I’m a new author in the age of AI, and it’s gonna be fine, right?

There’s a famous Warren Buffett quote that goes “Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful”. He’s talking about stocks, and when it’s the right time to buy them; in the stock market when people are fearful, values go down. That’s a perfect time to buy, as the common result of this, in Mr. Buffett’s case anyway, is that the market goes up and you suddenly have a bunch of stocks you bought for cheap.

What if human writing is having its “buy low” moment right now?

AI’s doing insane things to the world of writing. Online text-based communication is turning into a cesspit of recycled content that echo-chambers itself into becoming more and more bland, more average. It sucks, and it’s understandably irritating to writers who use their own human brains to write stuff good like me do.

But let’s look at the trend and think it through. AI is getting better at writing, and people are getting worse as they grow more and more reliant on AI tools. Kids can’t read or write, college graduates can’t read or write, people who can’t read or write are elected president; it’s all going in a pretty dystopian direction.

What’s actually happening, to me, is that average writing, the kind that people want to outsource, is still just as average as before, and bottom tier writing is becoming much, much better. My personal view is that this middle and bottom tier writing, which has been taken over by AI, is now more accessible to people who speak other languages, or who simply don’t write well, or whatever, and as a result is actually improving. That hurts to say, and it eats my soul to admit it, but I think it’s true.

I’m not endorsing AI writing, I’m just trying to present my realistic view of it. AI writing is good because its inputs are a mix of OK, average, and great writing, which may or may not be used with permission. That sucks. But regardless of the morality or legality of it, the simple fact is that large language models are producing better low- and mid-tier writing, stuff like emails and blog posts about fertilizer, than a cheap human writer did before. And now even the bottom rung of the writing ladder, the foreign bot posts on twitter and tiktok and the spam text messages trying to lure my grandparents into giving up their social security numbers, are becoming somewhat legible by people with functioning brains.

So how does all this add up to a “buy low” moment for writing?

I believe that if the low and mid teir levels of writing continue along this path, they will lose all value. Middle-tier writing will become the fodder of the internet as it’s generated and re-generated by AI bots and so on into infinity. People will outsource the reading of this garbage to other AI bots, who will summarize the regurgitated summaries until it’s just white noise.

And then, what skill will people wish they hadn’t outsourced and therefore lost?

Writing interesting shit.

So maybe we’re in a brutal down-cycle for writers, economically and socially. But I think for people like me, new authors who have skills to build and don’t have a ton of books out there being cannibalized by AI-wielding losers, it’s the perfect time to hunker down and build some skills, build some new stories and new worlds, find something that will stand out against the backdrop of grey-beige internet static that’s already taking over.

Invest in your writing skills now, instead of outsourcing them, and I think a time will come when you’re rewarded for being one of the few humans left with that kind of skill set. How things are made matters. And when an entire generation (or two) enters the world without the skills to write -and therefore think and imagine – for themselves, hopefully they’ll realize they messed up.