On writing ability and the people who’ve suddenly discovered they have it

Something happened on LinkedIn recently and I need to talk about it before I pull a muscle from the sustained effort of keeping my mouth shut.

People have discovered that AI can produce competent-looking prose, and a meaningful number of those people have drawn the conclusion that this makes them a writer.

Not “AI helped me write this,” which would be accurate and fine.

Not “I used a tool to help articulate my thoughts,” which would be reasonable and honest.

But a full, confident, apparently sincere belief that the ability to prompt a language model constitutes writing ability.

Some of these people are now saying this out loud. On the internet. Where people can actually see them.

What AI actually did

AI raised the floor. This is genuinely impressive and I don’t want to undersell it.

The floor used to be quite low.

People who struggled to structure an argument or write a coherent paragraph now have access to something that will do it for them.

That’s legitimately useful and I mean that without sarcasm, which makes a change for me.

But raising the floor is not the same as raising the ceiling.

And the number of people currently standing on the new floor, gazing upward at the ceiling, and concluding that the gap has closed is staggering.

Average is not expert.

Competent is not skilled.

“Grammatically passable on a good day” is not the same as knowing why a sentence lands, why a reader stays, why one word in a particular position does something that twelve words around it can’t.

What writing actually is

Writing is judgment. It’s the decision about what to include and, more importantly, what to cut.

It’s knowing when a short sentence hits harder than a long one.

It’s the instinct that tells you this paragraph is doing nothing and needs to go, even though it took twenty minutes to write and you’re quite fond of it.

It’s reading your own work as a reader and knowing, with uncomfortable accuracy, where you lost them.

AI doesn’t have judgment. It has patterns.

It produces the most statistically reasonable version of what a piece of writing in this genre tends to look like, which is why AI content is so consistently adequate and so rarely outstanding.

It knows what writing usually does. It doesn’t know what this piece of writing, for this reader, right now, should do.

That knowledge lives in the writer. A real one.

The tell

You can usually spot the difference between someone using AI as a tool and someone who has mistaken AI output for personal ability.

The first group produces work that’s clean, purposeful and occasionally excellent.

The second group produces work that’s decent at a glance and slightly hollow on closer inspection, like a film set with a very convincing facade and nothing behind it.

The second group also tends to be the more confident of the two, which is its own kind of poetry.

I’ve been a professional writer for twenty years and use AI regularly as part of my process.

It has made some of my work faster and none of my work unnecessary, because the parts that matter, the judgment, the instinct, the knowing, those are still entirely on me.

A tool that helps you write doesn’t make you a writer in the same way a hammer that helps you hit nails doesn’t make you a carpenter.

And a LinkedIn post about your own exceptional writing ability that contains an embarrassing number of grammar errors does not, I’m afraid, make the case you think it makes.

No one specific in mind. Absolutely not.