Table of contents
You've seen the headlines. And if these predictions are even half right, then it won't be long before A.I. can out-write most of us.
Whether you write for a living or live for writing, it's not hard to wonder:
Now that AI has eaten everyone's lunch, what's left for me?
That's the question this video takes on.
Not with style tips (avoid the em-dash!) or reassuring platitudes, but with a clear-eyed look at the specific qualities that make your writing irreplaceable.
Its answer draws on the deeper relationship between the writer, the reader, and the text—a three-way dynamic that AI simply cannot replicate.
Here are the five skills that will keep your writing valuable and singular:
- Voice emerges through your lived experience
- Metaphors come from the body
- Strategic rule-breaking
- Writing with something to lose
- Whimsy
Voice emerges from your lived experience
A writer's voice isn't just word choice or grammar. It's an emergent phenomenon, like the architecture of an ant colony or the fluctuations in the stock market.
Like these complex systems, writing style can be described with reference to its constituents (words or grammar).
But the effect only works in one direction. You could never look at the behavior of ants and predict their labyrinths, nor could you predict the macro patterns of the stock market by studying the buying and selling behavior of consumers.
Likewise, you can't understand writing style by examining a writer's language choices. That style is an emergent phenomenon, one that arises from the interaction of language with something that won't go beneath a microscope: lived experience.
The voice of AI is a thin soup, the blended average of every voice on the internet. When you churn thousands of singular voices into something homogeneous, you get slop.
Your lived experience—your specific history, your embarrassments, your obsessions—shapes your vision of the world. As you try to articulate this vision, you grasp for the language forms that seem most apt. And your choices cohere into what we call a writer's voice or style.
Metaphors come from the body
AI metaphors are uncanny.
They're formally correct. The use the right rhetorical structures. And of course their outputs are plausible.
They just seem a few degrees off.
AI always flubs metaphors because metaphors arise from the body, a physical frame of reference.
Two examples of metaphors that I find striking:
- I recall a metaphor from a middle eastern author who described the relationship between a certain mother and daughter as being like that of an orange to its navel.
- Do you know what garbage collectors in New York City call the maggots they find in the trash? Disco rice.
These metaphors are visceral.
And they're something that you'd only get from a flesh-and-blood human who has actually been somewhere, touched or smelled something, felt it in their bodies.
Break the Rules Properly
Great writers learn the rules in order to break them properly.
Take Shakespeare. Along with his plays he practiced the sonnet, which is pretty particular in terms of form. If we think of those formal requirements in rhyme and meter as rules, then part of Shakespeare's mastery of the genre comes not from his adherence to the rules but in his struggle against it.
Or take the final line of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (spoiler alert). invokes the image of being pursuit by a huntsman and his hounds, ends with "Fly them. Fly them." — not "flee." It's a grammatical error that carries tremendous power precisely because of its strangeness.
From one perspective, these are exercises in artistic license; from that of AI, they're mistakes that would be flagged and paved over with polished, predictable prose.
AI is teacher's pet: the four-eyed bug kid in front row who just crams and regurgitates what he knows the teacher wants to hear.
You might ask this kid to do your homework, provided you don't care about it. And you might just pass, provided your teacher isn't paying attention or is, you think, quite dumb.
School trained us to think that the success of our writing depends on whether any mistakes were made. But only a human with something to express can break the rules in a way that actually works.
Writing with Something to Lose
AI pays no price for its mediocrity.
When you catch it in a hallucination or banality, it responds "you're absolutely right!" and moves on. No embarrassment, no pain, no growth.
Real writing happens when something is on the line.
Jeff Bezos understood this when he banned PowerPoint at Amazon, requiring employees instead to write a five-page memo to be read by the entire team at the start of every meeting. That accountability produces depth and clarity.
Stakes happen when you expect someone you care about to read your text. If you don't care about the person on the other side of the paper, then there's no harm in using AI to churn out whatever text you're dealing with. But if you want to write well, then you need to bring that person into your field of concern.
Whimsy: the courage to follow a thread
Early AI models were genuinely surprising — strange, unpredictable, capable of sending your imagination somewhere unexpected.
Sadly, that quality has been engineered away. Modern models are optimized to produce the safest, most probable answer every time.
Human writers, by contrast, can approach writing as play: not following a pre-planned route, but pulling on a thread to see where it leads.
The psychoanalyst Martha Nussbaum once described her typewriter as a transitional object—not an instrument of anxiety, but a toy. Personally, I try to keep this image in mind with my writing. If I can approach my writing not as a job to be done but as a space of play, then not only do I enjoy the enterprise much more (which is important!) but I increase the odds that I might stumble upon something novel and useful.
So try to keep that frame in mind: think of your writing as an environment, a space of discovery, rather than a performance or a task.