Writing Boots

The Tractor-Cycle, 1938.

In yesterday’s post I suggested if people who use AI to “write” persist in calling themselves “writers,” then we writers are going to have to call ourselves something else. “Meaning makers,” came the suggestion. Or maybe …

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I’ve told the story here before about a graphic designer I worked with a very long time ago who received my copy and began laying it out into a newsletter. After an interval, she yelled over the cubicle wall: “Dave, the sidebar on page three is three inches short. You need to write some more shit.”

I can imagine that designer and other non-writers leaning on AI to write their shit. Where has AI been all their lives?

But increasingly, professional communicators are complaining that LinkedIn is even less interesting than it used to be, because their fellow communicators are using AI to write or heavily edit their posts, and everyone’s starting to sound the same.

My writer dad used to tell me there were writers, and there were typists who called themselves writers.

I think AI is starting to sift those two camps out, and maybe we’re discovering there are fewer writers in our ranks than we might have hoped, and more typists.

There’s another old term for a writer who will churn out any old shit that needs to be writ, to fit. As I described it here once, “A corporate communication hack is someone who with a straight face calls the new corporate podcast ‘slightly irreverent,’ the new employee video ‘kind of fun’ and the CEO’s blog ‘a bit edgy.’” Hey, those sound like AI prompts to me.

I realize that many corporate communication professionals do not consider themselves to be fine writers. I also realize that much corporate communication writing neither requires nor rewards a fine writer’s one-and-only mind. But real human communication still does. And if we’re going to have fine writers at all, we should stop calling AI-generated prose writing. Or we should start calling writers something else.