Why don’t more writers use AI?

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2025-01-15 21:00:11

By all measures, 2024 was an incredible year for Lex. We shipped some foundational improvements to the writing experience, and it paid off:

You exchanged 3 million messages with AI, and accepted 2.2 million inline suggestions with our Checks feature. (Fun fact: you deleted 1.8 million words using Brevity Check! )

Lex is only ~0.01% of the way towards our mission : to build the obvious word processor of choice for writers worldwide, by pioneering the AI era of writing.

We’re off to a good start. In fact, Lex is probably leading among AI-native, general-purpose word processors. But compared to our ambition, we’re still at the base of the mountain.

Most writers still use the same tools and workflow as ten years ago. They don’t use AI in their writing beyond basic grammar checks and sporadic quick questions to ChatGPT. It’s like having a polymath genius sat next to you all day ready to help, and only asking a few basic questions .

If you want to see a creative field that’s further along the AI adoption curve, look no further than programming. Every programmer I know uses AI all day. In 2024, tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot reached millions of developers, and Google has said fully 25% of the code their engineers commit is now AI-generated. I couldn’t find similar stats for writing (which itself may be an indicator), but we talk to writers all the time and it’s obvious that AI for writing has nowhere near the depth and breadth of adoption as AI for coding.