Technology and Writing

General, impact of Ai

By John F. Groom 

Technology Did Not Replace Me as a Writer. It Expanded What I Could Do.

When I was 23 years old, I had what most people would have considered a good, secure job. I worked in banking in Washington, D.C., for American Security Bank, a major local institution that has since disappeared through mergers. Then I quit.

I left because I wanted to become a writer. At the time, it felt like a choice between security and creativity. Writing seemed to be the profession I was best suited for, and I believed it was worth the risk.

Today, as artificial intelligence transforms the world, people often argue that AI will eliminate writing jobs. I understand why they feel that way. But after more than four decades of writing through multiple waves of technological change, I have come to a very different conclusion. Technology has never reduced my ability to create. Every major advance I have experienced has expanded what I was capable of accomplishing as a writer.

There is also an important fact that is often missing from today's discussion: making a living as a writer was already extraordinarily difficult long before AI existed.

Trying to Make a Living Before the Internet

In 1985 and 1986, I spent about six months trying to establish myself as a freelance writer. I did get published, earning several hundred dollars in total, including $125 for an essay that appeared in The Washington Post. For a young aspiring writer, being published in a major newspaper was a genuine accomplishment.

Financially, however, the experiment failed.

This was still the pre-digital world. Manuscripts had to be typed professionally. Copies had to be made. Every submission had to be physically reproduced, packaged, and mailed. By the time I paid for typing, photocopying, and postage, I had spent more pursuing publication than I earned from it.

The problem was never that technology had replaced writers. The problem was that there wasn't enough technology.

The infrastructure connecting writers with readers, publishers, and customers was slow, expensive, and inefficient. Writing ability was only one part of the equation. A successful career also depended on access to gatekeepers, distribution networks, production resources, and a market willing to pay for the work.

Like countless aspiring writers before me, I discovered that being capable of writing and making a living from writing were two very different things.

The Internet Changed Everything

More than a decade later, technology changed that equation.

From 1998 through 2003, during the internet's first major commercial expansion, I worked for AnnuityNet, the first company to attempt to sell variable annuities online. Suddenly there was demand for an unusual combination of skills: someone who understood complex financial products and could explain them clearly in an entirely new digital environment.

That happened to be something I could do.

For the first time in my life, I was able to earn a good living primarily through writing. Eventually, I was paid $125 an hour as a consultant.

The contrast with 1985 was remarkable. As a young freelancer, I had earned $125 for an entire essay published in The Washington Post. A little more than a decade later, the internet economy allowed me to earn that same amount in a single hour.

Technology had not eliminated the writer. It had created an entirely new reason for someone to pay one.

The internet didn't make my writing ability obsolete. Instead, it increased the value of a broader combination of skills: writing, financial knowledge, organization, explanation, and the ability to communicate unfamiliar ideas clearly.

Then Came Artificial Intelligence

Now another technological revolution is underway.

Artificial intelligence can write, summarize, edit, reorganize ideas, compare concepts, suggest structures, generate drafts, and produce in seconds what once required hours or even days. It would be easy to conclude that these capabilities make writers obsolete.

My own experience has led me to the opposite conclusion.

Today I use AI extensively while developing DataUniversa, Global Fast Fit, provenance systems, Connected AI, data interoperability, human-originated solution intelligence, and a much larger ecosystem of related ideas.

But I am no longer trying simply to become a professional writer.

I am trying to build something much larger: infrastructure that can help shape the future of global AI. AI makes it possible to pursue that ambition at a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

The articles I write are no longer isolated creative works. They are part of a much larger process of developing, testing, refining, documenting, connecting, and communicating ideas. An article about provenance may become part of the intellectual foundation for DataUniversa. An article about fitness performance may strengthen Global Fast Fit. A discussion about historical records, semantic interoperability, human solutions, or knowledge preservation may reveal a connection that eventually becomes a product feature, patent concept, data structure, or strategic principle.

AI allows me to move fluidly between all of these levels. I can begin with an observation, develop it into a concept, challenge it, compare it with historical examples, connect it to another part of the system, turn it into an article, translate it into technical architecture, explore its patent implications, explain it to a team, and then return to the original idea with a better understanding than I had before.

The writing hasn't disappeared.

It has become one component of a much larger creative process.

From Writer to Builder

Perhaps the biggest change in my journey is that technology has continually expanded what creativity means.

At 23, I believed the highest expression of my abilities would be writing. In 1985 that meant producing an essay, paying someone to type it, making copies, mailing it to editors, and hoping someone would publish it.

By 1998, the internet had transformed writing into a valuable commercial skill. Today, AI has transformed it again. Writing is no longer the destination. It has become one of the tools I use to build systems.

I am not simply producing articles. I am developing architectures, taxonomies, scoring systems, provenance frameworks, patents, global data-collection initiatives, structured knowledge systems, and a vision for how AI may eventually connect to authenticated real-world data—and ultimately to other AI systems.

AI helps me express these ideas faster, identify relationships between them, and maintain continuity across a body of work that has grown far beyond what any one person could hold perfectly in memory. It allows me to explore more possibilities, discard weak ideas earlier, and develop stronger ones more deeply.

Technology has not made creativity less valuable.

If anything, it has made ambition less constrained.

The Wrong Question

People often ask whether AI will eliminate writing jobs. It is a reasonable question, but I believe it is incomplete.

Of course AI will eliminate some jobs. It will transform many others and create entirely new ones. Every major technological shift has done exactly that.

The more important point is that "writer" has never been a single, stable economic category.

In 1985 I could write well enough to be published in The Washington Post, yet I could not earn enough from freelance writing to support myself. By 1998, the internet had created a completely different environment in which those same writing skills became economically valuable.

Today, AI has created another new environment. Writing is no longer simply an end product. It has become an interface between thought and action.

The more useful question is not whether technology replaces a particular task. It is what larger goals technology enables creative people to pursue.

For me, the answer has changed dramatically.

The typewriter era allowed me to write essays.

The internet allowed me to make a living from writing.

AI allows me to combine writing, reasoning, technology, data, and human collaboration in pursuit of something far more ambitious than I could ever have attempted alone.

Creativity Was Never the Tool

There is a tendency to measure creativity by how difficult it is to produce the final artifact. If a paragraph that once required two hours can now be produced in two minutes with AI assistance, some people assume something valuable has been lost.

I don't believe that is where the value resides.

The real value lies in deciding what is worth saying, what problems deserve solving, which observations matter, which connections are meaningful, and what should exist that does not yet exist.

AI can help express ideas, challenge them, organize them, expand them, and occasionally reveal relationships I had not noticed before. But the direction of my work—what I choose to pursue and why—comes from decades of experience, successes, failures, observations, and accumulated judgment.

When I was 23, I left a secure banking career because I believed I was supposed to become a writer.

More than forty years later, I realize I was both right and wrong.

I was right that writing would remain central to what I do.

I was wrong to think that being a writer was the final destination.

Technology kept expanding the possibilities. First it gave me a market. Then it gave me reach. Now it gives me leverage.

Today, instead of simply trying to write something worth publishing, I use AI to help pursue the most ambitious creative project of my life: contributing to infrastructure that can support a more connected global AI ecosystem.

Technology did not take creativity away from me.

It kept giving me more places to apply it.