What real writers say about AI
We’ve got one week left in the survey of writing professionals attitudes about AI, sponsored by Bernoff.com and Gotham Ghostwriters. (If you haven’t taken the survey, now’s the time.)
While I can’t share the quantitative results so far because I don’t want to bias the sample, I can share some of the open-ended text responses, also known as “verbatims.” Some of them are pretty emotional. And they’ve confirmed for me that writers are the wittiest people on the planet when it comes to expressing their perspective.
Verbatims from the 2026 AI and the Writing Profession Survey
In no particular order . . .
Even my own HUSBAND is using AI to edit his work, not me, who has literally 25 years of experience. It is utterly demoralizing. I hate my life
AI is a lousy answer to a stupid question that no serious writer would have asked in the first place.
AI writing is not innovative and does not have substance. I am highly concerned that this will have a degrading effect on all of us in the profession.
I think it can be a great tool for research (that should also be fact-checked) and brainstorming ideas or even coming up with character art concepts, but I strongly believe it should not be the final step in any part of the writing, editing, or publishing process.
AI is ruining every industry it touches and if I had a time machine I would find the original concept for ChatGPT, steal it, and throw it into the sea.
The intensity of work required to “fix” AI outputs is often greater than that needed to improve human writing, and the work is lower quality.
There will be more demand for competent, ethical writing. Writers and editors who are heavily using AI right now are going to be screwed when either token price becomes too expensive or they lose too much of their skill.
Writing is not just communication, it is thinking. AI is eroding not just a profession but essential human skills and knowledge
Computers have zero ability to know the euphoric feeling of falling in love, the joy of the diving into a cool lake on a hot day or the pain of losing a loved one. To outsource writing to AI is to outsource the greatest skill humanity has developed.
AI is exacerbating enshittification.
Generative AI is making people dumber and causes any critical thinking skills to atrophy.
The idea of allowing a large language model to regurgitate words that have been stolen from human writers who have put their effort into producing stories is maddening.
If AI continues to be unquestionably accepted as part of our daily lives, I believe that writing will cease to be a profession, and, as catastrophic as that will be, that will be the least of our worries when the tech runs the world.
Companies are using AI as an excuse to produce ever worse quality work and pocket the cost difference.
AI makes everything more difficult and time-consuming. It takes at least five times longer to fix all the things AI has broken than it does to write it correctly in the first place.
Writers who use AI need to be aware of how they’re digging the ground from under their own feet.
The amount of work it puts on me to untangle AI slop that comes my way is my current biggest pain point.
It is flattening language. The documents I work on now, though they are in widely disparate fields, all sound alike.
At some point, it will likely produce better and better results. It will, I think, never replace the human spirit and passion and humor that is part of most projects.
Copywriting and marketing writing is on its way out because it’s so formulaic that AI can replicate it without issue.
I can’t use my beloved em-dash now and that makes me angry. And I hate that people think what I do and what AI does is the same. Can AI talk to clients and make them comfortable enough to pull out their childhood trauma so they can create a coherent narrative around it? Can AI tap into its own childhood trauma and be funny? NO.
I know two people who can’t write who are trying to sell their memoirs that they wrote with AI, and they’ll never get a deal.
It is literally making people stupid and lazy. It is dumbing down everyone who uses it. It is destroying education. It has the capability to destroy societies especially those societies that are fixated on capitalism and greed.
AI is a cancer that is, at best, a spicy spellcheck.
People are pushing back on using AI for writing. There’s been an about-face on this topic compared to a year ago. There is a hunger for human writing now that folks have seen the slop that AI can produce.
The “writing” part of the profession is no longer the differentiator. I took great pride in standing out as a writer–the craft, the care, the voice, the informational and emotional impacts of the writing itself. And I always saw clear gradations in the quality of people’s writing in those respects, including among other professional writers. But I have seen firsthand, in some jaw-dropping ways, that people who were once C-level writers are using AI to approximate a lot of what distinguished me as an A-level writer. That doesn’t mean we’re all headed to the ash heap of history, but it does mean that we have to think about all the qualities of being a storyteller and strategic communications expert, not just the writing/editing that might have comprised a large part of our expertise and identity in the past.
It’s appearing to lowering the bar but I think it’s going to raise it. Clever and creative thinkers will prevail and stand out.
In case you were wondering, no one has registered spicyspellcheck.com yet . . .