You’re staring at a blank Google Doc at 2 AM. The cursor blinks. You type a sentence, delete it, type another. Your coffee’s gone cold. This sucks, but there’s something honest about it—the struggle means you’re actually thinking. Fast forward to today: same deadline, same blank doc, but now there’s a button that says “Help me write.” You click it. Three seconds later, you’ve got five paragraphs of perfectly adequate nothing. You change a few words, hit send, and feel vaguely dirty about it.
That’s where we are now. And I’m not going to pretend I don’t miss the before times.
The Copywriter Massacre Nobody’s Talking About
Let’s get real about what’s happening. Blood in the Machine recently published interviews with copywriters who watched AI systematically dismantle their careers. Not “disrupt”—dismantle. One writer described being forced to use AI tools to speed up their work, only to be laid off once management realized they could just have junior staff edit AI output instead of paying experienced writers.
This isn’t creative destruction. It’s just destruction with a productivity dashboard.
The pattern is predictable: companies adopt AI writing tools, quality drops but speed increases, experienced writers become “expensive,” junior staff become AI wranglers, and everyone pretends the output is just as good. Spoiler: it’s not. But it’s cheaper, and in 2024, cheaper beats better every single time.
What AI Is Doing to Student Writers
The New York Times ran an opinion piece from a creative writing professor that should terrify anyone who cares about, you know, human thought. Students are showing up to class with AI-generated essays that technically meet the assignment requirements but read like they were written by someone who learned English from a customer service chatbot.
The problem isn’t that students are cheating—though they are. The problem is they’re losing the ability to struggle with ideas. Writing is thinking. When you outsource the writing, you outsource the thinking. And once you’ve trained your brain that the struggle is optional, that there’s always a button that makes the hard part go away, you’ve fundamentally changed how you engage with the world.
These students aren’t learning to write. They’re learning to edit mediocrity. And that’s a completely different skill set.
The Texture of Human Mistakes
Pre-AI writing had texture. It had personality. You could tell when someone was reaching for the right word and landed on the wrong one. You could feel when a writer was tired, or angry, or trying too hard to sound smart. Those imperfections were features, not bugs—they were proof that a human being sat down and wrestled with language until something emerged.
AI writing is smooth. Too smooth. It’s like listening to a cover band that hits all the notes but misses the soul. Every sentence is grammatically correct. Every paragraph flows into the next. And it’s all completely forgettable because there’s no person behind it, no specific human consciousness trying to make you understand something they care about.
I review AI tools for a living, and I can spot AI-generated content from a mile away. Not because it’s bad—it’s often technically proficient. But because it lacks the weird, specific, human thing that makes writing worth reading.
What We’re Actually Losing
The pre-AI writing era wasn’t perfect. Plenty of human-written content was garbage. But at least it was human garbage, created by someone who made specific choices about what to say and how to say it.
Now we’re drowning in content that nobody really wrote and nobody really wants to read. It exists purely to fill space, to satisfy an algorithm, to check a box. And we’re all complicit—writers who use AI to meet impossible deadlines, editors who accept AI-assisted work because budgets are tight, readers who skim AI-generated articles because we’re too busy to notice the difference.
The economics make sense. The efficiency gains are real. But we’re trading something valuable—the messy, inefficient, deeply human process of figuring out what we think by writing it down—for something that’s faster and cheaper and ultimately hollow.
I don’t have a solution. I’m not going to tell you to delete ChatGPT or go back to typewriters. But I am going to say this: every time you hit that “Help me write” button, you’re making a choice about what kind of writer you want to be. And every time a company replaces a human writer with an AI tool, they’re making a choice about what kind of content they value.
We’re all making those choices right now, in real time. And I miss the era when we didn’t have to.
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