Member-only story
Is AI Turning Everyone into a Writer?
It depends on your definitions.
Note: No AI assistance was used to write this article.
A recent Medium newsletter made the following statement:
Looked at properly, the AI era is turning everyone into a writer.
This assertion bothered me immediately, and continued to bother me even after reading the rest of the newsletter for context. I strongly disagree that this is a “proper” way of looking at the burgeoning use of AI assistance. To explain my reasoning, we must first define what is meant by “AI”, and what is meant by “writer”.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is used for a large and growing number of different tasks. The function that has captured the most attention — and criticism — recently is generative AI, which accepts a user’s natural language prompts and uses a large language model (LLM) to create text, images, code, or other content requested by the user. Examples of this technology include chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini.
A writer, by definition, is one who writes. But “writing” could be a pencil scribble, a tweet, an essay, or a book, so that is not a very helpful definition. When I say that I am a writer, I mean that I use my own brain and hands to create stories and articles for other people to read…
