Summary
In a world where AI can serve up answers faster than we can formulate the questions, it’s tempting to relegate writing to a bygone era, much like canning your own food or lighting fires with flint and steel. But I believe writing is one of the last essential survival skills in the age of automation.
Yes, I use AI often. Like a busy professional ordering pizza delivery or opting for a family dinner at the diner down the street that makes fried chicken that’s almost as good as mine, sometimes I just don’t have time to cook from scratch. AI is like my personal content sous-chef. It helps me brainstorm, organize, and yes, even write that “good enough” email or article on a deadline. But just as knowing how and what to cook matters, especially when the power’s out and the fridge is mostly bare, so does knowing how to write.
Writing as a Survival Skill
Reading What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom by Piers Gelly made me reflect on the deeper value of writing. His writes about his classroom experiment with AI and how his students’ AI-generated essays, with titles like “Navigating the Digital Age,” blurred together like so much flavorless word salad. AI, it turns out, is great at sounding like a writer, but not always at being one.
Gelly’s experiment echoed something I’ve long felt: writing is like hunting, foraging, preparing, and preserving your own food. It’s a process that builds independence and resilience. Writing teaches clarity of thought, discernment, and perhaps most importantly, what it means to have a voice. It brings that stream of thought that runs through our minds into the world. And sometimes even gives voice to the poetry of our souls. In the experiment, when his students realized that their AI-generated stories all sounded much the same, they felt something had been lost. That feeling matters because what was lost was them.
In a crisis, the people who can still think critically, express their own brilliant or even messy ideas, and tell stories that resonate deeply with others will be the ones who lead. AI simply cannot replace great human minds.
AI Is a Tool — But You Are the Maker
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once likened ChatGPT to “a calculator for words.” And I think he’s right, at least in part. Calculators didn’t make math obsolete, they just made it faster to get to the answer. Knowing how to use one, especially the more advanced types of calculators for graphing and advanced formulas, became an important skill. But no matter how useful they became, they didn’t teach why the answer matters or what to do when the numbers don’t add up.
The same is true for AI and writing. AI can help us sharpen our thinking and get to the “answer” faster. It can be a tutor, a coach, an editor, or even a prompt generator. But it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, replace the foundational skill of writing. If calculators gave us the answer to c² = a² + b² — 2ab*cosC, writing helps us ask, what does the answer mean? and why does it matter?
Gelly’s classroom became a laboratory for this truth. His students discovered that using AI as a crutch caused their own thinking muscles to atrophy when used to do the thinking for them. One student wrote, “I had forgotten how to write.” The idea that they had forgotten how to express their own ideas with the rest of the world gave me pause. I know people who struggle with the physical aspect of writing out their thoughts due to cognitive processing challenges, yet have found ways to express their thoughts through tools like voice-to-text. They make the effort because they know how critical it is to be able to bring their thoughts into the world. That’s what makes this idea for forgetting how to write so troubling, because what it really means is forgetting how to reflect, how to persuade, how to lead, and even how to entertain.
AI Writing vs. Human Voice: Why It’s Not the Same
There’s a haunting example in Gelly’s article where a student named Max shared a vivid, emotional snowball-fight story… only to reveal it had been generated by AI. The entire class was fooled by the story and writing. What really fooled them wasn’t actually the prose itself, but the archetypal romance narrative, the vague but evocative imagery, the plot twist of connection in the cold that we have been trained to connect with in media.
The story was “good enough” to pass the baseline humanity test, but good enough isn’t usually enough to change hearts or move markets. Real writing is messy, personal, surprising, and has a unique feeling of passion behind it. It’s how we express what makes us us. In business, politics, and education, it’s that human nuance that is still the real differentiator. The real treasure might just be the friends (or ideas, or truths) we discover along the way as we write as the article notes.
What We Risk When We Outsource Our Thinking
AI may make us faster, which I think is ultimately useful, but it shouldn’t and mustn’t make us flatter. If every idea we produce and share is shaped by the same models, trained on the same biased data, and follows the same writing rules, will we all not start sounding exactly the same?
When AI helps every student write a better essay, but every essay sounds like a press release from the same PR firm, what happens to original thought?
When marketers, CEOs, educators, journalists, and students all outsource their communication to the same generative systems, what happens to the signal in the noise?
We risk a world where sameness is the enemy of insight and success.
Final Thought: Write While You Still Can
I don’t say this as a purist, and most certainly not as a Luddite or someone clinging to the past. I say this as someone who uses AI every day, but who also knows how to build a fire, can vegetables from the garden for use in the winter, sew a new dress, clean a fish, and tell a story without a script.
Writing is truly a special craft. It’s also a mirror of our thoughts and what makes us human. And sometimes, when the power goes out, literally or metaphorically, it might be the one skill that keeps the lights on in our minds.
So by all means, use the calculator and AI. Eat at the restaurant or get delivery. But don’t forget how to cook or write.
