Has AI Made Learning to Write Pointless?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Absolutely, no.
We’re at a point where artificial intelligence (AI) can draft decent emails, write clean essays, and even generate poetry at the click of a button. When everyone can create passable AI-generated copy, most people will. Writing quality and style is homogenizing rapidly. The opportunity lies in being creative and unique. Learn to write well and you’ll stand out above the AI slop.
AI has made strong writing skills more valuable and relevant than ever before. Far from making writing pointless, the rise of AI has elevated the value of clear, creative, and persuasive communication.
Writing is more important now than at any time in history.
Writing Makes You A Better AI User
Ask AI why writing is important, and this will be answer #1 - which is unsettlingly self-serving. But it’s true to say that to get the best results from AI, you need to write clearly and effectively. Interacting with AI isn’t like a Google Search, throwing in a jumble of keywords. It’s an active collaboration that relies on your ability to express yourself and the ideas you’re trying to explore.
Prompt engineering—the skill of crafting effective instructions for AI systems—has become a sought-after expertise. The quality of your prompt determines the quality of the AI’s output. A vague prompt like “Write about climate change” will produce generic, uninspired content. But a well-crafted prompt, such as “Write a persuasive editorial for Irish secondary school students about the impact of climate change on coastal towns like Dun Laoghaire,” will yield targeted, engaging, and relevant results.
And even that’s not all that well thought through.
Good prompting is structured, well-reasoned, considers hierarchy of information and how to break concepts up into digestible morsels. Good prompting is… pretty human.
There’s a wonderful irony in that to be better at communicating with AI, we have to be better human communicators.
It was a dark day.
Writing Breeds Critical Thinking
Writing isn’t just about slapping words on a page. It’s about honing linguistic skills. It’s about organizing your thoughts, developing arguments, and communicating ideas. These are foundational skills for learning, persuasion, and leadership. These are skills that AI cannot replace, but which it might displace if people do not seek to keep them alive. Steve Jobs inspired with words first, products after. ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ was a vision for the future communicated in five words - what a feat of economy. How long had Jobs been thinking of it?
When we write essays as students, we learn to structure arguments, synthesize information, and persuade readers. These are life skills no matter what you do. In the workplace, clear email communication, well-structured reports, and persuasive proposals are crucial for collaboration and decision-making. In the home, better communication will make life smoother. In the club, your persuasive use of language might make the end of the night that little bit more interesting.
And of course, reading is what makes for good writing. It is impossible to write well without reading well. Reading and writing are a symbiosis, you write well when you comprehend thoroughly, otherwise we get into a situation where AI generates words, then summarizes the words, and then writes more words generated from the summary and so on, without any humans doing any deep reading, and without any intelligence being transferred to the human at all. Writing keeps the human in the driving seat, doing the lion’s share of the actual thinking.
Packy is being facetious. Read his blog post here.
Writing Is Creativity & Voice
AI can mimic styles, but it can’t fully replicate a person’s unique voice. It isn’t unique or fresh or original. It doesn’t bank the sounds and smells of lived experiences to draw on, or have the ability to inhabit anoriginal perspective. It is a regurgitation and reinterpretation or reforming of what has gone before. Only you can share your unique experiences & perspectives and use them to describe the world.
Literary works, personal essays, and opinion pieces resonate because of the author’s distinctive style and insights. I wrote a previous piece entitled ‘AI Novel Writing is Pointless’, in which I describe a cursory attempt to get AI to sound like Irish author Paul Lynch, which proved this point. The results were derivative and wan, lacking any real warmth.
A blog post about growing up in your home town, for example, filled with local slang, personal anecdotes, and a sense of place, will always feel more authentic and engaging than anything an AI can generate.
Employers and universities recognize this. They value applicants who can write with originality and depth, not just correct grammar. They’re evolving to test for it, too. You may be asked to deliver your essay verbally, or via video. Your ability to generate and submit content is not what colleges want to teach you. They want evidence you can be an authentic thinker of new thoughts.
AI’s a Tool–Not a Substitute—for Human Expression
AI can assist with grammar, structure, and even idea generation. It is most powerful when paired with a skilled human writer who can guide, edit, and elevate the output, and ideally structure the inputs using actual intelligence and rigor.
Journalists, for example, might use AI to draft articles or analyze data, but the final story requires a human touch to ensure accuracy, context, and narrative flair. You have to fact-check and finesse it.
Authors might use AI for brainstorming or overcoming writer’s block, but the finished work will reflect their own voice and intent. They might even, as I did, chuck out any AI text entirely, and use it merely as something to push against. AI can be the generator of all the things you don’t want the end product to be, allowing you see what it must be in the process.
Think of AI as a super-smart writing assistant. It can help you get started, suggest improvements, and handle repetitive tasks—but it can’t replace your creativity, judgment, or emotional intelligence.
But both sides of the coin – the creativity that will set you apart, and the prompting of the machine – both require your skill in draftmanship if they are to be of any use.
Digital Literacy & Writing Are Intertwined
Writing is the backbone of your online presence—whether it’s on social media, blogs, emails, Linkedin or even delivering a well-written TED talk. That much is true.
When I built the structure of this post using AI, this section was all about influencing and building credibility, which feels very Klout. Digital literacy to me means understanding how information and content traffics across channels. It means discernment. Literacy shouldn’t necessarily be in service of content creation – that way lies AI slop and valueless SEO content*. Writing online, understanding how the internet will parse and index your words, helps you understand the fabric of digital communication. It’ll help you understand why some content goes viral and other stuff falls flat, how misinformation seeps into people’s minds, and how accurate information struggles to be heard.
Sure, thought leaders and influencers who write compelling posts or newsletters build loyal audiences – those are words directly out of the LLM. But that simplistic observation skips a critical step. Those thought leaders and the people who coach them have build audiences because they learned by trial and error, by reading and writing, to craft messages in a way that will be of value to the reader, and in a way that will also hook into the systems and digital tropes (read: algorithms) that avoid the many pitfalls of the digital world and help them reach the audience. That’s digital literacy in the AI age.
Ethical & Critical Evaluation Requires Writing Skills
You need to know what good and bad look and sound like before you can identify and/or create them.
As AI generates more content, the ability to critically evaluate, annotate, and respond to information—often through writing—becomes essential for navigating misinformation and making informed decisions. You need to be an editor, in short. And editors are always good writers. Well, almost always.
Students and professionals need to write critical reviews, fact-checks, and responses to AI-generated materials. Policy-makers and educators rely on well-reasoned written arguments to shape regulations around AI and other emerging technologies.
Even the nature of AI itself is subject to intense debate, and people are learning which parts of that need to happen in a human way, and which parts of the education process around AI can be left to AI summarization. I argued in a recent in-person session that discernment is going to be a key value we hire for in the next five to ten years, alongside creativity. Discernment comes through being broadly read in and having rich context to draw on. It comes from the ability to identify quality.
What this all means for students, professionals, and anyone navigating the digital world in the AI era is that learning to write is not obsolete—it’s a superpower.
Good writers are better AI users, sharper thinkers, unique voices, digitally savvy and confident, discerning critics & analysts.
5 Tips for Strong Writing in the Age of AI
Practice Prompt Writing:
Experiment with AI tools by crafting specific, detailed prompts. Notice how your wording changes the output. Go short, go long, vary your prompts. Try chaotic prompts and delibrately structured prompts. You’ll find what works. Then read the output so you can learn to spot AI-generated content in the wild.
Read Widely:
Expose yourself to different writing styles—news articles, essays, fiction, and opinion pieces. Pay attention to what makes each unique.
Write Regularly:
Start a blog, keep a journal, or write for a community, be it on Reddit or elsewhere. The more you write, the stronger your skills become. I try to do a piece of completely new creative writing at least once a week. Sometimes it’s flash fiction, or a haiku, or a short story, or a poem. It’s a way of forcing myself to generate something unique, straight out of the synapses.
Edit Ruthlessly:
Sure, use AI tools for grammar and structure, but always review and revise your work to ensure it reflects your voice and intent, and does the job you need it to do. If it needs to be concise, cut mercilessly. If it needs to inspire, pump it up. If it needs to communicate instructions, be sure every word is adding clarity.
Seek Feedback:
Get out of your head, out of your bubble. Share your writing with friends, teachers, or online communities. Share it with the person you know will be your harshest critic. Constructive criticism helps you grow.
The rise of AI hasn’t made writing obsolete—it’s made it indispensable. If you write clearly, creatively, and persuasively you will stand out as a thinker, leader, and creator, and be able to bend people and LLMs to your will more effectively.
*Full disclosure - the highest performing search term on this site as I wrote this post was literally ‘Has AI Made Learning to Write Pointless?’ but I hope you’ve found some value in my answering that question.
