What the Rise of Generative AI May Mean for the Writer Middle Class

It depends on what we choose, as a society

Cartoon by the author

[This is my opinion. I am not an expert on either AI or economics.]

There’s a type of writing job that’s mainly massaging search-engine results. A company commissions you to research a particular topic and write a blog post on it.

You aren’t necessarily being hired for your deep subject-matter expertise, but a level of accumulated skill and experience with the topic areas you specialize in.

Before writing, you need to pull information from search engines, just like anyone one could, including the reader.

But the difference is that you’ve read enough articles in this area to understand the terminology and know which sources are reliable. Your job is to select the good sources, understand and distill the relevant information, and, perhaps most importantly, narrate it all in an engaging and eye-catching way. After all, the blog post is partially sales copy: “Here’s why YOU need to know about this topic!”

Companies that commission these blog posts aren’t usually interested in your unique opinion on the topic, so you are limited in exercising your creativity. For a lot of writers, these are the dull, pays-the-bills jobs that subsidize the…