Here’s my hot take: I don’t miss pre-AI writing. And I think a lot of people claiming they do are actually mourning something else entirely.
Before you close this tab, hear me out. I’ve been watching the discourse around AI and writing intensify over the past year, and there’s a pattern I can’t ignore. When copywriters talk about being “forced to use AI until the day I was laid off” (as reported by Blood in the Machine), or when creative writing professors describe what AI is doing to their students (per a recent New York Times opinion piece), they’re describing real pain. Real loss. But I’m not convinced the villain of this story is actually the technology.
What We’re Really Missing
When people say they miss pre-AI writing, what they often mean is: they miss having time to think. They miss editors who cared about craft. They miss being paid fairly for their work. They miss readers who engaged deeply with what they wrote.
AI didn’t kill those things. They were already dying.
The content mills that now use AI to churn out SEO fodder? They were already churning out barely-human SEO fodder before. The students who use ChatGPT to write their essays? They were already buying papers from essay mills or copying from SparkNotes. The companies laying off writers to “save costs”? They were already treating writing as a commodity, not a craft.
AI just made the existing problems more visible and more efficient. It’s like finally getting glasses and realizing the world was blurry all along.
The Uncomfortable Truth About “Good Old Days”
I talk to a lot of writers, and many of them romanticize the pre-AI era. But when we dig deeper, the stories get more complicated. That golden age of writing they remember? It was often precarious freelancing, endless revisions for clients who didn’t respect their expertise, or grinding out content for pennies per word.
The difference now is that AI has made it impossible to ignore how little many organizations valued writing in the first place. When a company can replace you with a chatbot and barely notice the quality difference, that says more about how they viewed your work than it does about AI’s capabilities.
What AI Actually Reveals
AI writing tools are like a mirror held up to our content ecosystem, and we don’t like what we see. We’ve built an internet that rewards volume over value, speed over substance, and optimization over originality. AI is just really, really good at playing that game.
The creative writing students using AI to complete assignments? They’re responding rationally to an educational system that often treats writing as a hoop to jump through rather than a skill to develop. The copywriters being replaced by AI? They were already working in environments that measured success by output metrics, not by whether the writing actually connected with humans.
A Different Way Forward
Instead of mourning the pre-AI era, maybe we should be asking: what kind of writing do we actually want to preserve and protect? What makes writing valuable in the first place?
Because here’s what I’ve noticed: the writers who are thriving right now aren’t the ones trying to compete with AI on its terms. They’re the ones doing what AI can’t—bringing genuine expertise, unique perspectives, and authentic voice to their work. They’re writing things that matter to specific humans, not optimizing for algorithms.
The pre-AI era wasn’t better because AI didn’t exist. It was better when it was better because we valued different things. We can choose to value those things again.
Moving Beyond Nostalgia
I’m not saying AI hasn’t caused real harm. Those copywriters who lost their jobs? That’s a genuine crisis that deserves serious attention and solutions. The students who are losing the chance to develop their writing skills? That’s a problem we need to address in how we teach and evaluate writing.
But the solution isn’t to wish AI away or pine for a past that was already broken. It’s to build something better. To create systems that value human creativity and expertise. To pay writers fairly for work that matters. To teach writing as a way of thinking, not just a way of producing content.
The pre-AI writing era had its own problems. AI just made them impossible to ignore. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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