Every time I tell someone that I’m a writer, I see their face fall. Admittedly, in the age of AI, it’s not seen as the most lucrative career path. I’ve often felt ashamed to share it, and when I do, the conversations usually follow the same formula.
They’d ask the dreaded questions: “Won’t that just get outsourced to AI? Can you really make a career out of that? Why would you get a degree in something everyone can do?” And in turn, I would rush to defend my degree. Though I’d always add the caveat, almost apologetically, that while I do enjoy creative writing, I’m planning on going into technical writing, as if tying it to STEM made it more legitimate and AI-proof.
Spoiler alert: they still judged it.
And in trying to justify it, I was also minimizing the value of writing and myself as a writer. But frankly, I’m tired of having this conversation. Why do we assume that AI can inherently replace writers, and why do we feel so comfortable telling writers that? It’s not like writing is the only field being impacted by AI. There are plenty of highly respected careers that are also at risk of automation, and yet those aren’t the ones people dismiss in conversation.
And most of the people saying this still have favorite books, movies, TV shows, and songs, all created by, you guessed it, writers.
Writing, storytelling, and critical thinking are not unimportant things that we can rely on AI for. They are foundational to our society. It’s how we make sense of things. It’s how we understand the world and each other. Writing does more than entertain or inform. It challenges, provokes, captures nuance, contradiction, and emotion in ways that cannot be reduced to a simple AI response. AI can generate words and sentences, but it doesn’t understand them. It doesn’t see meaning in a sentence like a human would, and it doesn’t have anything of its own to say.
We’ve all seen a post on social media obviously written by AI, and more often than not, it’s not very good. They’re formulaic and lack substance. Which is why, the more AI advances, the more the human perspective matters. As long as I have my voice and a story to tell, I’m not getting outsourced. So the next time someone asks me if AI is going to replace writers, I already have my answer.
Yes, I’m a Writer. No, AI Isn’t Replacing Me.