I retired from my job as a technical writer in May 2025. From what I've read about AI, it sounds like I got out just in time. I strongly suspect that a lot of companies will lay off most or all of their writers and replace them with AI-generated content. It's not that the AI-generated content is so good - it's that AI tools can churn out text on demand instead of people having to wait until a human finishes generating it.
I haven't looked at ChatGPT or other AI content generators much - for reasons which I will get to later - but I did ask an early version of ChatGPT to provide stepwise instructions on how to brush your teeth, which is a standard written interview question for technical writers. When you think about it, brushing your teeth is a reasonably complex operation, involving a toothbrush, toothpaste, and the methods that you use to do the actual cleaning. And ChatGPT seemed to be at least reasonably okay at describing this.
But the trick is that it seemed to be okay at documenting how to brush your teeth. As I understand it (I hope I have this right), AI, even modern AI, doesn't actually think. It just searches through a whole lot of text related to a particular topic, such as tooth brushing, and then generates a best guess based on its data crunching. An actual human would need to comb through the text to determine whether there are any obvious or subtle errors.
And this is why I'm glad I got out of the technical writing business. Many technical writers won't actually do a lot of writing anymore - their jobs will be to read through all of the content generated by AI and check it for errors. Perhaps it's just me, but I find editing harder than writing and somewhat tiring: it's easier to organize my own thoughts and put them onto a computer screen than to try to figure out what other people or machines have written and correct it. And the temptation will exist to force one or two overworked writers to wade through dozens of pages of AI-generated content every work day. That sounds like no fun at all.
In the worst-case scenario, some companies might not even bother with having a human edit the AI-generated writing - they'll just serve it up to readers as is. I can't see that working out very well.
Despite all of this, I can see that it is possible that AI-generated writing might be useful in a business context. But, in my opinion, AI is no use at all for generating creative writing. The whole point of creative writing, or any other artistic endeavour, is that the writer or artist is providing his or her perspective or view of the world. AI-generated slop cannot provide this.
When I first started hearing about what AI could do, because I cannot draw, I considered using AI-generated images as part of creative projects. But I've now rejected that idea: AI-generated visual art is no better than AI-generated text. It lacks the human creative spark that makes art interesting.
The only time that I have actually used AI in a creative project was when I was first experimenting with Audacity, an open-source software tool that allows you to edit and mix together chunks of music or spoken text. I found a website that provides short snippets of AI-generated voiceover text in a number of artificial voices and I played with it a bit in this sample output. I won't do this again - I'll either work with excerpts of speeches delivered by real humans or I'll generate sound collages from multiple sources. And if I decide to do anything visual, I'll use image-based collages to overcome my lack of drawing ability. I won't be creating the material myself but I will be using my own perspective and ideas to select and organize it, and that's hopefully good enough.
I mentioned earlier that I don't use or even look at ChatGPT or other AI tools anymore. There are four main reasons for this:
Despite all of this, I fear that AI will just grow more prevalent over the next few years, as the temptation to replace us messy humans with machines will be too great. Even if, or perhaps especially if, their output is riddled with errors. Many things that humans do now will be done by AI bots. The AI doctor will see you now.
May 2026