Can AI write better than us? Maybe it’s not about that. Maybe it’s something deeper.

Social media is a publishing bloodbath right now. Everyone in the publishing world and beyond is weighing in on AI, how to tell if something was written by AI, the demise of human-written content. And here’s the truth: eventually there will be no way to tell. 

As an author, this terrifies me. I want to go around telling everyone I don’t use AI to write prose, that I don’t use it to write my social media posts. I want to post a banner over all my profiles. Human. 

Sure, I’m a reluctant cyborg to some extent. AI is a valuable tool. I use it for scheduling, to motivate myself, to find recipes, to brainstorm marketing ideas. But not to write.

Why? 

Because writing is how we as humans organize our thoughts. It has always been this way. The whole point of language is to communicate with each other, human to human. To make sense of things. To understand the world and the depths and intricacies of life.

What will happen to the human race if we stop writing? If we stop coming up with our own ideas and organizing them into sentences, paragraphs, essays, books, and so forth? 

We will lose the ability to think for ourselves.

It’s already happening. MIT recently published a study about the effect of ChatGPT on cognitive ability. You can look it up for yourself. It is not good news. 

So don’t stop thinking. Don’t stop struggling to form content. Sure, AI might be able to do it better. It might be more efficient, quicker, cleaner.

But from our very first words, language is how we connect with other humans, how we understand life itself.

Don’t let AI take that away.