When I was younger, I loved to write.
Whether it was in-depth reportages of school trips or dystopian teen novellas, I would spend hours smashing the keys of the world’s oldest typewriter before presenting an opus to my clearly delighted parents.
I loved how language can be so simple, yet also complex, and can be used by anyone to huge effect. You, as the author, have the authority to decide what the words say and how they say them. The clue is in the name.
From journalism to law, historical texts to diplomatic communication, the construction of a sentence can make a world of difference. Slip up on just one element – maybe even a comma – and it could mean a law is not passed, a treaty is not signed or a product that may have been a smash hit is consigned to the design bin of history.
But with the ever-creeping advent of tools that do the writing for us, where does that leave us as authors? Whether we like it or not, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and many of us may never write anything longer than a shopping list or Instagram post ever again.
But relying on <insert Gen AI of choice here> to complete the whole creative process does us all a disservice, and fails to appreciate what language actually is – and what we can do with it.
In its most basic form, writing is communication. It’s relaying information from one person to another in the most effective way. For many years, we gave the “dark ages” such a moniker, as a lack of written evidence on what was happening meant we were in the dark about it all.
With today’s 24/7 online news barrage, it’s unlikely that period is to be repeated.
Yet, at a recent conference in Monaco, I got chatting to a partner at one of the Big Four and we made a bet. He wagered that the job of a journalist would be gone within 10 years – maybe less – thanks to the advent of <insert Gen AI of choice here>.
I countered that the job of an auditor would be gone earlier… but I digress.
What I pointed out to him, delicately, was that he had misunderstood the job of a journalist, or indeed the job of many people who write or create content for a living.
He had mistaken “writing” for “communication” and dismissed the crucial part of information gathering as something a machine could also do.
Or rather, a machine can do it, but not to the same effect and this is the crucial point. It’s unlikely that <insert Gen AI of choice here> could break the MP expenses scandal or come up with the Guinness surfer advert.
Replicating something in the style of someone/thing isn’t new – Renaissance painters with their studios were on to it centuries ago – but now it’s automated.
As we chatted over the champagne someone else had paid for, I did concede that the role of the writer had already changed – especially in the world of business and finance.
Just like no one – apart from Tom Hanks – still uses typewriters, many other tools of progress are already deeply embedded in our personal and business lives. We would be churlish (and even more time poor) to not use what’s available.
But doing so makes it imperative we get the basics of information gathering right and it places a significant burden on us to excel at the part we must still play in this new creativity process.
The skills we are going to need as we enter the next quarter of the century actually remain the same as the last. Information gathering, narrative crafting and understanding what needs to be woven in (or left out) are vital in a world that thrives on automation, speed and excess.
Typesetters didn’t die out – they evolved into creators using InDesign. Authors need to follow a similar path of evolution, retaining the spark that keeps them a vital link in the creative process.