And then, it promoted us.
When I started my career in writing, people didn’t take it seriously. Writing was just… putting words on a page. What real skill did it take to do something like that?
I’ve heard this many times over the years, and I know other writers who have too.
And this whole premise is built on the understanding writing as output.
That was sadly reductive, of course, because the thinking behind the words you choose to put on a page and the order in which you choose to put it is based on strategy, intention, understanding, linguistic prowess, and a certain level of courage.
To some extent I could see how people who’d never really worked with writers felt that way – but a few years into working in corporate, I realised that there was a large part of the writing industry itself that reduced writing to words on a page.
*Cough* SEO keyword stuffers *cough*.
When you have writers paraphrasing reams of writing for eye-wateringly low rates, measuring their worth by ridiculous metrics like ‘rate-per-word’, it reinforces the idea of writing as an output-based task.
Those per-word marathoners have definitely been replaced by AI. Because AI is great – greater than humans – at generating output. Pages and pages of it. For free, even.
When AI slop replaced SEO slop and other writing slop – it also paradoxically shone a light on what it could not replace:
Writers who worked with intention, who are strategic, who write for impact, and who adore the craft of writing and the power it wields.
Writers who are thinkers.
This realisation forced a fundamental rethinking of how content work fits into organisations. If the value is not in producing pages but in the strategic thinking behind them, then the job is not production work. It is advisory work. It is leadership and coherence.
It is less about executing a content strategy and more about shaping strategy itself.
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But still, when AI marched into the mainstream, short-sighted leaders and teams enthusiastically decided to cull their writing staff. There were many rallying cries of ‘writing as a career is dead’, and panic in the industry.
Writers’ forums were clear indicators of the fear that many writers felt. Would they ever be relevant again? Did their skills matter at all? Would they ever find work?
No one knew.
Till… we were bombarded with AI slop that was as ineffective as it was easy.
AI-generated content simply wasn’t hitting the right notes. Content that ChatGPT wrote for brands got no engagement and said nothing new.
Which all came to show that in order to do editorial work within organisations properly and effectively – or in other words, if you want it to actually position your business or brand, and speak meaningfully to your audience – then you needed a layer of skill and experience that AI has not been able to build till now.
To represent a brand, you have to understand how its business works. You have to be able to zoom out and connect the dots between commercial strategy, brand strategy, emotional connections, corporate politics, organisational structures, team hierarchies, goals, needs and why all of this matters. You have to know what to delicately tip-toe around, and what to announce with fanfare.
Then, you need to be articulate all this contextual knowledge in ways that matter, to the brand, its audience and the world at large.
AI cannot do this.
As our content feeds are proliferated by AI slop, it is ironically increasing the value and elevating the work of human writers, who now do more than ‘write’.
Organisations are hiring writers in new capacities, that are taking the focus away from the output (which AI helps with), and using the thinking and strategy skills writers have.
Netflix was hiring for an Editorial Workflow Innovation Manager. Someone whose job is to innovate editorial processes, incorporate technology where it makes sense, oversee systems, and fine-tune how editorial work gets done. This role is not about producing content, but about designing the process and the rationale, and trusting that if you get the system right, the output takes care of itself.
Emirates NBD in the UAE was hiring for a Content Governance Manager. Governance – standards, accountability, impact. Not volume.
These are not traditional writing roles. They are strategic roles that happen to involve content. And they are being paid at levels that were unimaginable for writers before AI entered the picture.
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The writers who emcome out on the other side this shift will be the ones who always understood that writing was about thinking.
Not those who stooped to keyword stuffing, and churning out 500 variations of the same Google Ad copy because it was easy. This era belongs to those who care about their impact and understand that their work carries responsibility. Who treat writing as a discipline that requires intention and a respect for the craft.
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This is personal for me.
In my early days as a freelancer, I turned down retainer opportunities that would have given me stability – jobs that wanted me to simply paraphrase existing blog articles to serve the gods of Google without adding any thought. Some of those roles even outright said that I absolutely had to stay away from any originality, because they wouldn’t pay for it.
As a fresh-faced freelancer with an unsteady income, saying no to these jobs meant choosing my values over financial security.
It meant working harder to find clients and going through weeks and months of self-doubt.
That trade-off is serving me now. Because I made sure technology couldn’t replace me.
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So yes, AI replaced the writing job – one version of it that we’re honestly better off without.
And it promoted us.
It made the work behind our work more visible. It made the value of our thinking undeniable. It forced organisations to stop conflating execution with strategy, and to recognise that the two require very different skills.
The background work serious writers were doing all along – understanding context, making connections, caring about impact – is now the job itself.
And it’s a job that businesses are willing to pay more for.