Writers will dominate in a world of LLMs (part 1)
I find writing to be a lot like building. It’s the most human form of building, where you get to choose how much reality to include in your work. The culture of writing is as old as civilization but it’s still developing, while the culture of building IT products is new and innovating. These two cultures can learn a lot from each other.
There are so many external tools for building IT products, while there are so few external tools to build stories. All the best writing tools are stored in minds, education systems, and humankind’s text data - the corpus of data which LLMs happen to be trained on.
I believe LLMs can pull those tools-in-mind out of our heads, democratizing and automating them. That means unlocking new possibilities, creating new markets rather than pouring more of writers’ lifeblood down the drains of today’s saturated publishing industry.
I believe a future that relies on LLMs is one where the writing skillset becomes more valuable and not commoditized. Writing a piece worth reading is not something that can be automated, but it can be augmented. Of course, that comes with “bad” changes too - we have to figure out how to deal with AI content pollution and licensing. But I think the publishing industry will evolve, the future of writing is bright, and this post is a techno-optimist glimpse into what that could look like. There’s something great for everyone between the extreme “AI doomer” or “AI messianist” takes.
