Is AI Killing the Value of Human Writing?

Summary

This opinion essay asks whether AI is reducing the value of human writing by making written artifacts cheap and abundant. The author argues that abundance makes it harder to distinguish meaningful work from noise, while fluent AI text can be more persuasive and therefore more difficult to assess than older forms of low-quality SEO writing. AI can turn a vague idea into a sharper formulation, identify weaknesses, and point to relevant literature, but that convenience may encourage people to accept apparent knowledge without thinking critically or checking the substance beneath it. The author presents writing as a process that externalizes thought, exposes contradictions, and helps people discover what they actually think. This function matters even when the final text is not intended as art. For administrative records and routine professional emails, AI generation or editing is considered useful when the result is accurate, concise, and faithful to the sender’s intent; the main risks are unnecessary length, unchecked hallucinations, and misleading claims. Personal writing is different because its value may depend on the sender’s words being an authentic expression of feeling, making undisclosed AI-written love letters seem deceptive. The essay rejects a blanket rejection of synthetic text and expects AI-assisted poetry, fiction, and other creative forms to emerge, with distribution and quality remaining important bottlenecks. It distinguishes fully AI-generated output from writing shaped through substantial human direction and revision, and argues that AI may create new forms without eliminating older human practices. The proposed distinction is ultimately between low-effort and high-effort writing, regardless of whether AI was involved. High-quality AI-assisted work can reflect substantial human care and may help non-native writers communicate more clearly, while careless human writing can also be inaccurate, biased, or empty. The author concludes that the important question is whether a text performs its intended communicative work accurately, beautifully, and with care, rather than whether a human or AI produced every sentence alone.