A Note to Fellow Writers in a Noisy Time

In Five Years, Human-Sounding Writing Will Be the Real Premium

The other morning, I sat down to write and realised I could finish the piece in minutes if I wanted to.

The tools were there. The structure was obvious. The phrasing is almost pre-written. It would have been clean, competent, and completely forgettable.

So I didn’t.

I closed the page, made another coffee, and waited until I had something I actually wanted to say… even if it took longer, even if it came out rougher than planned. That hesitation turned out to be the point.

Because this is the strange moment writers are living through now.

Writing has never been easier to produce, and never harder to make matter.

If you write regularly, you’ve probably felt this already. Not fear, exactly. More like a quiet dislocation. The sense that the old rules still exist on paper, but no longer apply in the same way. Fluency used to be a hard-won advantage. Now it’s table stakes.

Machines can generate fluent writing effortlessly. They can organise ideas, smooth phrasing, build arguments, and keep going without fatigue or doubt. They don’t pause halfway through a paragraph wondering whether they’ve earned the right to say something. They just produce the next plausible sentence and move on.

Which means the ability to create tidy, coherent text is no longer rare.

And when something stops being rare, it stops being valuable in the way we’re used to measuring it.

I’m already noticing the shift. There’s more writing everywhere. More posts, more articles, more words filling more space. Most of it is perfectly acceptable. It makes sense. It hits the brief. It doesn’t offend. It doesn’t linger either.

The danger isn’t that writing gets worse.

It’s that it all becomes fine.

And fine is forgettable.

What cuts through that isn’t speed or polish. It’s presence.

You can feel presence in writing. It shows up in the small moments of friction. The sentence that feels chosen rather than assembled. The thought that doesn’t arrive fully formed, but earns its place by staying with the writer long enough to be understood.

Human-sounding writing carries the weight of decision. You sense someone thinking as they go, not just filling space efficiently. There’s a nervous system behind the words. A lived pace. A willingness to let edges remain visible.

That kind of writing is inefficient by modern standards. It wanders before it lands. It hesitates. It occasionally contradicts itself. It refuses to compress everything into neat takeaways.

But those aren’t flaws.

They’re signals.

They tell the reader there’s someone here. Someone paying attention. Someone prepared to risk being slightly misunderstood in order to be honest.

As output becomes infinite, readers won’t stage a rebellion against it. They’ll just start drifting towards work that feels alive. Writing that sounds like it exists because the writer needed to say it, not because it filled a slot in a schedule.

I find myself doing this as a reader already. Returning to the same voices. Waiting for certain writers. Not because they publish more, but because when they do, I feel less alone in my thinking.

That’s where AI becomes interesting rather than threatening.

Used well, it’s a mirror. A way to test ideas. A thinking partner that helps clarify what you’re trying to say. It can be genuinely useful in shaping work, challenging assumptions, and clearing fog.

But it can’t decide what matters to you.

It can’t feel the quiet discomfort that tells you a sentence is technically fine but emotionally false. It can’t sense when something reads well but doesn’t sit right. That part of the process still belongs to the human at the desk, staring at the page a little longer than planned.

The real risk isn’t that AI replaces writers.

It’s that some writers discover they were leaning on polish instead of voice. On familiar phrasing instead of attention. On templates instead of lived perspective.

AI flattens the middle. And in doing so, it makes the edges clearer.

If your writing comes from experience, from friction, from things you’ve noticed and can’t quite let go of, that contrast will only sharpen. Your work won’t disappear into the noise. It will sound different precisely because the noise has grown louder.

Trying to outrun machines is a losing game. Refusing the race altogether feels like the quieter, braver move.

So I’m choosing to write a little slower now. Not out of resistance, and not out of nostalgia, but out of respect for the work itself. I’ll use the tools when they help, and step away from them when they don’t. I’m less interested in finishing quickly than in finishing honestly.

Because in a world full of words, the ones that stay with me are always the ones where I can feel someone was present while they wrote them.

That’s the kind of writing I want to keep doing.

Until Next Time