Is AI making writers obsolete?
It depends how generic we humans are
This will take 6 minutes of your time to read. Get comfy. I hope it motivates you.
I’ve been thinking about AI a lot lately and the future of writing. I’m sure you have too. Some of you, I know, have fully embraced it. Others use it to help their writing or refuse to use it at all.
I’m not here to judge you.
This isn’t a piece about whether or not we should embrace AI.
It’s a reflection on our place, as human writers, in an AI world.
I don’t know about you, but as someone who’s been in this career for over 16 years, I’m certainly feeling the changes. More so than in 2020 when all the magazines I wrote for shut their doors.
I’ve lost a few gigs to AI now.
(For that reason, I try not to use AI generated images, but I grabbed this one back in 2023 for a story, so because I already have it—might as well use it.)
AI is changing the game and I keep thinking back to those old lamplighters and all the times the workplace has transformed with technological change.
I’m feeling a little sad about the direction I see writing going.
It’s possible, the type of career I’ve built—copywriting and writing stories for magazines and online publications—won’t be there 5 years from now.
Or it might be.
But I have to admit…
there’s no point paying a guy to light the street lamps when electricity can do the job in seconds.
AI is an efficient tool and I’m more than happy to hand some writing jobs over to AI.
If we want something left for us human creators, though — and I really do — we have to change how we look at our writing careers.
Some human writers are more replaceable than others. It’s time to choose which kind we are.
Stepping down from the ladder
I wonder what it was like for Domenico Basso when he realized he’d be stepping down from his ladder and losing his lamp-lighting job? Basso was one of the final lamplighters still working in the US in the 1940s.
Was he sad or relieved to move onto another type of work? Did he go on to do something different in street-lamp management? A desk-job flipping switches, maybe?
AI proves more and more capable of doing what we do. Our proofreading, news reporting, and copywriting jobs are easy-peasy lemon squeezy.
I’ve done all three in my career and I’m not sad to see some of it go.
I paid my oldest daughter to finish one of my worst copywriting jobs.
Two-thousand mindless blurbs about preschool supplies? There are only so many ways you can make a toy rake sound fun without losing your mind.
ChatGPT wasn’t around when I (and my daughter) did that job, but if it had been it would have done a perfectly fine job in a fraction of the time. I tested it just to see:
"Introduce your little ones to the joys of gardening with our adorable wooden toy rake! Perfectly sized for small hands, this durable tool will help your preschooler develop fine motor skills and a love of the great outdoors. Use it to rake leaves, cultivate soil, or create sandcastles at the beach. Order now and watch your child’s imagination grow along with your garden!”
Yip. Almost exactly the kind of thing we wrote. My client would have saved quite a bit of money if ChatGPT had been around then.
I’m happy to step down from that particular ladder and write more creatively.
Did we bury the muse?
Over the years, raw creativity often gets shoved aside in the face of shiny efficiency and economy. They charge on in with their business suits and their briefcases of strategic plans and take up all the space.
Creativity, in her dream-like movements and quirky outfits shuffles to the back.
Formula writing is quicker. It’s maximum profit in minimum time.
You don’t have to think deeply to write a listicle. It’s faster and cheaper to use a standard formula to create a screenplay. A sweet met-cute and you know the rest…
It’s safer to write a generic song. One study found lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time and “simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions.”
Creativity is slow, weird, and not always popular (at least at first).
Picasso had plenty of critics for trying something different. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was too long to be a single, according to EMI chief Roy Featherstone.
We’ve bought into the play-it-safe mantra because it’s worked. (Or perhaps, more accurately, the publishers, producers, editors, and record labels have bought into a play it safe mantra.)
If we wanted to eat, writers had to cater to those generic, same-same tastes that paid the bills.
None of that risky experimentation business. Eww.
But it doesn’t work now. AI rocks at generic content.
The time for generic is over
We’ve gotten away with it until now, but the write-by-numbers days are, well, numbered.
AI has learnt our boring formulas and standard tricks. It knows how to strategic-plan the heck out of this writing thing.
I think it’s good for us, actually.
If we’re really honest with ourselves, we’re all sick of dull, formulaic writing. Songs are all sounding the same. (One study proved that as music genres become more popular, they also become more generic.)
Movies are predictable too. (My hubby and I play “guess the ending” watching thrillers — we’re usually right.)
When was the last time something mainstream surprised you?
Don’t you think it’s time for a revival? A renaissance. Maybe the roaring art-revolution of the 20s we were hoping for in 2020 but didn’t get?
It’s time for us writers — the screenwriters, lyricists, novelists, and bloggers — to get weird.
A search for humanity
I’m always on the hunt for creative, original writers.
AI can’t write like humorist Jenny Lawson. I never thought I’d be reading about someone trying to find tiny condoms for her dogs’ paws. I love her oddball text conversations with her sister and her re-writing of truisms.
AI would never write something like this:
“The World is Your Oyster… it’s tough to get into and it will cut you if you don’t use the right knife. Also, it’s slimier than expected, but sometimes you get jewelry.” Jenny Lawson, Broken (In the Best Possible Way)
AI can’t give us the gorgeousness of a personal essay like Lisa Selin Davis’s story about finding her name-twin.
AI can’t tell me what you think — you, as an individual.
I want to know how my fellow humans interpret the world and how they deal with challenges. Not in the generic “This is how to deal with X” way AI gives me.
I want specifics. I want to hear Nell Beram’s views on marriage and Clive Thompson’s thoughts on our use of punctuation (or pretty much anything).
I want to feel what others feel in clear, crisp form and beautiful prose. Or just have a good laugh with someone like Jack Tuck and his “I’ve Quit Writing Personal Essays about Quitting Things: A Personal Essay.”
AI, no matter how good it is, can’t surprise, move, and delight me in the unique ways humans can.
Humans acting like humans
If we can embrace our quirks, our vulnerabilities, our humanness, maybe we’ll transform the creative forms we’ve gotten used to? Maybe we’ll design our own anti-formula formats.
Maybe AI is what we needed to push us out of the creator rut–to be challenged to experiment again like they did in the psychedelic 60s and 70s? (With or without the drugs, this time.)
Maybe to have a place among the robots, we need to stop acting like robots.
No more: “10 Side Hustles to Make $1000 Overnight”
Ditch the: “How to Drink More Water and Be More Productive”
Fully human. Off our devices (at least sometimes). Interacting with humans. Immersed in nature. Moving, experiencing, living, buying condoms for our dogs’ paws–things we do best.
What do you do best?
I saw a documentary years ago where a guy shocked me by explaining what we’ll do once the robots take our jobs (He thought it was a good thing).
“We’ll do what humans do best,” he said, “surf the internet.”
I sat staring at the screen, open-mouthed.
He was so convinced we were useless. Humans were better kept in cages than in the workplace, like Hamsters? Spinning in our wheels and scrolling on our phones.
I don’t think that’s what we do best. Good writers have taught me that. One of the things humans do best is connect. Connection is in our design. We connect at a heart level with inspiring music, powerful stories, and very human successes and mistakes.
When you connect ideas, connect experiences, and connect to each other, readers notice and appreciate it.
It might be time to step off the ladder, but while there are human readers, there’s still a space for human writers.
What do you make of it all?
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Kelly this thought of yours should revolutionize all industries and sectors of human society. I feel a very repeated conclusion of the end, is that AI would take over and we as humans we would be nothing. Just existing. But I can smell hope in your writing. For the first time it’s not a discussion that finalizes on an impending doom of the human race but rather a conversation that is to be had. WE ARE MORE. We built the AI thing, it didn’t just be. We can do more, our realness goes beyond the generic flood of information that exists now and I am glad someone is willing to put that out there.
I’m a non-native English speaker, and I’ve been studying English on my own a long time. Your articles are very easy for me to read—the sentence structures are clear and straightforward. I think this is the difference between professional and non-professional writing.
The advent of AI has truly brought us a lot of convenience. When I encounter confusing problems while learning English on my own, AI can provide me answers directly. When I use Google, I often have to spend a lot of time searching for the answers I'm looking for.
Of course, the AI we have today is just reasoning-based and has not yet entered the era of Artificial General Intelligence. It doesn’t possess the ability to think independently like a human. When cars were first introduced, many carriage drivers lost their jobs. I think those drivers ever imagined that one day they would be unemployed.
We should embrace technology and learn to use it effectively to grow in this ever-evolving society. Complaining won’t stop technological progress. If crying could solve problems, I could cry a Pacific Ocean. But no matter how society develops, people remain at the heart of the economy. Because a lot of humans don’t know what they truly want. Before cars existed, if you asked someone what kind of transportation they desired, they might have said: I want a faster horse. But once cars were invented, if you asked the same question, they would say: I want the car with the fastest acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h, because now they have options.
So, we need to create products that align with human nature and build a business that is centered around people.