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We’ll soon find out what is truly special about human writing
by James O’Sullivan, lecturer in digital humanities
AI can take over many writing tasks. But there is something irreplaceable about a text with an author standing behind it
In the mid-15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg began experimenting with movable type, the scribes who had spent their lives copying manuscripts by hand could not have known they were witnessing the end of their profession. The texts maintained a deceptive continuity, circulating the same liturgies and legal canons that had always been reproduced, possibly camouflaging the massive shift that was occurring in the mechanics of cultural production. Whether the scribes saw beyond the unchanged content to the upheaval in its origin, who can say; but we, looking back, can see what they couldn’t: that the revolution was invisible in the output – it lived entirely in the means.
Nearly six centuries later, we find ourselves at another such juncture. Large language models (LLMs) can produce prose that is, by most functional measures, indistinguishable from competent human writing. The question that might eventually have come to haunt the scribes of the 15th century – what happens to us when machines can do what we do? – has resurfaced with some vengeance. What happens to writing when the production of prose no longer guarantees the presence of a mind behind what is written?
The answer, if there is one, will possibly be found in what writing has always asked of the person who does it: a willingness to stand behind words, to mean them, and to accept the consequences of having claimed to have written them.
Writing has always been understood as a trace of human thought; when we read, we assume that behind the words lies a consciousness that selected them, a mind that deliberated over their arrangement, a person who stands accountable for their claims. This assumption is so deeply embedded in literate culture that we rarely articulate it – it is simply what writing is. Generative AI disrupts this assumption, producing text that has no author in any meaningful sense, no one who meant it, no one who can be held responsible for it, and no one who was changed by the act of composing it. The words exist, but the covenant that once connected writer to reader has been severed.
The professional consequences of this severance are already visible. Journalism, criticism and the broader ecosystem of writing-for-pay have already been contracting for two decades, squeezed by the ruthless logic of attention economics. Generative AI arrives at this moment as an accelerant, further breaking down the transaction that once sustained writing as labour – time exchanged for text exchanged for money.
Writing has weathered previous technological upheavals but, while the history is instructive, it is not reassuring in the way some of us might hope because the threat this time is of a different kind.
When a reader encounters a text, they can no longer take for granted that a human being composed it
The printing press didn’t destroy writing, but democratised its distribution, making books cheap and abundant, creating new publics and new genres. The intimate relationship between scribe and text, the sense that each manuscript was a unique artefact bearing the marks of its maker, gave way to something less personal.
Up until the late 19th century, handwriting was the dominant form of creative literary expression. This changed in the 1870s, when the first commercial typewriters came to market. Where handwriting had long been understood as an extension of the body, a kind of graphological fingerprint, the typed page was uniform, mechanical, depersonalised. Writers like Henry James and Mark Twain, who were among the first to compose on typewriters, reported that the machine changed not just how their prose looked but how it felt to produce it. The clatter of keys imposed a different rhythm and a different relationship to revision. Something was lost; something else was gained.
The word processor, and later the networked computer, accelerated this logic. The ease of editing made prose more fluid, more provisional, and the internet dissolved the gatekeeping structures that had once controlled publication. Anyone could write and publish, resulting in an explosion of text. Blogs, comments, social media posts, emails – by the early 2000s, written language was being produced on a scale unprecedented in human history. Writing became ubiquitous, ordinary and, in many of its manifestations, sadly disposable.
Each of these transitions was accompanied by predictions of catastrophe and claims of liberation, and each changed writing without eliminating it. The lesson that triumphalists like to draw is one of resilience, that writing adapts and survives, and finds new purposes as old ones become obsolete.
But generative AI represents a rupture of a different order, because, where previous technologies changed how writing was produced or distributed, LLMs change what writing is, or, more precisely, what it can be assumed to be. When a reader encounters a text, they can no longer take for granted that a human being composed it – as long as LLMs exist, there will always be doubt as to whether a piece was entirely written by a human.
The implications ramify in unexpected directions. Academic writing, which depends on the assumption that authors have actually done the thinking their papers represent, faces a crisis of verification. Legal documents, contracts and medical records, genres where accountability is essential, become newly uncertain. Even personal correspondence, the most intimate form of writing, is shadowed by doubt. Did my friend write this message, or did they prompt a machine to write it for them?
This contamination of doubt has spread quickly, most notably online, as the internet, once imagined as a vast library of human knowledge, is filling with synthetic text. Search results, product reviews, news aggregators and social media feeds are increasingly populated by machine-generated content designed to capture attention or manipulate behaviour. It’s harder than ever to identify trustworthy content.
But the question of writing’s future cannot be answered by cataloguing losses. If writing is to survive as something more than a nostalgic practice, it must find a new basis for its value. When it can now be almost entirely simulated by machines, what remains?
The answer is probably not in the properties of text but in the nature of the relationship that text enables. Human writing is only partly concerned with the production of words; more essential to its essence is the assumption of responsibility for those words. When a person writes, they are committing themselves, something a language model cannot do. They are saying, in effect: ‘I stand behind this; I am willing to be held accountable for the attempt.’
This dimension of writing, what we might consider its testimonial function, has always been present, but it has been obscured by more practical concerns. We valued writing for its usefulness, like how it conveyed information, made arguments, entertained, and persuaded. These functions can now be performed by machines with considerable competence, but what machines cannot do is bear witness or stake a claim grounded in lived experience and personal judgment. Large language models cannot enter into the implicit contract that says: here is a mind engaging with a problem, here is a person who cares about getting it right.
Writing that matters will be writing that can still function as evidence of human deliberation
In an environment saturated with synthetic text, this testimonial function becomes newly precious. Readers may stop asking whether a piece is well written and begin asking who wrote it, under what conditions, and why they should be trusted. Evidence of human deliberation will not take a single form, but may reside in the traces of process that machines tend to smooth away: in the presence of hesitation, idiosyncrasy, revision and judgment made under constraint. Imperfection itself might acquire a different valence. Even forms long thought obsolete, such as handwritten notes or materially specific modes of composition, may regain appeal as visible reminders that a particular person was present at the act of writing. Essentially, the criteria for valuable writing might shift to provenance, from fluency to accountability, and writing that matters will be writing that can still function as evidence of human deliberation – work that cannot be faked because it carries the marks of genuine thought.
The transition will be messy, and many forms of writing will not survive it. But writing that depends on trust and the willingness to be present to a reader – work grounded in first-hand experience or attributed to an author with a hard-earned reputation – well, this may find itself valued in ways it has not been for decades.
The future of writing may look less like the frictionless content economy of the recent past and more like the older, slower forms of correspondence and publication that preceded it. Letters, essays, criticism, investigative journalism, genres where the identity of the writer matters, where readers seek out particular voices and measure what is written against what has been written before. To hold a writer to account, in this sense, is not simply to agree or disagree, but to respond, to challenge, to cite, to remember and, when necessary, to withdraw trust. Such forms cannot be automated without losing what makes them valuable, because they are, by their nature, resistant to scale. We might think of this moment, nearly six decades since the theorist and critic Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, as a moment of revival, as the rebirth of the author.
Whether such writing can sustain itself economically is another question. Writers have always struggled to make a living, and the coming years will intensify that struggle. But the deeper question is not whether writers will be paid – though that is, of course, vitally important – but whether writing will continue to mean something, and whether the act of composing prose will still carry the weight of human intention.
Real, human writing may become rarer and more deliberate – more visibly marked by the presence of the person behind it. It might slow down, retreat from the platforms that have commodified it, and find refuge in spaces where trust can still be built between writer and reader. It may take place in settings and forms that reward patience rather than immediacy, where words are written with an awareness of who will read them and remembered for having been read. It might become more like it was before the age of mass media – a practice defined by the quality of attention it embodies, rather than volume or reach, gathering value through continuity and recognition rather than constant circulation or amplification.
The scribes of Gutenberg’s time could not have imagined the world that movable type would create, and we are no better positioned to foresee what lies ahead. But if writing survives this rupture, it will be because it offers something that no machine can replicate: the irreducible fact of a human being, thinking in public, willing to be known by their words.
James O’Sullivan is a senior lecturer in digital humanities at University College Cork, Ireland. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Noema, The Irish Times, Irish Examiner and the LA Review of Books, among other publications. He also shares his writing on Substack.
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
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