Scribblings (blog)
Modern Scribe
The Author and the Algorithm
October 6, 2025
[This blog post was curated (conceived, guided, reviewed, edited, etc.) by me as part of ongoing research in the rapid change in the world professional writing. Note that the emphasis in the post is on “creative writing” such as novels, screenwriting, poetry, and similar but does not directly address nonfiction. Still, all of the points mentioned apply to nonfiction works as well. The bulk of the writing was prompted by me using Gemini 2.5 and NotebookLM and was part of the research into the arrival of the “Synthetic Writer.” —AG]
The classic image of the solitary writer, painstakingly working over a blank page, is getting a major 21st-century update. Today, a new figure—the ”synthetic writer”—is emerging in the creative world, representing novelists, screenwriters, and poets who partner with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring their stories to life. This shift is not about machines replacing artists; it is about a profound new kind of collaboration. Rather than just using a computer for simple tasks, these writers are engaging with AI as a dynamic assistant within the creative process itself. The act of writing is quickly transforming into a fluid dialogue between a powerful language tool and a human creator.
Why Writers Are Embracing the AI Assistant
For many who have integrated AI, the technology offers practical solutions to common creative struggles. It is seen as a way to enhance the writing process, boost productivity, and even help authors rediscover the joy of their craft.
One of the most common benefits is AI's ability to help writers beat the blank page. By brainstorming plot points, suggesting character names, or generating a few starting sentences, AI transforms writer's block from a daunting barrier into a manageable challenge, allowing the writer to maintain creative momentum.
AI also provides a significant boost to productivity. This acceleration means professional authors can meet demanding publishing schedules, while hobbyists have more time to complete projects. Furthermore, for writers dealing with health issues like carpal tunnel, AI can serve as an essential accessibility tool, enabling them to continue writing when they might otherwise be unable to.
Finally, AI helps writers focus on the fun. Every writer has parts they struggle with, such as plotting or dialogue. By strategically reducing friction in these challenging areas, AI allows the human author to dedicate more energy to the parts of writing they find most fulfilling. Working with AI on difficult sections can even serve as a learning opportunity, helping writers develop their skills by example.
Finding Your Groove: The Writer-AI Partnership
Writers who use AI typically view it as more than just a simple tool. Instead, they develop fluid relationships with the technology, often describing these partnerships using familiar human metaphors. These relationships fall along a spectrum of creative control:
The Assistant or Actor: In this tight-control model, the human writer is the “boss” or “director.” The AI is given specific, task-oriented commands—acting as a “supportive yes man”—to execute the writer's vision without inventing its own ideas.
The Collaborator or Editor: Here, the writer is more open to the AI’s creative input, treating it like a partner that can “bring its own things to the table.” The AI might help draft scenes in the author's voice or act as an editor, offering suggestions and feedback.
The Muse: In this role, the AI’s main job is to provide inspiration. It is used to generate unexpected ideas, character secrets, or plot twists that spark the writer’s own imagination.
Crucially, in all these models, writers maintain a strong sense of ownership and control. They intentionally set boundaries to preserve their authentic voice and ensure the final work is a product of their own artistic vision and decisions.
The New Workflow: From Prompt to Polish
Integrating AI transforms the traditional, linear path of writing into a dynamic, iterative loop of prompting, generating, evaluating, and refining.
During Brainstorming and Outlining, AI can instantly suggest diverse angles on a topic, produce a detailed outline, or create character backstories, helping the writer move swiftly toward drafting with a clear structure. In the Drafting and Expansion phase, AI can function as “autocomplete on steroids,” generating hundreds of words when the writer is stuck or expanding a brief scene with descriptive detail. For Editing and Polishing, AI goes beyond simple grammar checks to suggest ways to rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and improve clarity.
However, this is not automation. This workflow remains an effortful process involving many decision points, which keeps the writer firmly in control.
The Irreplaceable Human: What AI Can’t Write
Despite the power of these tools, AI has significant limitations. At its core, AI is merely a text-prediction engine that generates statistically likely sequences of words based on the vast amount of data it was trained on. It lacks consciousness, genuine understanding, or lived experience.
This is precisely where the human writer remains irreplaceable. AI cannot replicate:
Emotional Depth and Lived Experience: AI can only fake emotion; it cannot draw from real memories, personal history, or feelings to give a story heart.
A Unique Voice and Style: AI-generated text tends to default to a straightforward, generic style, lacking the personal touch and unique perspective that differentiates a human author’s work.
True Creativity and Vision: AI imitates; it does not create in the human sense. The writer’s essential role is to provide the critical judgment, strategic intent, and overarching vision that shapes the raw output into a meaningful work of art.
The rise of AI does not herald the death of the author; rather, it signals the evolution of the author's toolkit. Ultimately, the technology can generate words, but the writer provides the vision, the voice, and the soul. The story, and how it’s told, remains firmly in human hands.
5 Questions for the Reader to Consider
This blog describes the relationship between a writer and AI existing on a spectrum, from the tight control of the Assistant to the inspirational ideas of the Muse. If you were to start using AI in your own creative projects, which of these partnership roles do you think you would adopt, and why?
AI is often used to overcome writer's block by providing starting points and momentum. Do you believe that relying on AI for initial ideas might eventually diminish a writer's capacity to generate original starting points on their own?
The human writer is irreplaceable because AI lacks genuine emotional depth and lived experience. In what specific genre or type of story (e.g., memoir, historical fiction, contemporary romance) do you think the absence of genuine lived experience would be most immediately felt by the reader?
The new creative workflow involves an iterative loop of generating and refining. If you planned to use AI for drafting, what specific boundaries would you establish to ensure that you maintain the strong sense of ownership and creative control that the source suggests is necessary?
The sources mention a growing ecosystem of specialized tools like Sudowrite and general chatbots like ChatGPT. As these tools become more sophisticated, how important will it be for the modern writer to understand the technical limitations of AI—namely, that it is only a text-prediction engine that imitates, rather than a conscious creator?
Six Unexpected Ways AI Is Radically Restructuring the Writing World
I asked NotebookLM (an A.I. program from Google) if artificial intelligence is having an impact on writers and publishers. What follows is its answer. I served as originator of the initial prompt, reviewer, and curator. AG
For the past few years, a single, anxious question has dominated conversations about writing: will AI take our jobs? The narrative is compelling and simple—a wave of powerful new technology is poised to make human writers obsolete, replacing nuanced prose with automated text and creative storytelling with algorithmic efficiency. It’s a story of replacement, obsolescence, and the inevitable march of progress.
But the reality on the ground is far more complex, counter-intuitive, and ultimately, more interesting. The story isn’t a simple battle of human versus machine. Instead, artificial intelligence is acting as a disruptive force that is fundamentally restructuring the profession—eliminating some roles, elevating others, and creating entirely new challenges that go far beyond the question of who types the words.
Drawing on recent economic data, firsthand accounts from freelance writers, and legal analysis from industry watchdogs, a more nuanced picture emerges. Here are six surprising truths about the real ways AI is reshaping the written word, and it’s probably not what you think.
1. The Best Writers Are Surprisingly the Most Exposed
Conventional wisdom suggests that in any technological disruption, the most skilled and experienced workers are the most insulated. Past innovations, from the personal computer to the internet, tended to complement high-skill labor, widening the gap between top performers and the rest. But with generative AI, the opposite appears to be happening.
A recent study from the Brookings Institution analyzing the freelance platform Upwork found that writers and other creatives in occupations exposed to generative AI experienced a 2% decline in contracts and a 5% drop in earnings. But the most revealing discovery was a "somewhat surprising pattern": the most experienced freelancers, those with stronger past performance and higher prices, were the most affected.
The researchers' explanation is that generative AI is "leveling the playing field." It allows less experienced freelancers to produce work that approximates top-tier quality, making clients less willing to pay a premium for elite human talent. Instead of augmenting the best, AI is closing the quality gap from the bottom up, a significant departure from how past technologies have impacted the labor market. This compression from the top is only half the story; at the very bottom of the market, an even more dramatic culling is underway.
2. Low-End Writing Is Disappearing, But High-End Work Is Thriving
While top-tier freelancers are feeling the squeeze from new competition, the absolute bottom of the market is simply vanishing. According to freelance writers sharing their experiences on Reddit, low-tier writing jobs—the kind of content mill work that pays "pennies" for SEO filler—are "dead." One writer, Irichcrusader, explained that this type of work used to be the primary entry point for new writers to "get their feet wet," but those opportunities have largely been automated away.
In its place, a different kind of demand is emerging. The same writers report getting "better quality gigs" that require skills AI currently lacks: original research, deep expertise, and personal experience. As clients and publications scramble to differentiate their content from the flood of generic AI text, they are pushing for more in-depth articles with a "personal twist." This pressure is forcing human writers to "up the ante," focusing on unique perspectives and expert analysis that a machine cannot replicate.
As editorial consultant Anne Hervé summarized the new value proposition of human skill perfectly:
"We want AI to do the washing up for us, not to paint the Sistine Chapel. We need humans and human skills for nuance, and there’s a huge amount that goes into the developmental editing process that simply can’t be replicated with AI. And I don’t think you’d want to anyway, as you risk losing some of the magic."
But as writers adapt to a new market that values human expertise, a much larger battle is being fought over the raw materials that fuel the AI content they now compete with.
3. The Biggest Fight Isn't About Replacement—It's About Rights
While public debate centers on job replacement, the most intense and consequential conflict is being fought over the very legality of how large language models are built. The core issue is not whether AI can write, but whether it was legally trained to do so.
The Authors Guild, which is suing companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, argues that generative AI poses a "serious threat" to the writing profession precisely because the technologies are "built illegally on vast amounts of copyrighted works without licenses." This battle over training data—and whether authors should be compensated for their work's role in creating these multi-billion dollar tools—is the central fight that will shape the future of the industry.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Copyright Office has drawn a clear line in the sand. Works created solely by AI cannot be copyrighted. However, a work that is AI-assisted can receive copyright protection, but only if a human author contributes "sufficient expressive elements" through creative arrangements or significant modifications of the AI's output. Simply writing prompts is not enough to claim authorship. The Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, articulated the guiding principle behind this distinction in a recent report:
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection. Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine, however, would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright."
4. Writers Are Using AI as a Personal Assistant, Not a Ghostwriter
Instead of fearing replacement, many professional writers are embracing AI as a powerful and versatile assistant. Rather than outsourcing the core act of writing, they are using these tools to accelerate the tedious, non-creative tasks that surround it, freeing up time and mental energy for the work that truly matters.
Based on accounts from dozens of working writers, this "personal assistant" model is becoming the norm. Common use cases include:
Generating initial outlines and brainstorming topics.
Drafting proposals and cold pitches to prospective clients.
Improving their own LinkedIn profiles and professional bios.
Conducting research and summarizing dense source materials.
Creating social media posts based on their longer articles.
This shift is reflected in what clients are asking for. According to the staffing firm TimelyText, companies aren't looking to replace their writers with bots. Instead, they are actively seeking out "writers who know how to use AI well—not avoid it." The new, valuable skill is not just writing, but writing augmented by the intelligent use of modern tools.
5. For Much of the World, AI Still Has a Strong Accent
The idea of AI as a universal, globally accessible tool is a myth. A survey of professional writers from 49 countries, published in an arXiv research paper, reveals that the performance of AI chatbots is highly uneven across different languages and cultures.
There is a significant performance gap between English and other languages. Nearly half of the multilingual writers surveyed interact with AI only in English, and many who do use it in other languages still prefer English because it performs better. Compounding this technical gap is a gap in awareness; the study noted that many writers incorrectly believed their native languages were unsupported, with speakers of Swahili, Turkish, and Tagalog, among others, unaware that tools like ChatGPT could assist them.
This bias also extends to cultural knowledge. The study found that underrepresentation was most commonly reported by respondents from African countries like Kenya and Nigeria, as well as India and Greece. In contrast, writers from the U.S., U.K., and Canada were most likely to feel their culture was adequately represented. This disparity matters because it challenges the narrative of AI as a great equalizer. Instead of creating a level playing field, current AI models risk reinforcing existing global inequalities, centering Anglophone perspectives and leaving other cultures and languages behind.
6. Publishers Are Using AI as a Bookie, Not a Novelist
Despite widespread fears of AI penning the next great novel, major publishing houses are overwhelmingly using the technology for a much more practical purpose: business intelligence. Rather than replacing authors, they are using AI to optimize operations and make smarter financial bets.
Publishers are applying AI to a variety of business-critical tasks, including:
Analyzing market trends to predict which genres are likely to become bestsellers.
Setting optimal e-book prices and determining initial print runs for physical books (Penguin Random House).
Providing personalized book recommendations to readers (The New York Times).
Streamlining tedious back-office tasks like populating metadata, performing initial translations, and proofreading.
Matching academic research papers with suitable peer reviewers (Springer Nature).
New AI-driven platforms like Spines are also emerging to automate the production process for authors who publish for "self-branding" or legacy, rather than profit. The consensus within the industry is clear: AI is a powerful tool for improving efficiency and freeing up human staff for high-level creative and strategic work, not a replacement for the human author.
A New Chapter Is Being Written
Artificial intelligence is not a simple replacement for writers. It is a complex, disruptive force that is fundamentally reconfiguring the profession. It is simultaneously compressing the market for elite talent while gutting low-end content farms, creating a new premium on deep human expertise. It is sparking critical legal battles over copyright and compensation while also offering powerful new tools for productivity and research. Far from being a universal leveler, its benefits are distributed unevenly across the globe, often reinforcing existing divides.
The story of AI and writing is not one of replacement, but of a profound and often paradoxical reconfiguration of value itself. As these tools become more integrated into our creative processes, the most important question may not be what AI can write, but what new kinds of creativity and collaboration it will inspire in us.
