Why Writing Still Matters In The Age Of The Infinite Text Generator

Let's begin with a delicious irony. Right now the internet is positively drowning in articles dealing with "How to Spot AI Writing".

It's a shame that roughly 90% of them demonstrate their authority by confidently declaring that AI overuses em dashes - and then proceed to show you examples that use regular old hyphens like I just did.

Dashes.

You know, these things - the ones that look like minus signs.

An actual em dash looks like this—the limousine of punctuation marks.

Apparently, expertise in detecting Artificial Intelligence doesn't require expertise in basic typography.

On an engagement loop

The proliferation of these badly punctuated panic pieces tells us something important. There's a market for AI anxiety. Where there's a market, there are people showing their wares.

People are genuinely worried that machines have learned to string words together so convincingly that human writers might as well pack up their laptops and take up... reading instead.

The fear is understandable. When your profession can theoretically be automated by something that doesn't require food, water (er...), health insurance, or emotional validation, it's natural to feel a bit existentially wobbly.

But the thing about AI that all those dash-confused articles miss: it's artificial.

Revolutionary, yes. Impressive, absolutely. I'm incredibly interested in the technology. I'm a touch more interested in its potential than where it currently is, but I'm interested nonetheless.

But it's still artificial, in the most literal sense of the word. AI writing is a magnificent feat of pattern recognition and statistical prediction, a digital parrot that's been fed the entire internet and can now recite it back in increasingly sophisticated combinations.

It can produce clean prose, follow instructions, and even attempt humor.

What AI cannot do - what it fundamentally, structurally cannot do - is have experiences.

The Human Factor

No AI model (and there are thousands of them) has ever stubbed its toe on furniture at 3 AM while trying to sneak a midnight snack.

No AI has ever felt the peculiarly mortifying embarrassment of waving back at someone who was actually waving at the person behind it.

No AI has ever sat in a doctor's waiting room, wondering if today is when it finds out whether that mysterious bump is cancer, or if this is just another Tuesday in its life after all.

AI can write about human experience the way a cookbook can describe the taste of chocolate. Technically accurate. Completely bloodless.

Your voice matters because you have actually lived in a human body, with all its attendant indignities and revelations.

You know what it feels like when your brain decides to remember every embarrassing thing you've ever done just as you're trying to fall asleep.

You understand the specific panic of realizing you've been nodding thoughtfully at someone who stopped talking ten seconds ago.

These aren't just quirky details. These are the texture of authentic human experience. AI at the moment is limited to its training data. No amount of training data can replicate the lived reality of existing in meat and bones and chronic lower back pain and embarrassment about a spectacular zit.

Moreover, readers aren't stupid. They can sense authenticity, even when they can't articulate exactly what they're detecting.

There's something in genuine human writing, a kind of beautiful imperfection, an emotional frequency, call it what you will. Something that resonates like a tuning fork. Even the most polished artificial prose can't quite hit that mark (yet).

It's the difference between a perfectly photorealistic painting and an actual photograph. Both might look the same at first glance, but one of them contains light that actually bounced off real objects. Somehow, we can tell.

AI writing tends toward bland competence. Bit like elevator music for the eyes. It rarely takes the kinds of risks that make writing memorable. The weird metaphors and unexpected tangents - the moments where a writer's personality breaks through like sunlight through clouds. Artificial intelligence is trained to avoid offense, to find the safest path through any topic. It tends to produce prose about as exciting as plain yogurt.

Human writers, on the other hand, are beautifully unreliable. We go off on tangents, make cultural references that baffle, have strong opinions about yogurt, unexpected biases, and blind spots that shape everything we write.

These are not bugs. They're features. (Ah, the old not-x-but-y rhetorical pattern. It was ours first. We need to take it back.)

The writing world isn't ending. It's just getting more competitive, which isn't necessarily bad news.

When machines can produce serviceable copy at the speed of light, truly good human writing becomes more valuable, not less.

The bland, formulaic, boilerplate content that was always kind of pointless? Yes, AI can do that now, and frankly, good riddance to it.

But the writing that matters, the pieces that make people laugh, cry, think, or feel less alone in the universe: this still requires the irreplaceable ingredient of genuine human consciousness.

So yes, your writing still matters because you are a unique cosmic flower. But more importantly, you're a unique cosmic flower with working nerve endings and a credit score and and strong opinions about whether a tomato is a fruit or not.

Keep writing. The robots may be coming for a lot of jobs, but they're not coming for our souls.

(At least not yet.)