— This is not another anti-AI rant
My LinkedIn feed is littered with antsy writers railing against AI writing. They frame it as “slop”, riddled with telltale linguistic fingerprints (em-dash, anyone?) and structural patterns, such as negative-positive restatement (it’s not this, it’s that) and so on.
Their anxiety takes me back to the 2000s, when commercial photography became saturated with “fauxtographers” armed with digital cameras offering low-cost or free services. The pros pushed back, arguing that a whizzy digital camera didn’t make someone a photographer any more than a stove made you a chef. But the damage was done and the market for professional photography changed, in the view of the establishment, “for the worse”.
You can’t blame writers for defending their craft, but they should pitch a different argument. Rather than wave and point at AI writing’s so-called sins they’d be better to focus on the perceived value of AI writing.
When readers smell an AI rat, they assume there’s no one ‘behind’ the writing, that it’s a concoction and should be ignored. They think that if what they’re reading was ‘free’ to create (required no human effort other than prompting) then the cost of ignoring it is zero.
It’s the same with AI art. OpenAI’s Sam Altman himself argued that if an AI model makes an image, even a beautiful one, and there is no specific human creator, the value placed on that work by people is effectively zero.
His statement implies that while technical skill and “perfection” are now effectively free, human origin is the true product.
Writing and other forms of creative expression situated in human experience come from somewhere specific – someone with a heartbeat, someone who has skin in the game, a point of view, taste and judgement. AI models can’t go there.
When readers know there’s a human behind the writing, the cost of ignoring it rises, because there’s real human investment in the output. It’s a signal that says: someone thought this and felt strongly enough to put it on the page. Human writer-reader exchange is a trust transaction – and trust, unlike content, is declining in the age of the machine.
AI generates from the record of human experience. Writers generate from inside it.