Illustration by Dola Sun
Some days, I sit in my home office and try to come up with a list of things AI can’t do yet. It feels like the list is getting shorter and shorter.
It can already do almost everything I do as a writer: generate story ideas, write headlines, organize notes, and edit. It can write articles, ads, proposals, e-mails, and entire web pages. It can even write novels. Sure, they’re weird, but they’re out there. It could probably write this column. (Not to worry, you’re stuck with human me for now.)
At first, generative AI—that’s the kind of artificial intelligence that takes what you’ve fed it and generates something back—seemed like a bunch of people talking, and I assumed I didn’t have to pay very much attention. The writing it produced didn’t sound human. It always felt artificial, like cherry flavoring.
But over the past few years, AI learned how to be an actual cherry. If it used to produce usable writing two out of 10 times, now it’s usable writing eight out of 10 times. Which is why I feel like it’s a ticking clock, counting down on my career and all the tasks and projects people will no longer need to hire me, a freelance writer, to do.
I use AI tools myself, and then I wonder if I’m working myself out of a job by doing that. Like, when I’m struggling to explain a strained hamstring after having already written seven other articles about orthopedic injuries, it helps to see how ChatGPT or Claude describe the condition. I view AI as a tool for providing suggestions, not for producing finished products to turn in. But it’s naïve to think that’s how most people view it.
I keep reading think pieces about AI, talking about what it means for writing and publishing. One piece discussed the fear some writers now have of sounding too much like AI and how writers will start trying to distinguish themselves from AI in ways that make their writing worse. There’s also a constantly changing legal landscape, with new lawsuits daily about copyright and what large language models (LLMs) can use to train themselves.
I can’t keep track of what’s happening. Does someone owe me money for using my books to train ChatGPT? Send the check, please!
In the meantime, I was assigned to write a piece for a think tank client about the AI race between the U.S. and China and how the next 10 years will basically decide the fate of the world and how AI is used. (Fun fact: I used AI to help research and organize the story.) In a nutshell, the only way the U.S. and our democratic values (I mean, it’s debatable how intact those values are right now…) can win is if we relax regulations (goodbye, planet!) and make it easier to build enough data centers here to handle AI’s significant power requirements. Otherwise, China basically owns the future. We need to win, except what does winning mean?
My first career reinvention was after the recession of 2008. I’d spent the early 2000s acquiring bylines in national magazines. I wrote pieces about fitness for health magazines and produced stories about homes and backyards for Better Homes and Gardens and all their specialty publications.
There was so much money flowing! I was literally living my dream. And then, in the space of a year, most of my editors were laid off and the magazines I’d relied on for income started shrinking their issues or shutting down altogether.
I hired a business coach and worked to re-focus my business where the money was: helping companies with things like web copywriting, speechwriting, video scripts, and blog posts. Things hummed along for several years, until I grew tired of everything feeling so piecemeal. I needed a specialty area where I could claim expertise and charge more. I found that hospitals and health systems wanted help reimagining their web content to fit the consumer-friendly platforms everyone was moving toward.
Around 2016, I started offering content strategy and invested in learning best practices around healthcare web writing and user experience (UX). This type of web writing is a specific skill set, quite different from writing meandering columns about midlife in Cincinnati. You have to distill everything down to the simplest explanation in a factual but empathetic tone. It involves constantly translating medical jargon while optimizing for SEO and talking about why this hospital or that practice is the best place to go in ways that are easy to understand.
I’m really good at it. You know who else is? If you’ve read an AI Overview of a health condition—and at this point, everyone who uses Google to search for anything health-related has—you already know the answer. Basically, what I’ve spent the last decade helping hospitals do now happens instantly in one search.
In a way, the rise of AI is just one more rung on the ladder of human progress, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet itself. I can’t help but think about a story my mom tells about her grandfather, Jesse Cook, who was born in 1875 and boarded the horses that pulled beer carts.
It seems like a very specific business, and my mom isn’t sure if he was also a blacksmith or had some other trade. She just knows he had a stable in what we now call the West End, and at some point after my mom’s father, Edwin, was born in 1901, Jesse realized the horse and cart business was dying because of automobiles.
He set about converting his space to a garage, and teenage Edwin—who dropped out of high school shortly before graduation—helped him. I think about these two, father and son, seeing the future and knowing they had to adapt. A true tale of Industrial Revolution reinvention. It should inspire me!
The problem, my mom’s story goes, was that they didn’t properly calculate the height of new-fangled delivery trucks to fit in their renovated garage. I don’t know if they didn’t measure properly or if the trucks didn’t exist yet and they didn’t understand their actual size. Either way, they’d already built out the space and it was too late to change. The horses were gone, the trucks wouldn’t fit, and the plan stalled. My mom isn’t certain, but she thinks they rented out the space. Eventually, the city bought the land.
This story of failed reinvention has left me trying to download some kind of message from the Cook boys. Some piece of advice or insight that might help me as I consider my next steps. Maybe it’s just, Granddaughter, remember to measure twice and cut once. But as I crane my neck, listening to their whispers, I think the message is actually about community.
I imagine that Jesse and Edwin’s community was hyperlocal, relegated to a few blocks. Family, friends, and neighbors was the circle for most people back then.
Sure, newspapers told you what was happening in the world, but information was filtered, centralized, and distributed. It didn’t move with the speed of people.
I wonder who they shared their plans with? Did they get feedback? Did it fail because they didn’t talk to the right people? Because they didn’t have access to the stories of stable-to-garage successes in Detroit and New Jersey and Iowa and Atlanta? Could the right virtual roundtable on transforming your horse cart business into a truck business have made the difference?
I’m thinking about this because, for me, community with other writers is the only way to navigate this situation. Every day, I read posts on social media and professional networking platforms where writers talk about how they’re adapting to AI. How they’re pivoting or rethinking. Sometimes they’re just ranting, but in those rants are seeds of ideas. There’s a sense that we’re in it together. That we are connection machines and word people who will always find the way.
Yes, we’ll have to adapt, because humans have never not had to adapt. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’ve created a career that isn’t just full of words. It’s also full of people. And I’m counting on that making the difference.
Also this: When my great-grandfather sold his garage and land, it created a small inheritance the grandchildren ultimately received in the early 1950s. It’s why my parents had a down payment in 1958 for a modest ranch house on Birchwood Drive. That was the house where I became a writer, “publishing” my first magazine at 8, appropriately called On Birchwood Drive. It’s the same house where my mom, now 90, still lives.
It all turned into something else, which is what always happens.
AI has learned how to write good sentences. But LLMs haven’t yet mastered twists of fate, which means my career has life in it yet. I will, however, make sure to keep measuring the ceiling.
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