AI is making us all writers

Will anyone write (or read) in five years?

If you listen to the breathless coverage of where AI is taking us, the answer might seem to be "no." Why would we bother communicating with each other when the robots can do it for us? After all, writing is hard. Why not just spare ourselves all the effort?

But that's simply not what's happening. Looked at properly, the AI era is turning everyone into a writer. The major AI tools are all prompt-based, which is a fancy way of saying "they do what you write." Your ability to capture what you see in your mind's eye using words is going to be one of the key skills of the era, and "capturing what you see in your mind's eye" — well friend, that's just another way of saying "writing."

Writing, as a human practice, isn't going away. At Medium, we love writing. We've never had more writers publishing stories on Medium than we have in 2026. We can see a very bright future for writing, and we want to do everything we can to turn that vision into a reality.

So for this week, let's dive into a few recent Medium pieces looking at how writing and AI are intersecting.

"The idea that where you sit and when can affect your state of mind might sound like magic at first. But it's not, it's science. Any writer can use the research-backed power of ritual to make their own writing practice more pleasant and productive."

—Nir Eyal, How to Use the Magic (and Science) of Rituals to Improve Your Writing

The essential human ability to judge quality

Educators are on the front line of reckoning with how writing is changing right now. Tasked with teaching students to think critically and write effectively, they're now faced with AI-polished (or fully AI-generated) writing that doesn't reflect a student's actual understanding. Many schools are now starting to focus on the artifacts of learning that go into student essays — like drafts, notes, revisions — to assess the process rather than just the output.

While this makes a certain amount of sense, educator Aaron Schultz writes in Schools Are Solving the Wrong AI Problem, it's by no means foolproof. "The trap begins when we assume that documenting the process is the same as demonstrating learning, when we take evidence that should inform teaching and turn it into evidence that certifies achievement," Shultz says.

Assessing the process is a category error — students see through it right away, and turn those notes and drafts into a performance of thinking. The solution? Asking students follow-up questions that require them to use their judgement.

Judgement, some scholars argue, has become the essential human capability in the AI era. Put aside the process and even the output, and ask students the questions only they can answer for themselves: Is it good, and if so, why?

"Some mornings I complain about my life for three pages. Some mornings I untangle a plot problem or write a shopping list in verse. Sometimes I write about having nothing to say. More often than not, halfway through, something interesting emerges."

—Jack McNamara, As A Writer, It Took Me 36 Years To Start Doing Morning Pages

When AI does (and doesn't) change thinking

You've maybe heard about this study: An MIT Media Lab researcher last year looked at student brain activity while using ChatGPT compared to students using Google search or nothing, and found the AI users "underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." Definitely concerning! The study was widely covered, and helped spawn the notion AI makes us dumber.

But there's nuance to the study that the coverage last year largely missed, writes data scientist Abi Kambanis. First, the negative impact showed up in immediate cognitive impact (ie, in the moment), but wasn't structural or long term. We don't, as yet, know what kind of effect AI tools will or won't have on the brain long-term.

More importantly, the main effect the study looked at, cognitive debt, showed up differently in different AI usage contexts. Yes, when students were using AI to generate answers and uncritically copying and pasting them, cognitive debt showed up in the results. But structured AI usage — where AI is used to respond to the work already written — had much lower impact on cognitive debt.

"What distinguishes these conditions is not the presence or absence of AI, but the location of human agency within the workflow," Kambanis writes. "When users retain responsibility for planning, evaluation, and synthesis, AI can function as a cognitively productive scaffold. When these responsibilities are also offloaded, engagement declines."

Or, she writes, "In this mode, cognitive effort does not disappear. It relocates."

Be an explorer, not a tourist, when it comes to writing

It's worth keeping in mind in the midst of this discussion of AI and writing that, sad but true, there was slop writing even before ChatGPT came along. I know, it's hard to hear, but humans have been making slop as long as writing's been around.

And the internet, for good and bad, has been home to a lot of it. Not bad writing per se, but familiar, boring writing, "You open an essay online. The writing is competent. The sentences are clear. The advice is sensible. And yet, halfway through, a quiet feeling appears: Wait. Haven't I read this before?," writes David B. Clear in Why Most Online Writing Feels Like Something You've Already Read.

Clear has a novel metaphor for this: Tourism. The tourist writer shows up at the same topics like a tourist snapping a picture of the Eiffel Tower. There's no ill-intent, and everyone's entitled to their tourist pictures (please don't go look at my Instagram feed), but the sameness leaches out anything meaningful for the reader to hold on.

The naturalist writer, on the other hand, takes a different approach. They're not collecting snapshots, they're exploring with the goal of understanding something deeply. At its core, good writing is about discovery. "The tourist covers ground and recreates postcards," Clear writers. "The naturalist explores territory and makes discoveries."

He doesn't say it, but I will: Relying on AI to generate your writing makes you a tourist no matter what — a tourist to your writing and a tourist to your own mind. Don't be a tourist.

A final thought

We just absolutely loved this recent story about the power of small repairs, Minor Mendings, by Karla L. Miller. If you want, you could probably even apply it to writing, but hey, I'm not the boss of you!

A key quote:

"If you're stuck in a space where nothing is urgent but everything needs doing, and the consequences of delay are yours alone to bear, then Repair of Small Objects may be just the spell that frees you from your doom spiral."

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb and Carly Rose Gillis

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