One of my favourite films is How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days.
It’s a classic noughties rom com, Andy Anderson (played by Kate Hudson) works for a national Cosmopolitan-esque magazine, as the resident “How To” writer. She has a desk and assignments and frankly, plenty of thinking room. Her job was to come up with ideas and write one article per issue. In the film, Andy is fed up with writing “vapid “how to”” articles wants to get more into serious journalism.
However, whilst I was watching recently, I just kept thinking: man, what a job. I’d have killed to have that job. I know loads of people who’d love that job.
Okay okay, so it’s a film. I hear you cry. However it represents a time where journalism and magazines thrived and writing was considered a real skill. The film depicts the turn-of-the-millennium optimism about editorial and digital culture.
Carrie Bradshaw was one and the same – a writer for The New York Star, a regular column about sex and relationships. Although I find her character flawed in so many ways, she was still paid her infamous $4 per word, and lived in a beautiful (albeit rent-controlled) flat, on her own, in central New York.
Nowadays, I know they still exist, but these jobs are typically now held by freelancers who have to work multiple jobs to just get by. Writing is no longer a viable career path in the same way.
I’ve been writing for 12 years now, I’ve seen the blogging world boom and dwindle. I’m watching as AI takes over and people lose the ability to write something as simple as an email. Writing has become about proving you didn’t use AI, just cause you love to use an em dash – (like me!)
There used to be a real romanticisation of writing, perhaps perpetuated by these fictional high flying women. It begs the question, where did all the real life writers go?
Unfortunately, now writing jobs have also been displaced by the rise of AI, and amalgamated into generic marketing roles. Copywriting is a skill which is being stolen and replaced by AI. It also means the market is flooded with low-quality content, after all, AI relies on copying work which has already been made available to it. It has to steal other’s work as it does not possess the deep richness and depth of human emotion or lived experience. Human writing is erratic and uniquely stylistic, AI writing is predictable and sanitised, devoid of nuance or deliberate complexities.
It makes me wonder how writing as an art, a profession, will change: whether the younger generations will learn how to write using their brains, as opposed to a prompt.
I am, however, loving apps like Substack, where the written word is put first and it gives writers a space to share high-quality content. Maybe instead of blogs, that’s where it’s at now.
For me, I’ll continue writing. Usually my style is simple free-flowing thought, and it brings me plenty of joy. As for Andy Anderson and her job of dreams: maybe we’ll see a resurgence sometime in the future when everyone craves human written word. For now, seeing AI be shoved down all our neck does makes me wonder if the originality of writing will be consigned to the past.
We can only hope it isn’t.
