AI in writing: the end of a professional monopoly

In December 2025, Merriam-Webster named “slop” its Word of the Year. Not the old definition—soft mud, pig feed—but a new one: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” The term had exploded across social media, journalism, and professional discourse in less than two years. Writers had successfully branded AI-generated text as garbage, and the term stuck.

But something about the panic felt off. The intensity of the response, the moral urgency, the existential framing—it all seemed disproportionate. Writers weren’t just saying AI writing was bad. They were saying it was wrong. Inauthentic. A threat to human creativity itself.

I started asking a different question: What if writing was never the thing writers claimed it was?

The hypothesis

Here’s my proposition: Writing as a professional discipline arose not as a form of human expression, but as a specialized skill for navigating formal systems. Writers exist to access the writing system the same way lawyers exist to access the legal system. Both are abstraction layers built on top of natural human communication, which is oral and conversational.

And just like the legal system, the writing system is a closed loop. Writers define good writing. Writers teach writing. Writers credential writers. Writers hire writers. Writers judge writing. There is no external validation, no independent measure of whether writing is “working” for non-writers, because writers control all the evaluation criteria.

When AI demonstrated it could navigate these systems—could produce text that satisfied formal requirements, passed bureaucratic filters, generated appropriate responses—writers recognized an existential threat. Not to human creativity. To their professional monopoly.

The evidence for this is hiding in plain sight.

Writing began as bureaucracy

The Mesopotamian cuneiform script, one of humanity’s earliest writing systems, can be traced back to an eighth millennium BC counting system using clay tokens. Writing emerged from counting and accounting. For millennia, writing was used exclusively for record-keeping, inventory management, and administrative documentation.

Writing literally began as bureaucracy. System-navigation from day one.

Around 4000 BC, as Denise Schmandt-Besserat documents in her research at the University of Texas, “the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form.”

This wasn’t poetic expression. It wasn’t storytelling. It wasn’t “authentic human creativity.” It was data management. Writing was a tool for freezing information in a retrievable format so that complex formal systems could function.

“creative writing” is barely a century old

When did writing become “creative”? When did it transform from a functional skill into a sacred art?

Remarkably recently.

Ralph Waldo Emerson first used the phrase “creative writing” in his 1837 address “The American Scholar.” But it didn’t become an academic discipline until the early 20th century. Barrett Wendell’s “advanced composition” course at Harvard in the late 1800s is called “the true beginning of creative writing” by scholars. The University of Iowa established “imaginative writing” as a formal discipline in the 1920s-1930s, developing what became known as the workshop model. The first formal Creative Writing MA program in the UK wasn’t established until 1970 at the University of East Anglia.

“Creative writing” as an academic discipline is barely 100 years old. For comparison, law schools existed in medieval times. Medical schools in ancient Greece.

Here’s what’s fascinating: creative writing started as a democratization project. According to contemporary scholarship, it “emerged from the opposition to traditional philological concepts such as the theory of writers’ natural talents, classical reading studies, and language rhetoric. Its purpose is to transform writing from a privilege of the so-called ‘chosen ones’ to a right accessible to the common people.”

The movement explicitly served “veterans, women at the bottom of society, immigrant groups, ethnic minorities” with the goal of enabling “these people not only to be readers but also to express their voices as writers.”

Creative writing programs began with the radical premise: “Everyone can write.”

Today, facing AI, they’ve reversed that premise: “AI can’t really write because it lacks human specialness.”

They started by democratizing access. Now they’re defending exclusivity.

The self-referential trap

Even within academia, creative writing has always struggled for legitimacy. One scholar characterizes it as “the most untheorized, and in that respect, anachronistic area in the entire constellation of English studies” with “a long history of subordination to literary studies, its lack of status and sustaining lore.”

Creative writing has always been defensive about its legitimacy, even before AI existed.

Why? Because it lacks external validation. If writing were truly about communication, we’d measure it by comprehension, efficiency, and task completion. But “good writing” is measured by:

Stylistic sophistication (requires training)
Genre conventions (requires initiation)
Aesthetic qualities (requires taste formation)
Originality (requires extensive reading)

All criteria that preserve the need for professional writers. All judgments made by other writers.

This is identical to the legal system. Lawyers define what constitutes “clear law.” Lawyers write laws. Lawyers credential lawyers. Lawyers interpret laws. Of course the legal system is convoluted—it’s practically designed to require lawyers, and lawyers make the laws.

The same circularity exists in writing. Writers control both production and evaluation. There is no independent test of whether writing is serving its ostensible purpose—communication with non-writers—because writers decide what counts as good.

A reasonable objection is that this argument collapses all writing into functional prose and ignores literature—novels, poetry, essays that are clearly more than system-interface work. That objection is partly right. Literature is different. But that difference is precisely the point.

Literature is exceptional because it is not primarily evaluated by whether it satisfies institutional or bureaucratic requirements. It does not exist to unlock processes, pass filters, document decisions, or encode instructions. It exists to be read as itself. And importantly, most people do not participate in literature as writers. They participate as readers.

The problem is that professional defenders of “writing” routinely conflate this narrow, exceptional category with the vast majority of writing people actually do for work: emails, reports, applications, policies, documentation, marketing copy, posts, proposals, and updates. These forms are not judged by non-writers for their aesthetic achievement; they are judged for clarity, adequacy, and effectiveness. Treating them as sacred acts of human expression is a category error.

Literature may well remain resistant to automation in meaningful ways. But literature has never been where most writing labor lives. The current panic is not coming from novelists alone. It is coming from a professional class whose economic value depends on controlling access to everyday, functional writing systems—and those systems are now accessible without initiation.

How people actually use writing

Most people use writing the way they use a freezer: as a tool to preserve something for later retrieval. They don’t appreciate their freezer’s aesthetics. They don’t discuss freezer craftsmanship. They just want it to work.

Reading, for most people, is fundamentally instrumental:

“I need to know how to fix this”
“What did they decide in the meeting?”
“What are the instructions?”
“What’s the main argument?”
“Give me the recipe”

The evidence of instrumental use is everywhere. People skim. People want TL;DRs. People prefer summaries. Audiobooks have exploded in popularity—a return to the oral. People say “just tell me” instead of “send me something to read.”

Who actually enjoys “writing itself”? Writers. Literature professors. MFA graduates. Book reviewers. The writing class.

It’s another closed loop. The people who claim writing is special are the people whose professional identity depends on writing being special.

When people praise something as “well-written,” what do they typically mean? “It was clear” or “I understood it easily.” Not “the prose was beautiful.” Not “the sentence construction was masterful.” They mean it successfully performed its function: transferring information efficiently.

Most people read to get ideas, not to appreciate writing. They want writing to do what it does—capture ideas, recipes, instructions in a fixed form that can be reactivated later. They want it to be a highly functional system of temporarily freezing human communication.

It’s no accident that designers, editors, and operators—people accountable for outcomes—often experience writing culture very differently than writers experience themselves.

The people who enjoy writing itself are mostly those in the writing class. For everyone else, it’s work.

The tell: everyone hates writing

If writing were really about authentic human expression, why do people hate doing it? Why does it feel like painful labor? Why do we procrastinate writing emails?

Because it was always work. System-interface work.

Think about what “learning to write” actually means. It’s not learning to express yourself—you already do that when you talk. It’s learning a complex set of formal conventions: grammar, syntax, genre expectations, rhetorical moves, citation formats, organizational patterns. You’re learning to navigate a formal system that has specific requirements for what counts as acceptable input.

This is why writing instruction focuses on rules, not expression. You learn the five-paragraph essay not because it’s how humans naturally structure thoughts, but because it’s what the academic system accepts. You learn cover letter formats not because they reflect how you’d actually introduce yourself, but because they’re what the hiring system requires.

Writing has always been the skill of encoding human thought into forms that satisfy system requirements. It’s translation work. Interface work.

And now that work can be automated.

The coding comparison

Writing is functionally identical to coding. Both are:

Symbols that navigate formal systems
Require years of training
Evaluated by other practitioners
Have “style” and conventions
Feel like work to most people

Yet the cultural narratives are radically different:

Writing = creative, human expression, irreplaceable, has “soul”
Coding = mechanical, technical, replaceable, “just logic”

Why the double standard?

Historical prestige. Writing got mystified first because it’s older. Writers controlled cultural production—including the narratives about writing itself—long before programmers existed.

Proximity to “natural language.” Writing looks more human because it uses words we speak. But this is superficial. Written English is as formal and rule-bound as Python. The difference is familiarity, not fundamental nature.

Cultural power. Writers write the thinkpieces, the novels, the criticism, the social media discourse. They controlled the means of meaning-making. Coders build systems but historically lacked the cultural power to define what “counts” as important creative work.

Here’s the killer question: What’s the actual functional difference between writing a legal brief and writing a database schema? Both are formal symbol manipulation to navigate systems. Both require specialized training. Both have aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions. Both can be done well or poorly.

Why is one “creative work” worthy of legal protection and moral defense, while the other is “just technical work” that nobody protests when AI automates?

The hallmark test

Someone will object: “But what about love letters? Poetry? Personal journals? Surely these represent authentic human expression, not just system-navigation?”

Have you heard of Hallmark?

Hallmark became a billion-dollar industry because most people couldn’t or wouldn’t write their own heartfelt messages. They bought someone else’s words to express “their” feelings. Professional greeting card writers have been outsourcing “authentic personal expression” for over a century.

The pattern is revealing:

Pre-1900s: People who couldn’t write well either struggled with personal letters or hired scribes
1910s-2020s: Can’t write a love letter? Buy a Hallmark card
2020s: Can’t write a professional email? Use ChatGPT

Same function. Same “inauthenticity.” Different payment structure.

The only thing that changed is who gets paid. With Hallmark, writers get royalties. With AI, they don’t.

And yes, intellectuals and “real” writers sneered at Hallmark cards as cheap, mass-produced sentiment. The 1930s version of “slop.” But regular people didn’t care because they needed a way to navigate the system of expressing feelings in writing.

If writing were truly natural human expression, why did Hallmark need to exist? Why couldn’t people just write their own love letters?

Because even for intimate personal communication, writing was system-interface work. Most people outsourced it when they could afford to.

How writers mobilized

In July 2023, nearly 8,000 authors—including household names like Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, and George R.R. Martin—signed an open letter to AI companies demanding permission and compensation for using their work. By September, the Authors Guild had filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, framing AI training as “identity theft on a grand scale.”

The Writers Guild of America went on strike for 148 days in 2023, listing AI as an “existential crisis.” They achieved contractual language stating “AI cannot write or rewrite literary material.” The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023. The lawsuits have continued into 2025, with writers joining amicus briefs and pushing for legislation.

The framing was consistent: “theft,” “stolen work,” “authentic human expression” versus “soulless machines.” Using AI wasn’t just wrong—it was morally suspect. Lazy. Inauthentic. Cheating.

Compare this to how other professions responded.

Lawyers? By 2024, 79% were using AI tools. They focused on efficiency gains and established ethical guidelines. The American Bar Association issued formal opinions on responsible AI use. Concerns centered on accuracy, reliability, and data privacy—pragmatic issues, not existential threats.

Software developers? By 2024, 97% had used AI coding tools at work. Only 12% saw AI as a threat to their jobs. Their concerns were technical: accuracy, code quality, maintenance debt. No organized resistance. No moral panic. No “code slop” discourse achieving cultural saturation.

Only writers mobilized for total resistance. Only writers successfully framed AI as uniquely threatening to their profession’s authenticity and value.

Why?

Because writers control the discourse itself. They write the articles. The op-eds. The social media posts. The think pieces. They got to define the narrative before anyone else could respond. They weaponized language—their core competency—to defend their position.

“Slop” is brilliant messaging. Visceral. Memorable. Disgusting. Much more effective than “automated text generation.” Writers are good at this. It’s literally what they do.

They also tied AI writing to broader cultural anxieties: job loss, authenticity crisis, tech surveillance, “humanity” under threat. They didn’t just say “AI writing is different.” They said “AI writing is wrong.” They created a moral framework where using AI makes you complicit in something ethically dubious.

It was a masterful PR campaign. And it worked because writers are professional communicators defending their monopoly on professional communication.

What AI actually threatens

My wife is an artist and painter. She’s not “good at” writing in the sense that the writing class defines it. Writing takes her a long time. Professional emails are laborious. Social media posts drain her energy. So for years, she simply didn’t write much. She didn’t have the time or energy to maintain a writing presence.

Then I showed her how to use Claude and ChatGPT to organize her ideas and draft text. Not to replace her thinking—to translate her thinking into written form. To handle the system-interface work.

Now she uses AI constantly. She participates in written discourse in ways she couldn’t before. She can maintain social media. She can communicate with galleries. She can engage in the word-world.

What happened?

GenAI made writing accessible to someone outside the writing class.

This is the real threat. Not that AI “replaces” writers. That AI democratizes access to the writing system.

For the first time, you don’t need initiation into the writing class to produce text that satisfies system requirements. You don’t need years of training to generate professional emails, social media posts, documentation, reports. You don’t need to hire a writer. You don’t need to struggle through the painful labor of encoding your thoughts into acceptable written form.

You can just use a machine.

Writing is no longer exclusive. The gatekeepers have lost their monopoly on system-access.

This is exactly what happened with:

Legal document templates (anyone can file without a lawyer)
TurboTax (anyone can file taxes without an accountant)
Email (anyone can send correspondence without knowing formal letter conventions)
Wikipedia (anyone can access encyclopedic knowledge without buying Britannica)

Technology democratized access to systems that previously required professional intermediaries. The professionals claimed this would lead to disaster. Mostly, it just made the systems more accessible.

When writers claim to value “democratizing voices” and “amplifying unheard perspectives,” they mean it—as long as those voices learn to write the way writers write, get credentialed the way writers get credentialed, and accept the authority of writers to judge what counts as good.

When technology actually democratizes access to writing systems, they call it “slop.”

Because it was never about the writing. It was about controlling who gets to access the word-world.

Writing was never special

Here’s what the evidence shows:

Writing began as bureaucratic record-keeping. “Creative writing” is barely a century old and started as a democratization project before becoming a credentialing system. Writing is judged by writers using criteria that require initiation. Most people use writing instrumentally and experience it as work. Even “personal expression” has been outsourced for over a century (Hallmark). The only profession that mobilized against AI was the one that controls discourse itself.

The “AI slop” panic isn’t about protecting human creativity. It’s about professional writers recognizing that their monopoly on system-interface work is ending.

The mystification was always strategic. When you can’t defend the function (writing as communication), you sacralize the form (writing as art). You claim it’s about “authentic human expression” even though most humans hate doing it. You claim it requires special training even though it’s just learning formal conventions. You claim it’s irreplaceable even though it’s been outsourced whenever possible.

AI didn’t threaten authentic human expression. It threatened the professional class that claimed ownership of the written word.

And now that class is doing what any threatened professional monopoly does: fighting to preserve its exclusive access to valuable work. The difference is that writers are better at public relations than accountants or lawyers or coders. They can make their professional self-interest sound like defending civilization itself.

But the evidence doesn’t support the mythology. Writing was always just symbols that navigate symbol systems. Forms that unlock processes. Text that satisfies bureaucratic requirements. Interface work between human thought and formal systems.

Important work. Necessary work. But not sacred work. Not irreplaceable work. And definitely not work that requires a special class of initiated professionals maintaining exclusive control.

The ultimate irony? Creative writing began with “everyone can write.”

AI might actually make that true.