“We’ll just write it ourselves” and other fanciful tales

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You want to write it yourself. So what else is new?

While some large investment companies have taken their writing back in-house (which is the polite version of saying “we’ll get AI to write it”), I don’t believe the investment world has evolved beyond needing writers any more.

I don’t think good writers who’ve learned their craft are going anywhere any time soon.

Writing has always required the ability to absorb information, think, write, rewrite, and rewrite.

Then, when you think it’s perfect, take another pass at it.

Because the truth is as simple as this. Anyone can write. Everyone does write. But writing for an audience, putting yourself in their shoes rather than your own. Expressing complex ideas in a way that just about anyone can understand.

Those are skills that need to be acquired. They are muscles that need to be exercised. And if you don’t have them, I’m still not convinced you’ll be able to prompt your way to success. Not in the long-term, anyway.

Every writer that uses words to earn a living knows they are in daily competition with people - clients usually - who think they can do the job themselves. Sometimes they can, because writing is the ultimate democratising device. You have a keyboard, and you can conquer the world.

But the writing itself is the easy part. It’s the end result after you’ve been through the hard work of knowing what you want to write about.

Writers earn their living through the value they add to a company's brand, their understanding of the business and its people, and the subtle art of talking to a subject matter expert and connecting them with the client in ways that can’t be faked or flattened.

And writers are not paid for the words they ultimately put on the page. They’re paid for the millions of choices made about the words that do not go on the page. Those are all judgements that mean the difference between leaving an indelible impression on a client or leaving them cold, because it reads like everything else.

I don’t want to sound all apocalyptic, or vengeful, but I do think a reckoning is coming. I think those firms that took the chance to replace writers with a writing tool might find that the tide will turn against them.

The success of The Odyssey this summer demonstrates that a good story, well told, will stand the test of time. And ever since the printing press was invented, the doors to who gets to tell those stories have been wide open.

Because people have wanted to hear other people tell stories for centuries, and the appetite for outsourcing this to a simulacrum simply isn’t there.