I’m convinced that writing is dead. I’ve been writing for decades. In the 90s and early 2000s, while learning tech, I tinkered a lot while blogging about the journey. It cemented what I learned, shared knowledge with others, and gave me a helpful career reference point.
During Marine bootcamp, my rack mate Kuchenbecker let slip that I knew tech. Voila. I was named scribe. While recruits slept, I got to build a Microsoft Access recruit-tracking app so Drill Instructors could track metrics. Give a nerd a computer and they’ll use it. I sent short letters to family checking in and saying hi. The DIs would’ve blown a gasket if they’d found out about this little “integrity violation.”
Fast forward to 2008 in Iraq at a little base, Al Habbaniyah. In the middle of the night, our SSgt came in and pulled me out of my rack. The Captain read me my rights and told me to take my blog down or face charges. I’d been posting occasional updates during our buildup and deployment. Never locations or specifics. Just simple messages. “Hey family, I miss you. It’s hot in Iraq. We’re safe. Can’t wait to meet my newborn daughter.” I still have those posts. They’re private now. No need for extra drama on top of what we already had from the higher ups.
Back home a few years later, I was leading teams at a consulting firm. Writing and platforms like LinkedIn became key for recruiting, sales engineering, setting our tone, and telling our story. It helped establish our standards in the business community.
Through time at AWS, Kestra Medical, Central States, and now Simmons Foods, I’ve continued writing. Then someone asked, “That’s all AI, right? The stuff you post on LinkedIn?” After the existential crisis passed, I realized the shift. Cheap tools that spit out clean technical writing make people assume everything must be AI.
I’ve used Grammarly and similar tools for years. And like most, feed drafts through tools to clean up wordiness, grammar, and typos fast. The help is real. And so is the increasing reliance on them.
People crave genuine human connection. They sense inauthentic content everywhere and meet it with skepticism. Ideas get dismissed. It’s disheartening. I believe that’s why long-form podcasts have exploded.
My daughter wants to write about real events out in the world. Events that will happen whether documented by humans or machines. My advice to her is simple. Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. The default assumption will be that it’s AI. But writing is still one of the clearest ways we show we’re human.
“I’ll keep writing. People will assume it’s AI. Just like you will when you pick up any book written after 2024’ish. Many will just stop posting and stop sharing (or have already). The impostor will try to convince me to give it up because what’s the point after all?
I worry the open, curious internet I grew up on, the one I built a accidental career around, is already gone. Is it?