In 2025, human writers will reassert their value. In recent years, the race to obtain more and more content has been driven by technological and market imperatives, such as search engine optimization, which serve neither the creator nor the consumer. Human needs and desires have been pushed aside in favor of the attention economy and click drive.
Hailed as a boon for freedom of expression, the Internet’s initial promise has failed us. Literature and journalism have been replaced by worthless “content,” aimed primarily at filling web pages rather than informing or entertaining. Meanwhile, writers’ incomes have declined. The Author Licensing and Editorial Society reported a 60.2 percent decline in author income when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available generative AI has been, for many, like the final nail in the coffin for writers .
But 2025 will be a turning point, not for AI replacing us, but for a renewed appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, which will cripple traffic to original websites, eliminate the need for useless “content” to game the system and push people to demand better.
Generative AI has sparked a series of litigation and industrial and regulatory actions. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, prompted by complaints from civil society organization NOYB, managed to halt Meta’s plans to train its AI on users’ posts, photos and interactions. Traditional publishers like The New York Times have stepped up to protect their own interests and, with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, the Financial Times and The Atlantic in particular, have signed deals with generative AI companies, presumably in the belief that it is impossible to stem the tide. In 2025 they will be proven wrong.
As copyright lawsuits rumble through the courts, in 2025, we will also see decisions about liability for the inevitable errors produced by generative AI. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers using AI content will come to a head as slanderous falsehoods circulate online and are amplified by thoughtless robots and AI search engines. In 2024, academic publisher Wiley, close 19 magazines facing an avalanche of false scientific articles. To err is human, but counterfeiting on an industrial scale is largely a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, no soul, and has nothing to lose, but the people who use it, or ask others to use it for them, do.
In 2023, AI companies began hiring poets from around the world to try to infuse their dead-eye products with something resembling creativity. And in 2024, copywriters found their careers, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as humanizers of synthetic marketing content that doesn’t pass an algorithmic, let alone human, quality test. The value of human creators is starting to be realized by the corporations that tried to crush them, now that even machines aren’t fooled by AI. But editing robotic writing is boring: in the end will writers just say no? And will readers join them?
The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a film written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the theater received more than 200 complaints about the film’s very premise.
Publishers who have trusted people will attract the best writers and, ultimately, the most lucrative audiences. Since many media outlets offer little to no compensation to freelance writers, those humans will be reluctant to sell their souls so cheaply to train AI to replace them. Publishers who sell their writers will see their talent go elsewhere and, with them, their readers.
In a world flooded with nonsense derived from automation, human writers will allow readers a breath of air, like a green park in a polluted city. Instead of being wiped out by AI, in 2025 we will see a recognition of the inherent value of quality human writing, and perhaps human writers will be able to begin to come into their own.