality: There’s just this whiff about AI-written pieces — something that doesn’t feel right. They are technically good but flat. The AI editing process often takes out the voice that I want to hear in a good First Opinion essay. I’d rather you send me a piece that we can work on together than one that is so deep in the uncanny valley that it’s hard to pull it out.

Call me a Luddite if you want — I’ve been called worse! — but I think that this is in readers’ best interest, and STAT’s.

Recommendation of the week: “Yesteryear,” by Caro Claire Burke, is getting a lot of buzz, and I think it’s well deserved. In the novel, an uber-successful tradwife influencer wakes up to find herself in 1855 Idaho, forced to live the life she’s previously only cosplayed. Though heavy-handed at times, the writing is sharp and the story propulsive.