Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this.
And they will be the last.
This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
Professional writing used to be a career. Copywriters at agencies. Technical writers at software companies. Content writers at media outlets. Journalists. Scriptwriters. Grant writers. Marketing writers. There were jobs, real jobs with salaries and benefits, for people who were good at putting words together.
These jobs have been eroding for twenty years. The internet destroyed journalism economics. Content farms destroyed quality expectations. Gig platforms destroyed rates. Each wave left fewer writers making a living and more writers scrambling for scraps.
AI is the final wave. Not because AI writes better than humans. It does not, not yet, maybe not ever for certain kinds of writing. But AI writes good enough at a cost of nearly zero. That is the only equation that matters.
Most professional writing was never about excellence. It was about competence. Write clear copy for this product page. Write a blog post that targets these keywords. Write documentation that explains this feature. Write an email campaign that converts at 2%.
None of this required brilliance. It required someone who could produce readable prose reliably. That was the job. Not art. Craft. Workmanlike competence delivered on deadline.
AI does workmanlike competence. It does it in seconds. It does it for the cost of a few cents. A human writer charging even minimum wage cannot compete with that math.
The writing that required brilliance, the genuinely creative work that only talented humans could produce, was always a tiny fraction of the market. Most writing jobs were the competent stuff. That stuff is gone or going.
Some writers will survive. The ones with genuine voice, distinctive perspective, built audiences. The ones who write things people seek out specifically because a particular human wrote them. The ones whose writing is entertainment, not just information transfer.
But this is a small number of people. Most professional writers were not building personal brands. They were doing a job. They were good at the job. They got paid for the job. Now the job is being automated and no amount of personal brand will save them.
The writers who pivot into adjacent roles might survive. Content strategy. Editorial direction. AI prompt engineering, which is depressingly hilarious. Managing the machines that replaced them. Some will find homes in these areas.
But the job of writing for pay, the job that sustained hundreds of thousands of people, is ending. The people doing it now are the last generation who will.
I am a writer. Not professionally, mostly. But I write. I care about writing. And I think something important is being lost that we are not adequately mourning.
Human writing, even competent middling human writing, carries something that AI writing does not. A perspective. A context. A set of experiences and biases and blind spots that shape how ideas are expressed. You could read a piece and sense the human behind it. That human-ness was always part of what you were reading.
AI writing is clean. Competent. Empty. There is no one behind it. No perspective. No stakes. No reason for it to exist beyond the prompt that generated it. Reading AI writing is like eating food that technically has calories but leaves you hungry.
When all the professional writing is AI writing, we will have more words than ever and less meaning. The information will transfer. The soul will not.
This is not going to happen in fifty years. It is happening now. Companies are laying off writers. Agencies are reducing headcount. The content farms that already paid poorly are paying less because AI can do it for free. Every month, the economics get worse.
Within ten years, I expect professional writing to be a niche occupation. A few thousand people globally, maybe, doing the high-end work that still requires human touch. Everyone else will have been pushed out.
The writers working today are the last ones. They are living through the end of their profession. Most of them know it. They are updating resumes and learning new skills and trying to pivot while they still can.
Some are in denial. Some are hoping AI plateaus or regulation intervenes. Some are just hoping to ride it out until retirement. All of them are hoping for outcomes that probably will not happen.
The last generation of professional writers is already alive. I wonder if they know which one of them will be the very last.