What people keep getting wrong about AI (and why us writers can relax)
I’m sure you’ve probably encountered them online by now. You know who I mean. Those insufferable people who wail, bitch and complain constantly about AI. Who accuse any writers who disagree with their frankly luddite takes of being traitors and not writing their own work.
These people believe the machines are lining up to take our jobs and our souls in one go. A bit like those luddites from the 19thc century who complained when machines were first introduced in factories or when computers replaced the typewriter.
AI is a tool. Nothing more. AI is not creative. It cannot make an original thought. It doesn’t think, it doesn’t feel, and it definitely doesn’t care. What it does is mimic- sometimes convincingly, often laughably poorly and it tells you what it thinks you want to hear.
If you’ve actually dabbled with it and used it (I use it in my day job to speed up projects and assist with tasks) you’d realise that AI is not a threat to human writers. At all. The biggest threat comes from human non-writers, those who haven’t spent years of their life writing professionally or for their livelihoods. These people are often semi literate and think that AI produced words are great. Sadly there’s a lot of them, another failure of education, but we need to accept that there’s nothing we can do about them.
I’ve been seeing it a lot lately in the professional and business worlds. Audiences have learned what is AI and what isn’t. Most don’t want AI produced content, they want the human touch, they want to be able to relate to the creator. In Marketing we’re seeing this more and more. AI generated emails etc are ignored far more than those with a human touch.
AI is not “smart.” What it’s doing is mathematical prediction dressed up as insight. It’s learned, through endless data ingestion, what words tend to appear near each other and when you ask it to write, it just keeps guessing the next word over and over again.
Read enough AI-generated writing and you start to spot the patterns: it sounds confident but says nothing. It repeats itself. It leans on generic phrasing and safe ideas. It waffles because it’s not actually saying anything, it’s just assembling sentences that sound like they mean something. To any trained copywriter the content it produces is essentially slop. Sure it can generate the skeleton of a piece but it still requires the human to add, edit and use their creative skills to bring it to life and reach an audience.
AI also has no concept of truth. Ask it for facts, and nine times out of ten it’ll happily invent them. It’ll give you sources that don’t exist or quotes no one ever said. It’s not lying as such it just doesn’t even know what lying is. It’s just following the pattern that seems most likely.
That’s the magic trick of AI: it sounds intelligent, but it isn’t. It’s an echo chamber of everything that’s ever been said and a remix machine for the internet’s collective noise. There’s a good reason why educational establishments ban its use for students and those that do allow it insist that any results are thoroughly research to ensure accuracy. Using AI should be increasing critical thinking, but alas humans are lazy and most often take things at face value even if it’s a blatant falsehood or lie. (Just look at how the media and politicians spout lies for a good example).
The difference between data and experience
Real writing comes from our human experience. It comes from how we see, feel, and remember. We writers take chaos and turn it into something of meaning. When we write we often draw on heartbreak, joy, boredom, curiosity, and everything in between.
AI can’t do that. It doesn’t have memories, feelings, or the faintest idea what love or grief are. It doesn’t sit at a desk battling a sentence that won’t come together or feel the quiet rush when it finally does. It can produce ideas that a writer can then work with but it still requires the author’s heavy involvement.
In my experience I have used it to generate outlines of ideas and then its down to me to heavily edit, tweak and add emotion and feeling into it. AI is a tool, just like photoshop is to artists and designers. (And most of those tools now also incorporate AI too.)
It can make you more productive but it cannot do the work for you. At all. Readers might not always be able to explain why they can tell the difference, but they sure can feel it. There’s a pulse in real writing, a voice behind the words. An AI can mimic the shape of that voice, but it can’t fake a soul.
Why writers have nothing to fear
People keep saying AI is going to take writers’ jobs. But honestly, I don’t think so. I said earlier how businesses and their customers are pushing back on its overuse. Security concerns too will also restrict its use among businesses and to be honest with you I think a major AI bubble is rapidly approaching.
It’s useful, sure, but it doesn’t do what its advocates claim it can or will be able to do. How can a booming AI industry thrive when it still can draw hands properly, still makes nightmare fuel videos and which churns out waffle copy.
In the case of both readers and viewers they want connection. Sure some of the AI videos we see on socials are funny but can that type of content sustain this behemoth that some AI companies are claiming it is. Trillions of Dollars has been poured into this tech and yet the results are still pretty underwhelming.
AI can fill pages, but it can’t build relationships. It can produce content, but it can’t create trust. It can flood the internet with generic slop, but it can’t write something that makes you laugh on a rough day or linger in your head for hours after reading. Trust me, I’ve tested it a lot. AI on its own is a bit of an idiot. It needs direct human involvement to produce anything good.
What AI will replace are the soulless, SEO-churned blogs that were already lifeless to begin with. In other words, the junk food of the writing world. The stuff no one reads twice. If anything it could incentivise companies and book readers to invest more in human writers. People want to be engaged, they want soul. For proof of that look no further than the crap coming out of Hollywood. Big budget movies with crappy writing flop all the time. People want human stories, things they can relate to and plots that actually make sense and make them feel something.
I think we’ll be fine.
What AI is actually good for
That’s not to say AI is useless. Far from it.
Think of it as a writing companion who’s helpful but a bit thick. It can proofread (often better than any human). It can tidy up sentences. It can spit ball ideas when you’re stuck. It can summarise your copy and provide advice.
It’s great for the boring parts of writing like the scaffolding, description, not the soul.
Used well, it’s like having an assistant who does some of the heavy lifting so you can focus on the creative work that matters. Used badly, it’s like handing over your voice to a robot and asking it to pretend it’s you. No one wants that and people can tell.
All the panic about AI might actually be doing us writers a favour. It’s reminding everyone what makes human writing special.
When you read something that truly resonates, it’s because there’s a person behind it, someone who’s lived, thought, and cared enough to shape their thoughts into words. That’s not something you can code.
AI can help you polish a sentence, but it can’t give it meaning. It can’t make a reader feel something real. It can’t take a creative risk, or tell you why it keeps writing even when it’s hard.
That’s what we writers do. That’s what we’ll always do.
To those who constantly bitch about AI. Just shut up. It is a tool and nothing more. You bitch that the likes of Amazon is now filled with AI created slop, newsflash Amazon has always been filled with low quality slop. I know, I’ve been an indie author for a decade now and the scammers, the slop artists and low effort writers have always been and always will be an issue. If you blame AI for your book failing it’s not Ais fault, it’s yours. Your book isn’t good enough. It doesn’t stand out enough, you haven’t done enough to market it. Perhaps your writing just isn’t good enough.
To the rest of us who aren’t total whiney idiots use AI or not. Let it tidy your grammar or help you brainstorm or not. But don’t mistake it for a writer. It’s just a tool, one more instrument in the creative process.
Originally published on M.S. Olney's Substack a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
