You’re reading this right now.
That makes you a reader.
Right. Of course.
Whether or not you’ve sat down with a book lately, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time reading. Email, website, texting, social media – most of our primary forms of communication these days are text-based.
So, even if you don’t consider yourself a “reader,” modern life has turned you into one.
Likewise, as you send off an email or respond to a text, communicating via the internet or your smartphone has turned you into an unwitting short-form writer.
Technology has made readers and writers out of all of us, but up until recently it hadn’t replaced the acts of reading and writing. We still wrote and read the words ourselves.
Generative AI has changed that. Not only can it process information, it can also produce pretty sophisticated responses. With new versions that can accept multimodal input, we can talk directly to ChatGPT or Claude and receive fully formed blog posts, white papers, and even books (in theory, anyway).
Does that make AI a writer?
Are we still writers?
Of course. But there has undoubtedly been a shift in writing – not in just the process or even the final product, but in the role we as human writers play.
An Identity Shift
Generative AI has made it incredibly easy to put words out in the world. And with every new model released, it becomes even easier to generate responses that feel like something written by a real human.
For those who don’t have a lot of time or comfort with writing, that can be a huge productivity boost. Even for those of us who made a living writing in a pre-AI era, there are lots of ways AI can help with the process.
Generative AI as author means there’s a lot more text being produced, much more quickly, with much greater ease. The time to write well-researched, high-quality content is drastically shortened with the assist of AI, but it still requires a guiding hand to prompt, fact-check, and refine. When we write with AI, we become editors, as well.
More than Just Mechanics
This also means that the proportion of ratio of human-to-robot content available on the internet has shifted dramatically. Most major publications have guidelines identifying whether AI has been used in their content. But when it comes to the rest of the internet, it can be difficult to identify whether any given piece was written by a person or a machine.
The question becomes whether the prevalence of AI-created content dilutes or concentrates the value of the writer.
That is: What can humans bring to the table that generative AI never will?
The answer isn’t just quality writing. There are inherent aspects of being real people with real experiences that AI will never be able to capture, no matter how many data sets it’s trained on.
Think of generative AI as a mechanic who’s never owned a car. It’s read all the manuals, watched all the videos, and knows the names of all the parts. But it will never truly understand the exhilaration of driving down an open road at sunset, top down, wind in your hair.
(Believe me, I tried asking different gen AIs to describe that feeling, and the results were… not good. One presented me with a list of bullet points.)
To drive (no pun intended) home the point: No matter how much AI content is out there, it won’t resonate with readers in the same way a piece with a human author will.
Human Writers, Human Beings
Real people bring innovation, experience, and a point of view to their writing. We don’t just produce the words – we come up with the idea, synthesize the background knowledge, understand the reader, and create something that’s not only readable, it’s relatable.
This is true for everything from blog posts to emails to white papers to presentations. If you can’t connect with your audience (who is also human!), then you’re not succeeding in the purpose of your writing. They’re not going to buy a product, service, or even concept if they can’t relate to the content.
Generative AI is rapidly evolving, becoming more advanced and releasing new features on what seems like a daily basis. Like other forms of technology, it’s changed how we function as readers, writers, and editors – even if we don’t think of ourselves in those terms.
What does it mean to be a writer in the age of AI? Simply put: It means being human.
