Member-only story
Will I Still Be Writing In Five Years?
My loss of writing income has me wondering about the future
I wonder if I’ll still be writing in five years or two or one.
Will my words still be needed, wanted, or available? Will bots have crawled and reassembled all my pieces into new bits that artificial intelligence regurgitates to less scrupulous inquirers?
My writing income has decreased by 80% in less than six months. Like others, I could switch to another platform, but will bots quickly follow me there?
Am I witnessing my obsolescence as my original words fade into the hollows of the Internet? Will I become like an antique typewriter, adored but no longer useful?
Popular writers promised me this would never happen. They said human words would always ring true.
But I now think they were mistaken.
Last month, Linda Caroll reported an AI post on Medium that received 6K claps and more than 100 comments.
AI may be a better mimic than we ever imagined. AI stories that pass undetected through human and algorithmic curators pull money from the Medium payment pot. At the same time, real writers receive less and less—at least, that’s what many have reported in their articles.
