AI is the era of writers!
Just a few years ago, we said that AI could take over procedural tasks, but it couldn’t possibly replace creative work.
Then we saw that AI can make in 10 minutes what writers take 10 days to produce. So we backtracked a bit and said “AI can replace mediocre writers, but NOT great writers.”
(We don’t even have the guts to call our writing “good,” let alone “great.”)
With the new AI models, we “good” writers are probably now seeing that AI is better than us in many ways. And maybe because of fear of being displaced (or our pride not wanting to accept inferiority vs. an AI chatbot), our favorite thing to say now is “AI can never replace people who use AI.”
It’s funny how we resolve this cognitive dissonance.
But here's a mindset shift for us, writers:
Writers are NOT dead
On the contrary, this is the era of writers!
The previous era was the era of coders.
It used to be only through code that you could communicate with digital systems to be able to create stuff.
Now, if you have an idea, you can materialize it digitally through the power of your words.
We're approaching the point where if you want to create a task management app, for example, you no longer need to write code. What you need to write are good descriptions and commands in the form of normal language.
The accuracy of your output (how closely it matches your vision) depends on the quality of your prompts.
The struggle that people usually experience when prompting AI is that, in their head, they have this idea they want to create or this thing they want the AI to do, but they don't have the words to express the idea. They can't describe well what they want to happen.
And this power to translate thoughts into words is the strength of writers!
So don’t worry, fellow writers. We’re not (yet) irrelevant.
In fact, this is our golden age. We’re most well-placed to thrive in this new uncertain period if we lean on to our skills—language clarity, precision, and creativity—things we’ve been low-key perfecting forever.
Now, here’s one practice that will improve your AI prompting skills.