Let’s suppose AI is going to take over all corporate writing tasks.

No reason it shouldn’t, if we remain on the current trajectory.

This writer sees it coming.

“Write an article on ‘What is payment gateway?’” I recently typed into a ChatGPT window. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered writing generator, quickly obliged.

The result was impressive. Sure, the tone was inhuman and the structure as sophisticated as a college essay, but the key points, the grammar and the syntax were all spot on. After a bit of a punch-up, it was perfectly passable as a sponsored content article designed to drum up business leads for a software provider – an article like the one that I, a professional copywriter, had just spent hours writing.

My amusement quickly turned to horror: it had taken ChatGPT roughly 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that I charged £500 for. The artificial intelligence software is by no means perfect – yet. For businesses that rely on churning out reams of fresh copy, however, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

In other words, there will soon be no need for people to perform any corporate writing.

This includes all business writing, such as marketing copy, info copy, legal copy, and journalism, as well as all mainstream (i.e. profitable) entertainment writing. Novels, screen plays, journalism again hahahahahaha: it’s all going to be generated by machines, not people.

When that happens, there will be no longer be tangible reasons for people to learn how to write.

Why bother learning how to write, when you can click a button and whatever you need will be written for you?

Think it won’t happen?

I know. People are lamenting that students will start “cheating” by using AI to do their writing assignments.

But there was a time people lamented students wanting to use calculators in class.

How’d that end up?

Humans seem wired to do things the easiest way. We don’t normally exert effort if there’s no immediate, tangible return.

Hand-wringing won’t change that.

The AI technology–whether it’s ChatGPT or some future iteration–is going to win.

And what’s that going to do to our brains?

What were “humans” like before we were widely literate? Impossible to know, for sure. But it’s probably reasonable to assume our brains operated differently than they do today.

It’s also reasonable to assume that if we abandon writing, the brains of most humans will revert to something like our pre-literate manner of functioning.

But writing won’t disappear completely…

Instead, I predict writing will become an esoteric pursuit. Like meditation: something practitioners do not because there’s a tangible ($) return, but because of the effect writing has on the mind/brain.

Writing brings clarity of thought. It’s a bridge between the verbal and non-verbal workings of the psyche. It brings the unknown/felt to the attention of the ego/waking self.

That’s why “journaling” is a thing for people who are upset/conflicted. It helps us know what we know.

Now imagine a world where hardly anyone knows how to write.

“Writers” would be as exotic and peculiar as monks.

Writing may once again be seen as something akin to an act of magic.

How crazy is that?

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