I’ve been playing around with AI language models over the last month and the results are astounding. Within seconds, chatGPT can chat with me just as a human would, generate a 5000 word essay on any topic imaginable, and create reasonable short stories with minimal prompting. It is fair to assume that soon enough, the quality of chatGPT stories and essays will rival those of the best writers on earth.

The question is then, why even write? If you can give this model a few prompts and a writing style, it could write your blog or your book in a fraction of the time with amazing precision. The time saved could lead to more productive tasks that AI cannot (yet) automate, or for leisure. Writing may soon enough find itself relegated to something akin to cooking over a fire or writing letters: an anachronism.

Or perhaps writing will be something that one does not for the result, but for the process. Those who write as a means to an end might happily never write again. But for those who find pleasure in the clarity of mind that only writing allows, in the satisfaction of creating and editing your own words, in the effort of refining your piece into something worth sharing, as the struggle is the reward, this art will still remain.