In 2025, human writers will reaffirm their value. In recent years, the race for more content has been driven by technological and market requirements such as search engine optimization, which serve neither creators nor consumers. Human needs and desires have been neglected for the attention economy and the drive to click. Hailed as a boon to freedom of expression, the early promise of the internet has failed us. Literature and journalism have been replaced by useless “content”, mainly to fill web pages rather than to inform or entertain. Meanwhile, the income for writers has decreased. The Authors’ Licensing and Copywriting Society reports a 60.2 percent decline in author earnings when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. The emergence of widely available generative AI is, for many, like the final nail in the coffin for writers. But 2025 will be a turning point, not for AI to replace us but for a new appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, disrupting traffic to genuine websites, will eliminate the need for useless “content” to game the system and will push people to demand better. Generative AI has caused litigation and industry and regulation. prevail. Data protection regulators in the EU and the UK, prompted by complaints from civil society organization NOYB, successfully put Meta’s plans to train AI on user posts, photos, and interactions on hold. Traditional publishers such as The New York Times have stepped forward to protect their own interests, and with them, the interests of their contributors. But some, the Financial Times and The Atlantic in particular, have signed deals with generative AI companies, perhaps believing they can’t hold back the tide. In 2025, they will be proven wrong. As copyright lawsuits rage through the courts, in 2025, we will also see liability decisions for mistakes that generative AI cannot make. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers that use AI content will be heard because false defamation is spread online and amplified by mindless bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, closed 19 journals facing a flood of fake scientific papers. To err is human, but industrial-scale counterfeiting is a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, no soul, and nothing to lose—but the people who use it, or ask others to use it. dead-eye products with something close to creativity. And in 2024, copywriters find their careers, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as humanizers for synthetic marketing content that doesn’t pass algorithms, let alone human, quality testing. The value of human creators has dawned on companies that seek to crush them, now even machines are not fooled by AI. But editing a robot’s writing is boring—does the author finally just say no? And will the reader join them? The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a film written by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after cinemas received more than 200 complaints about the premise. the best author, and finally, the most lucrative audience. With many news outlets offering little or no compensation to freelance writers, they won’t sell their souls cheaply to train AI to replace them. Publishers who sell their writers will see their talents move elsewhere and, with them, their readers. Rather than being wiped out by AI, in 2025, we will see a recognition of the value inherent in quality human writing, and perhaps, human writers will be able to start charging for it.
