In 2025, human authors will reassert their importance. In recent years, the race for more content has been driven by technical and market requirements such as search engine optimization, which neither the creator nor the consumer benefit from. People’s needs and desires are sidelined to promote economic attention and click motivation.
Hailed as a boon for free speech, the early promise of the Internet has failed. Articles and journalism have been replaced by meaningless “content”, more intended to fill web pages than to inform or entertain. Meanwhile, the income of writers has been reduced. The Authors’ Licensing and Copywriting Society reported a 60.2 percent drop in author income when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available productive AI felt, to many, like the final nail in the coffin for writers.
But 2025 will be a time of change, not for AI to replace us but for a re-appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the arrival of AI-generated search, blocking traffic to the original websites, will kill the need for meaningless “content” to play the game and will push people to want better.
Generative AI has sparked a number of lawsuits and industrial and regulatory actions. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, thanks to complaints from the public organization NOYB, succeeded in obtaining a temporary hold on Meta’s plans to train its AI on user posts, photos, and interactions. Traditional publishers like the New York Times have stepped up to protect their interests, and in turn, the interests of their contributors. But others, the Financial Times and the Atlantic in particular, have entered into agreements with AI manufacturing companies, perhaps in the belief that it is impossible to catch the tide. In 2025, they will be proven wrong.
As patent litigation enters the courts, by 2025, we will also see decisions on liability for the inevitable errors produced by artificial intelligence. Defamation lawsuits against AI companies and publishers using AI content will reach a peak as defamatory lies are spread across the Internet and amplified by mindless bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, closed 19 journals in the face of a flood of fake scientific papers. To err is human, but industrial-scale fraud is more of a technical problem. AI has no morality, no soul, and nothing to lose—but the people who use it, or ask others to use it for them, do.
In 2023, AI companies began hiring poets from around the world to try to infuse their dead-eyed products with something close to creativity. And in 2024, copywriters find their jobs, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as artificial content marketing humans that fail algorithmic, let alone human, quality sniff tests. The number of human creators is starting to appear in companies that wanted to crush them, as machines can be fooled by AI. But editing a robot’s writing is boring—will writers end up saying no? And will students join them?
The London Premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a film written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the cinema received more than 200 complaints about its premise.
Publishers who bank on people will attract the best writers, and ultimately, the most profitable audience. Since most news outlets offer little or no compensation to freelance writers, those people will be loathe to sell their souls so cheaply to train an AI to replace them. Publishers who market their authors will see their talent go elsewhere and, with them, their readership.
In a world full of automated drivel, human writers will let readers breathe, like a green park in a dirty city. Instead of being eliminated by AI, by 2025, we will see a recognition of the importance of nature in high-quality human writing, and perhaps, human writers will be able to start charging for their importance.