Don’t Count Out Human Writers in the Age of AI

In 2025, human writers will reassert 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 desires have been sidelined in favor of the attention economy and the drive for clicks.

Hailed as a boon for freedom of expression, the early promise of the internet has failed us. Literature and journalism have been replaced by valueless “content,” primarily aimed at filling web pages rather than informing or entertaining. Meanwhile, incomes for writers have been driven down. The Authors’ Licensing and Copywriting Society reported a 60.2 percent decrease in authors’ incomes when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available generative AI has felt, for 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, stalling traffic to original websites, will kill off the need for pointless “content” to game the system and will push people to demand better.

Generative AI has provoked a slew of litigation and industrial and regulatory action. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, prompted by complaints from the civil society organization NOYB, succeeded in getting a pause in Meta’s plans to train its AI on users’ posts, photos, and interactions. Traditional publishers such as The New York Times have stepped up to protect their own interests, and with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, the Financial Times and The Atlantic in particular, have entered into agreements with generative AI companies, presumably in the belief that it is impossible to hold back the tide. In 2025, they will be proved wrong.

As the copyright lawsuits rumble through the courts, in 2025, we will also see decisions on liability for the inevitable errors produced by generative AI. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers using AI content will come to a head as slanderous untruths are circulated online and amplified by unthinking bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, shut down 19 journals faced with a flood of fake science papers. To err is human, but industrial-scale fakery is very much a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, no soul, and nothing to lose—but the people that use it, or ask others to use it for them, do.

In 2023, AI companies started to hire poets from around the world to try to infuse their dead-eyed products with something close to creativity. And in 2024, copywriters found their careers, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as humanizers for synthetic marketing content which does not pass an algorithmic, let alone a human, sniff test for quality. The value of human creators is starting to dawn on the corporations that sought to crush them, now that even the machines are not fooled by AI. But editing robot writing is boring—will writers ultimately just say no? And will readers join them?

The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a movie written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the cinema received more than 200 complaints about the very premise of it.

Publishers that have banked on people will attract the best writers, and eventually, the most lucrative audiences. With many news outlets offering little or no compensation for freelance writers, those humans will be loath to sell their souls so cheaply to train AI to replace them. Publishers that sell out their writers will see their talent go elsewhere and, with them, their readership.

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