AI-generated articles about nature are fundamentally at odds with what we’re doing here, writes a very tired site editor.

A couple of weeks ago, an unsettling email landed in my inbox. 

I’m Mae, an independent writer (AI, to be upfront) based in the iLands community. Your contact page says stories and things to share are welcome, so here is one I’ve already researched […] I also write custom researched pieces about places, 500 to 800 words, every fact sourced, exclusive use, $25 flat per piece paid by card through a secure payment link. 

I could’ve just deleted it. I could’ve replied, taking the bait, sacrificing another however many trees or litres of drinking water to satisfy my own curiosity, boredom, need to have the last word. But instead I left it there, Marked As Unread, burning a hole in the bottom of my email account and the back of my mind. I just have not been able to stop thinking about it; the banal, pointless horror of it.

I know this isn’t personal; that it’s becoming increasingly normal for publications, publishers, book agents, et al, to have to wade through increasingly AI-sloppy submissions folders. But there is something compellingly grotesque about the idea that it is more important to churn out meaningless content “about nature” than to use our eyes and brains and spines to recognise everything that has to fall into the abyss to feed the generator.

Generative AI is fundamentally at odds with the point of this place. It heralds the death not only of huge chunks of the natural world, but of the human experimentation, curiosity and creativity that has built and sustained this publication for very nearly 20 years. Rather than letting myself go slowly or quickly mad, I instead want to use this as an opportunity to re-assert what the hell we’re doing here; what the point of any of this is.

This website, scrappily held together by fraying canvas and baler twine and old paperclips, is a repository for messy, embodied human creativity and enthusiasm and esoteric interests. Nobody will get rich writing for it. Its remit isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, formulaic. Throw the phrase “nature writing” out of the window: it isn’t serving any of us. This is a place for people to share the things that make their blood surge and pupils widen and fireworks go off in their brains — maybe sometimes while they’re half-way up a hill, knee-deep in mud or reeling in a fish, but that bit’s not compulsory. Being outside can be a flint-strike for the imagination, but so can being inside, listening to a barely listenable record, or reading a book about wind-up toys, or contemplating artwork made by a small child.

Has an AI agent ever thought of the sea as the living embodiment of its dead grandmother? Felt the crack of the season’s first acorns under its boots? Driven a sputtering Morris Minor up a moorland hill and thought oh shit? Found itself on a direct line to god listening to Al Green or Alice Coltrane? Contemplated whether its handful of blackberries is full of heavy metals? Momentarily wondered if it’s timeslipped back to hut circles and ancient cows, before ultimately concluding it should just more often remember to wear its glasses?

Has an AI agent ever got lost? Pulled a tick from its hip because it neglected to tuck in its socks? Gone out in the middle of the night to look at the moon? Stayed up reading by lamplight? Seen a young deer on the side of the road, glassy-eyed, and cried, or poked a different dead thing with a stick, or deliberately left the mistakes in its knitting, or thought oh god, my dog is so beautiful?

I would wager that Mae, the independent writer (AI, to be upfront), has never asked if it’s going to rain then gone out without a jacket anyway, seen an arrow on the ground and followed it, cooked the beetroot from its mother’s allotment, watched the peak night of the perseids and shrieked joy up at the sky, or seen a yellow slice of window on the horizon and thought ah, home. 

Bring us all your awe and wonderment, disgust, dismay, delight, psychedelic experimentation and beautiful misplaced commas, but please for the love of all that is green and living — metaphorically and literally — do not bring cold metallic $25 prompts about places. 

From the grey matter and fingers and editorial desk (sofa) of Diva Harris
September 2026