AI will probably kill writing

Trying to make it through a week without spiralling totally about the future

Monday 7:56pm

My friend holly pulls up outside my house. I grab my bag and run to the car, only noticing as I reach for the door that I still have dirt under my fingernails from a fucking intense day digging and weeding the garden.

She drives chaotically into the city, swerving between lanes and braking erratically as we try to catch up on the last 7 months of each other’s lives.

“There were so many times there where I almost broke up with Ben,” she casually tells me.

“WHAT?! You defs kept that quiet,” I choke out.

She tells me having a kid is fucking hard on relationships. You don’t sleep. You don’t have sex. For three years she didn’t have a single night away from their kid, until she finally broke and booked a hotel in the city for two nights, alone.

I literally lay in bed for two days ordering room service. On the second day I fucking shat the bed — never trust a fart — which I blame on way too many truffle fries.

She makes this disclosure just as we pull up outside the stadium we play futsal in. I’m fucking nervous. I am never nervous before mixed futstal on a Monday night and I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s being away for seven months and worrying I’ll be rubbish on a new team. Or maybe it’s because a friend recently snapped his foot off — no exaggeration — and we’re all a bit scarred. Or it could be the effect of the huge weekend I had (I did find myself crying in a cafe for no reason this morning).

We start playing and suddenly the nerves are gone. I’m right here in the room. The bright lights overhead, the thud of the ball, the echo of footsteps on the court, the yelling, the whistle, the sweat dripping down my forehead and soaking my shirt—I feel so fucking alive. I’d forgotten how good this feels. The viscerality of it, the sensory overload, the oneness with your team.

We become like a singular organism, shifting shape together as we attack or defend; talking in shorthand as we figure out who we are to each other on the court. We win 5–4. I score one and set up two. I’m elated, and Holly and I sing to her dumb ABBA playlist the whole way home.

Tuesday 3:39pm

It seems like everyone has babies now, and so much of life is showing up and doing what you can to make their lives a bit easier. Meanwhile, I’m still wrestling with the garden—pulling out weeds, planting my summer veggies: tomatoes, eggplants, capsicums, corn, beans. Then the herbs: cilantro, basil, dill, rosemary. And of course watering and netting the raspberries, nectarines, and apricots.

I love gardening, and in my more romantic moments I imagine moving somewhere with cheap land, tending a garden and reading books all day. But I’ve spent enough time bouncing around small country towns to know I’d be bored and trapped within months. Still— a girl can dream.

My body is sore from soccer last night and from this morning’s run to my friend’s place for coffee. Google said it was 8km, but along the creek trail it’s closer to 14. He’s the one whose foot snapped off, and even six weeks later he can barely move. Like the unnamed protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, he spends his days in a painkiller-induced stupor. It’s fucked because he’s a musician, and he hasn’t been able to play gigs or earn anything since the accident.

Life is hard. Life is mean. The second you step off—or fall off—the escalator, capitalism punishes you.

Another friend arrives with their 18 month old kid. We sit out of the sun and I cut watermelon for us. Their kid is in that curious stage: wandering around putting things in his mouth, poking the dog, and then, when he’s bored, starting to cry and demanding attention.

When friends tell me they’re pregnant and keeping the baby, I’m always excited for them. But it’s a bittersweet excitement, because I know now that you lose part of your friendship once they become parents. Their time gets chopped into blocks between feeds, daycare pickups, school runs. Gone are the impromptu park hangs and unplanned after work dinners or beers.

They tell me it’s been a hard 18 months. They feel like they no longer own their body—their boobs brutalised by feeding, their body something to be crawled over, grabbed at, or hit whenever he wants attention. Being back at work has helped their sense of identity a bit, but their sex life is entirely gone, and so is any concept of free time.

They laugh that just a few years ago they were hospitalised for taking too many drugs and how they’re in bed by 8pm every night. Change is weird.

Do I want kids? I don’t know. I always think “probably, one day,” but the future keeps closing in and I’m no closer to an answer. It looks gruelling. It looks brutal. My friend says some days they regret it so deeply they feel trapped in a life folding in around them. And other days they feel a kind of euphoria they never knew was possible.

There’s watermelon everywhere, and he starts crying again, and they say it’s time for them to leave.

Wednesday 9:41pm

We’re all multiple drinks deep at this point. The remnants of dinner are spread across the table, empty wine glasses and bottles dotted around the room. Outside, the last faint echo of the sunset lingers, but the street lamps have come on, pouring warm orange light into the kitchen.

I love this moment in a dinner party, when the food is over and everyone is stuck in conversation. One friend has just finished a project on how AI will impact education and is consulting now. He says he’s genuinely worried about what AI means for the next generation of kids. We all feel we have a stake in it: one of us is head of the English teachers’ association, one’s a university lecturer, one’s a digital rights activist, another works in the arts. Generative AI is coming for all of us.

It’s too hot and we’ve all had too much to drink. Faces flushed, the windows thrown open, debate about whether we need to put the air conditioner on. But we all agree on one thing: generative AI will kill writing.

For centuries, the ability to write has been a gatekeeper. But that’s shattered now. Writing feels meaningless. Anyone can type a few prompts into a machine and it churns out decent prose—yes, it’s overdone, and yes, it loves the em dash (but so do I, so who am I to complain).

My friend says hiring has become impossible. He used to get twenty applications; now he gets hundreds, all clearly generated by feeding a resume and selection criteria into ChatGPT. Everything looks the same. Nothing stands out. Another friend jumps in, shouting over him, saying her students’ essays are so banal and generic now—so clean they feel entirely machine-made. Gone are the spelling mistakes or little grammatical slips. It’s all so drab.

I say writing is romantic to me, and I don’t want to read something generated by a machine. What do we lose when we outsource creativity to a program that’s essentially just guessing the next word?

Sometimes writing is the only way I can coalesce my thoughts into anything coherent. There’s something so challenging, and so human, about sitting there, staring at a blank page, trying to piece together a love letter or a resignation letter or an essay you care about. I don’t want that to disappear into the ether.

We agree we’re on the wrong side of history, and that just as capitalism ruined so much of what we loved—the early, chaotic internet—generative AI will kill writing too.

My friend’s boyfriend comes home. We’re all in a flow and he’s not on the level. He keeps trying to talk about himself, dragging the conversation endlessly back to him. We keep weaving the threads to keep it moving, but he tangles every single one. Shared glances around the table. Subtle eye signals. And then, en masse, we leave.

The night is warm and the air hugs us as we make our way to the station, talking too loudly on a suburban street while dogs bark and cyclists stream past.

We circle the same question: if everyone can write at the same level now, what’s the value of writing at all?

Thursday 11??pm

I feel A pull up the covers and slip into her side of the bed. I hadn’t realised I’d fallen asleep, but it makes sense— being outside in the sun earlier had baked a heaviness into my body that I couldn’t shake.

Mostly still asleep, I feel A press up against me. She rolls me over and starts kissing me. Hard and deliberate. My brain lags behind my body as I start to come alive. To move and to feel her.

“No, you’re not allowed to move,” she whispers, pushing me back down.

My body wakes up, even as my brain drifts as though in a fever dream. She grabs me—too hard. She always does when she’s really horny.

I disobey and touch her, running my hands down her back as she sits on me, tracing the curve of her hips. Her weight presses her butt into my stomach. I love the feeling of cool skin on a hot summer night.

She forces me back down onto the bed and I lie there, still half asleep.

Eventually, I gasp, and it’s over.

I never fully wake, but afterwards it takes me ages to fall asleep again. I lie there in the hot summer night, suspended in that liminal space between awake and asleep. I feel the cotton rubbing against my skin as I turn over, and I kick the duvet off as I feel the thick heat pressing down on me.

Friday 8:43am

I’m walking my dog again after months and months away from her. She’s so excited to be home, pulling at the lead, trying to inhale every smell on every fence and tree.

It’s so nice to have a home and be around the people you love.