Don’t count out human writers in the age of AI

In 2025 human writers will prove their worth. In recent years, the race for more and more content has been driven by technological and market imperatives such as search engine optimization, which serves neither the creator nor the consumer. Human needs and wants have been ignored in favor of the attention economy and the pursuit of clicks.

Hailed as a boon to freedom of expression, the early promise of the Internet failed us. Literature and journalism have been replaced by priceless “content” aimed primarily at filling web pages rather than informing or entertaining. Meanwhile, writers’ incomes have declined. The Licensing and Copywriting Society reports a 60.2 percent decline in inflation-adjusted author earnings from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available generative AI feels to many like the final nail in the coffin for writers.

But 2025 will be a turning point not for AI replacing us, but for a renewed appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, driving traffic to the original websites, will kill the need for mindless “content” to game the system and make people demand better.

Generative AI has sparked numerous lawsuits and industry and regulatory actions. Data protection regulators in the EU and UK, prompted by complaints from civil society organization NOYB, were able to put a pause on Meta’s plans to train its AI on user posts, photos and interactions. Traditional publishers like The New York Times have stepped up to protect their own interests, and with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, notably the Financial Times and The Atlantic, have entered into agreements with generative AI companies, presumably in the belief that it is impossible to stem the tide. In 2025 they will be proven wrong.

While copyright lawsuits play out in the courts, 2025 will also see rulings on liability for the inevitable mistakes caused by generative AI. Defamation lawsuits against AI companies and publishers using AI content will come to a head as defamatory falsehoods are spread online and amplified by mindless AI bots and search engines. In 2024, academic publisher Wiley, closed 19 magazines faced with a deluge of bogus scientific papers. To err is human, but counterfeiting on an industrial scale is largely a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, no soul, and nothing to lose – but the people who use it, or ask others to use it for them, do.

In 2023 AI companies have begun hiring poets from around the world to try to imbue their dead-eyed products with something close to creativity. And in 2024 copywriters have found their careers seemingly doomed by AI being revived as humanizers of synthetic marketing content that doesn’t pass algorithmic, let alone human, quality testing. The value of human creators is beginning to dawn on the corporations that tried to crush them, now that even the machines aren’t fooled by AI. But writing editing robots is boring – writers will eventually just say no? And will readers join them?

The London premiere of The Last Writer, a film written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the cinema received more than 200 complaints about the premise itself.

Publishers who bet on people will attract the best writers and ultimately the most lucrative audiences. Since many news outlets offer little or no compensation to freelance writers, these people won’t sell their souls so cheaply to train an AI to replace them. Publishers who sell their writers will see their talent go elsewhere, and their readership with them.

In a world flooded with derivative automated nonsense, human writers will give readers a breath of fresh air, like a green park in a polluted city. Instead of being destroyed by AI, in 2025 we will see recognition of the intrinsic value of quality human writing, and perhaps human writers will be able to start charging their worth.