AI pitches are making everyone's life harder
Plus 35 new paid writing gigs in today's daily update.
It’s April already, folks! Somehow we’re more than a quarter of the way through the year (and I’ve seen a grand total of three days of sunlight so far).
To help you kick off April in the right way, we’ve just shared a roundup of 35 new paid pitch calls and freelance writing opportunities.
Lots of good stuff here, and 140+ new opportunities shared already since Monday!
AI pitches are making everyone’s life harder
It’s time I spoke up about this.
I have been told by multiple editors in the last month or two that they no longer share open pitch calls because of the sheer volume of AI generated content that they have to sieve through. It’s a waste of time dealing with 100 pitches that have the exact same proposal, clearly been placed into an LLM and copied across with minimal editing.
Let’s get something straight: AI can’t think. It cannot create. It does not have ideas.
Despite what tech bros will tell you, this is just what it is: a very fast search engine that pulls patterns from things that already exist online. When you ask it for pitch ideas, it sifts through what’s already been written and then regurgitates those ideas.
When you do this, you’re not pitching something original. It is impossible for you to be original when doing this. Editors know this, and can increasingly spot these pitches with ease over time.
Picture this: A magazine about cats posts a pitch call. You would love to write for them, but you’re stuck for ideas, so you drop the exact brief into an LLM. It spits out a handful of options. One about cats in ancient Egypt catches your eye. Sounds fresh, and perhaps not something you’ve read yourself. You tweak the wording a little, add your credentials, and send it off.
The editor opens their inbox. Half the pitches are about cats in ancient Egypt. Yours, alongside everyone else’s, is going to be the easiest rejection the editor has to send out.
Absolutely nobody wins here. The editor wastes an afternoon (and probably longer) sifting through carbon copies of the same idea. You waste your time creating a pitch that never had a chance. And somewhere, a genuinely good story goes unwritten because the person who could’ve told it outsourced their thinking.
This is happening constantly. Editors aren’t naive! I mean, they’re very often the smartest people I know.
More and more, they know what an AI-generated idea looks like straight away because they’re seeing the same three ideas on repeat. Some pitch calls are now drowning in identical angles, identical hooks, identical ‘surprising facts you didn’t know’ framing. The moment an editor spots this, your pitch is done. It doesn’t even matter how it’s written if the idea is formulaic.
And worse, it’s going to put a big black mark against your name. So when you do come back with an original idea, the editor is instinctively wary of whether it’s real.
There’s also the hallucination issue. AI invents sources, misremembers facts, and at times conjures entire experts out of thin air (check out the fine work from my friends at Press Gazette if you want to read more on this).
If you pitch something built on a detail that doesn’t exist, you will get found out. A year or two ago you might have gotten away with it, but not now. The damage to your reputation from that will be irreparable, too.
Your brain works differently to a language model. It connects real things from your actual life. Things that you’ve read or thought about, or perhaps your specific experience of owning a cat that a bot will and can never know.
That’s raw material that no LLM has access to. So use it!
The writers getting commissioned in 2026 are the ones who are thinking for themselves first. Make sure you’re one of them.
Well said, AI has no place in writing. The fact that “writers” are using it for pitching is shameful. Use your brains.
I understand all the arguments regarding AI. I'm a software engineer. But AI can't make you a better writer. It can make you a better researcher, as long as you verify, and it can certainly help you code better and faster if you use it correctly. But it cannot help you become a better writer. When I use Grammarly, if I accept all its recommendations, it would turn my writing to shit.
Even if it didn't, it wouldn't make me a better writer. Only practicing the craft does that.