Generative A.I. divides the writing profession

Gotham Ghostwriters have released a report on a comprehensive survey of writing professionals who were asked about their experience with and evaluation of the impact of generative A.I.

The conclusion points to a deep divide in attitudes between those writers who use A.I. regularly and non-users.

Positive opinions

Those familiar with A.I. report ways it helps

I’ll upload 10+ hours of transcribed interviews that I’ve conducted with clients and use it to help me
with drafting an outline based on their thought leadership and ideas. I also use it to help me better
match my client’s natural voice and tone. I’m amazed at how many times it’s helped me come out like a
superhero with exactly what my client envisioned.

Today alone I edited 5 chapters, made 3 book covers, summarized meeting notes, put together a Jira workflow, and still had time to go out for dinner with my family.

My research time is less than before. Using prompts, outlines, and pulling quotes from transcripts is faster.

Fear and loathing

The attitudes of non-users are markedly different.

They are bullsh*t machines. The few times I’ve tested them, they have proven to be unreliable, incomplete, and facile.

It is removing human thought from the writing process. I can spot AI writing and even AI outlined writing from a mile away because it is voiceless, empty, derivative slop. Of all the ways to rapidly accelerate climate catastrophe, this one has to be the stupidest.

It removes the human authorial voice and repurposes it into corporate-friendly garbage, even in settings where that voice is not appropriate. It all sounds so similar and soulless.

Tasks

The range of tasks advanced users employ generative A.I. for is much broader than occasional users. Advanced users use AI for an average of 8.6 different tasks weekly, including less common objectives such as deep research and analyzing numerical data. Basic users average four different tasks, focusing on brainstorming and research. Dabblers often do only one task, typically finding titles or doing a web search.

Claude

I was interested to see that Claude is more popular among advanced users. It’s the go-to generative tool I employ for my SciFi series ‘Our Fermented Future‘ which also uses ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grammarly, Suno, and Midjourney.

My experience

In addition to the 12-part ‘Fermented Future’ series on Booch News (running through December 2025, new episodes drop every Friday), my experiments with generative A.I. include:

1 Comment so far
Leave a comment

It’s interesting hear responses to the broader issues around generative A.I. such as this from my Facebook friend Rocky who posted (in response to this article)

AI is great if you love the idea of eliminating human jobs. For example, AI is going to eliminate all the jobs for human rideshare drivers in the next 3 years. Corrupt corporations like Uber just love that! AI will eliminate many more millions of jobs besides that. That is fine, except the people who lose those jobs are offered no replacement for them or guaranteed income.

These concerns are addressed in detail in a great 8-part podcast series ‘The Last Invention‘ by Longview.

The AI revolution has begun – the product of a seventy-year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This is the story of that journey: its rivalries, its competing visions of utopia and apocalypse, and the race to build what may be humanity’s last invention.

Check it out!



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)