On November 20, 2022, ChatGPT launched and got over 1 million users in its first five days.
More LLMs like Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini stepped into the scene. And this caused writers to do what they do best: panic.
For the past 4 years, writers have feared being replaced by AI, soliciting different opinions.
Some compare it with mathematicians feeling threatened by the calculator before but turning out fine. Others say AI won’t replace writers but writers who use AI will. Some had a counter-opinion to that using a car and horse analogy. “Cars replaced horses, not horses who could drive cars,” they said. It was an interesting perspective, but I kept pondering on the same question.
“Is it still worth it being a writer?”
After weeks of thought, I sat down and asked myself a series of questions. Does AI have personality? Can it feel? Can it sigh, close the word processor, put its head down on the table, eyes shut for minutes, until it gets a lightbulb moment?
The answer was always no… but it isn’t a complete flaw.
LLMs are governed by rules and guidelines with the sole function of predicting the most useful response based on patterns they were trained on. They simply can’t think independently. They draft, suggest, and organize, but can’t decide what matters or how much emotional weight a line carries. It’s simply a tool, but only skilled individuals can wield one, not fools hiding under the facade of being a writer.
I’m talking about fools who produce mass amounts of words devoid of human effort. The fools who can’t sit through writing the first draft. And the fools who find no joy in writing but simply see it as a “get-rich” card.
Yes, AI will replace writers—only lazy “writers.”