Model Behavior: Taylor Lorenz

We want to have an honest conversation about how publishers are feeling about and using AI. These tools are in their infancy, and while the norms around their use and disclosure are evolving rapidly, we think it’s important to ask top writers, creators, and thinkers about their work, their businesses, and how they intersect with where AI stands today.

That’s why we’re introducing Model Behavior, a new series featuring public intellectuals, critics, writers, and creators discussing how they work in this moment. We’ll ask candid questions about the tech industry, AI pet peeves, how it’s impacting their sense of identity and livelihoods. We’ll also ask each guest to give us a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process and explain whether and how they use these tools. From anti-AI purists to power users, we’ll get into the prompts they choose, their tool stacks, or their 100% analog workflows.

We start off this week with Taylor Lorenz, the founder of User Mag.

Do you find yourself altering your writing style to sound “less AI”?

Oh my gosh. A while ago, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair where I used the phrase “deeply human.” That’s actually a phrase I use a lot. I use adverbs a lot. And somebody was like, “This is AI.” I actually had to show the edit history to prove it was my own bad writing.

How much do you spend on AI tools every month?

Probably about $300 a month.

When does AI use cross over from “tool” into “something I’d owe my readers a disclosure about”?

I think the more transparency the better, and I believe in answering readers’ questions and being open. I’m doing this interview because I happily talk about how I use these tools. When you don’t give readers the information, you’re not allowing them to evaluate the information they’re consuming in context. A lot of writers use AI, and they don’t want to talk about it because they think they’ll be canceled or get all this backlash, and people will hate them and unsubscribe. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment, but I think part of getting through this phase we’re in is being transparent and open and having these conversations in the open and discussing this stuff publicly.

Would you read a newsletter where the copy was 100% AI-generated?

Absolutely, I love several newsletters that are AI-generated. I subscribe to a newsletter from a social listening tool that sends a weekly automated roundup of trending content and analysis of that content. It’s completely AI-generated, and I find it incredibly useful. There are newsletter writers I specifically follow for their taste and their voice or their unique writing. And then there are newsletters I get that I think are potentially automated or openly automated, or partially automated, I guess I should say, and I find a lot of value from those as well.

What are your AI pet peeves? Is there anything that irks you about how you see your peers using AI?

I’m in a lot of journalist groups. Journalists are using AI constantly. I think there are a lot of people who are very performative about AI online. They’ll spend all day shitting on AI 24/7, and then they’ll come into the group chat saying, “By the way, does anyone know how to use this new Claude tool?” I think that’s a disservice to readers, especially if you’re a tech writer. I am so critical of mass surveillance, I write critically about these AI companies, I write critically about their lobbying efforts, I report very critically on the AI industry, but I also cover consumer products, and I want people to understand how these products work. I don’t want to scare people with hyperbolic claims or misinformation, or just do things I know would get me more engagement.

If I got online every single day and ranted about how evil the AI industry is, or ranted about how AI is fake, it’s a bubble, nobody really uses it for anything, it’s all coming crashing down, and I’m not kidding—there are people who do that who are millionaires. Adding nuance to these conversations is not profitable. But I think it’s important.

Has AI changed how secure you feel in your own value as a writer?

I’m actually a terrible writer. I think I’ve gotten better, but I was a terrible writer when I started out. A really famous New York Times editor told me: if you want to be a journalist, the point is to expose new information. What LLMs cannot do—yet—is uncover things the way actual journalists can. AI has caused a great deal of instability in my career. I certainly question my ability to maintain a living as a journalist. I’ve been asking readers when they cancel to tell me why, and a lot of them are canceling because they just use AI to get their information now instead. That’s been quite devastating; I would say I’ve lost about a quarter of my income.

Have you changed your editorial strategy to counter that?

I am in the process of trying to figure that out. The way I’ve tried to adapt so far is to try to leverage these tools to be more productive. But I don’t know how to counter it, if at the current rate this continues, I will have lost half my income by the end of this year. Which is scary, and that’s not an indictment on any one platform like Substack; it’s a complete transformation in how people get information, and I think tech reporters, especially people who cover online culture, are seeing a lot of this. Because most of my newsletter was recommendations, that’s something AI can do better than me. It can scour the internet and find a story better than [I can]. The reason I don’t use AI for that portion is because I try to communicate to people, you are paying for access to my brain, for the news that I personally think is interesting. But I don’t think people care that much, and I think if they can get something even more tailored to their interests instead of mine, they’ll do it. So I’ve tried to do more original writing and communicate to my audience, “If you want me to remain an independent journalist and produce this content, please support me, because the news outlets I write for don’t pay anything.”

Every single big investigation I have done, I have lost thousands of dollars. It sounds so bleak, but at the same time, I love technology. I want a better world through technology; I support people getting their information from AI. I think we as a culture just need to recognize that it’s disrupting our information ecosystem, and think about what business models we can build to support journalism. Right now a lot of journalists are not going to be able to remain journalists. I’m also pivoting the coverage of my content because I was covering a lot of politics, which was bad for advertisers, so now I’m trying to cover more basic tech stuff because that’s more monetizable. I don’t personally mind that very much, but I’m not going to be exposing as much wrongdoing in the political ecosystem, and I’m not the only one making that decision.

Do you think the way the tech industry has rolled out AI has helped or hindered its adoption?

It’s a little bit of both. Let’s consider the fact that ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer product of all time, ever. Now that growth has slowed, of course, but there is enormous interest in this technology. Look at Anthropic, mostly a B2B business model but they have a huge consumer business. There are millions of people getting utility from AI products; you cannot ignore that. Look at the reviews on ChatGPT alone, they have over 6 million reviews in the iPhone store. I think they have like a 4.8 rating. People love these tools; people use them every single day to improve their lives.

At the same time, the people who run these tech companies are self-interested. They’re often bad actors. I disagree with their ideology. They will do anything to make money at all costs; they don’t always have the users in mind. I think they’ve failed to communicate the benefits of the technology to a lot of skeptics. People need to remember that AI is not just OpenAI and Anthropic, that large language models are a new technology, and personally, I use DeepSeek probably more than I use those other tools. So that’s another issue a lot of these people have—they think AI, they think Sam Altman.

What responsibility do platforms and AI companies have to writers and creators?

I think platforms should do everything they can to support creators. There are platforms that are predatory, like Meta, that absolutely do not materially support creators. X is not a platform that has supported creators; hopefully they start. And then there are platforms, I would argue like Substack or even YouTube, that offer scalable revenue generation. Substack is part of my income, enough to live on.

I also think how we should fund journalism is an open question, and I don’t think it should be on the tech companies necessarily to fix—their job is to build these products, not save journalism. But look at someone like Craig Newmark. Craigslist decimated the local news industry in a lot of ways, and he’s funded enormous journalism projects and saved so many outlets from peril. So I think these tech billionaires should consider their impact on the world, and if they can blunt that impact with their billions, consider doing that. So far, none of them have; I hope that changes.

Any advice for someone who wants to start in journalism in the midst of all of this?

I would tell them that the business model for journalism is in flux right now, so if you want to be a journalist, number one, build a direct relationship with an audience. That’s the most valuable thing you can do. And don’t shy away from new technology. The one advantage you have when you’re starting out is that you’re starting from scratch, so you can build your business model however you want. There are a lot of young people I talk to today who know journalism is going to be a hobby for them. They’ll become an HVAC technician and do journalism on the side, or make some other product and use that to fund their journalism. I don’t know that we’re going to have journalism the same way we had for the past 50 or 60 years. But we could build something better. We just have to have these conversations.