Some good points there, Rowen. And I pretty much agree. I mean, I don’t doubt that AI will be capable of producing works that traditionally have only been considered possible through human creativity. In fact, AI already does that. For instance, there are paintings created by AI that are pretty much indistinguishable from a Rembrandt and songs created by AI that sound like The Beatles.

But I think writing is a little bit different. I mean, if I read a recipe, an instruction manual, or a weather report, I don’t care who wrote it. It might have been an intern at a corporate blog, a committee, or an AI.

But if I read a personal essay or an opinion piece, then I want it to come from an individual. And if I found out that it was written by a collaboration of a dozen interns — or an AI — I’d probably stop being interested in it. Why? Because I would immediately know that the piece wasn’t representing the experiences and opinions of an individual.

As an analogy, take the Olympics for example. Machines can beat humans in pretty much all physical aspects: endurance, strength, speed, etc. But we still prefer watching competitions between humans than competitions between machines.

I think it’s the same with writing. Even if machines can perfectly emulate human writing, I think most audiences will still be more interested in reading the real thing.

Case in point, if I knew you where an AI, or that your comment had been written by a committee, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it, much less responding to it :)