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

In 2025, human writers will reassert their value. 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 abandoned 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 Literature and journalism have been replaced by worthless “content”, intended primarily to fill web pages rather than to inform or entertain. Meanwhile, incomes for writers have been reduced. The Author 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 felt, for many, like the last 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 the need for useless “content” to game the system and push people to ask for better.

Generative AI has prompted a host of industry and regulatory litigation and action. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, prompted by complaints from the civil society organization NOYB, managed to put a stop to Meta’s plans to train its AI on posts, photos and user interaction. Traditional publishers like the New York Times have stepped up to protect their interests, and with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, the Financial Times and the Atlantic in particular, have signed agreements with generative AI companies, presumably in the belief that it is impossible to stem the tide. In 2025, they will be proven wrong.

As copyright lawsuits rumble through the courts, in 2025, we will also see decisions about liability for the inevitable errors produced by generative AI. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers using AI content are coming to a head as false slanders are circulated online and amplified by mindless bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, closed 19 newspapers faced with a stream of fake scientific articles. To err is human, but counterfeiting on an industrial scale is very much 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 began hiring 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, apparently doomed by AI, revived as humanizers for synthetic marketing content that does not pass an algorithmic, and even a human test, sniff for quality. The value of human creators is beginning to dawn on the corporations they tried to crush, now that even machines are not fooled by AI. But editing robot writing is boring – will writers just end up saying no? And readers join them?

The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, 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 bank on people will attract the best writers, and eventually, the most lucrative audience. With many news outlets offering little or no compensation for freelance writers, those humans don’t mind selling their souls so cheaply to train AI to replace them. Publishers who sell their writers will see their talent go elsewhere and, with them, their readers.

In a world flooded with derivative automated screenplay, human writers 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 of quality human writing, and perhaps, human writers could begin to charge their value.