On Writing For Humanity
No human is going to read this. No robot is going to care.
No one is going to read this. No one is going to read this because it is not being written with an algorithm in mind. It does not seek to please the search engine optimization gods. It is written by a person with the hope that another person will stumble upon and consume it. Perhaps that person will show it to another person, who will show it to yet another person.
These are words written for humanity. Is that pointless, in 2024, when everyone else strives to write for a robot — if they’re not asking a robot to write it for them in the first place?
Maybe. Maybe none of this matters. I’m no one. I’m just dumping words out of my brain and onto a digital page because I want to. Some days the urge to write is so strong that it feels more like an addiction.
The longer I’ve worked in online media, the more algorithm-compliant strategies we’ve collectively been asked to apply to our words. Until major corporations started replacing their people with AI, we — writers, editors — had to figure out how to write things for machines that still had souls. I got really good at that. With practice, tucking keywords neatly into prose becomes a subtle, often effective art form.
Now editors are being hired to take the nonsense AI generates and shape it into things written for machines that maybe still have souls.
I did not become a journalist to bow to machines.
Before I accidentally became a journalist, I was an aspiring novelist. I wrote stories about real people experiencing real human events and emotions. I have always been interested in people and why they do the things they do. It has served me well in both of my aspiring career paths. People are the center of every story. There are so many of us on this planet that everything we do has a ripple effect. Since we keep doing the same things over and over again, it’s easy to draw parallels between the humans of before and the us of the present. We can then use known patterns to predict what might happen to us next.
This is why I became a storyteller. To explore humanity, as a human being.
If I were optimizing this article to coax it onto the front page of Google, there would be subheadings. The headline would be longer. I would have disclosed in the first paragraph what makes me an authority on this topic (supposedly, I am a person; therefore, I am an expert on the subject of being a person).
Perhaps my bio would clarify that I am 10 years into my career and list a few of my accomplishments. There are a few, I think. Maybe not enough for Google to notice me, though.
But I wanted these words to have meaning. I’m not here to help you solve a problem — if I knew the solution to this existential crisis, I wouldn’t be writing about its devastation. I’m not here to explain how AI writes articles, or why SEO works if you follow the rules.
I am stunned by the knowledge that for the rest of my career — for as long as websites exist and need people creating and modifying words for them — the algorithm will be the audience. Not people.
How did we get here? How do we proceed?
The only prerequisite for calling yourself a writer is that you write — but at what point, in writing to appeal to a machine, do we stop being writers and instead become prisoners?
Writing is supposed to free us from pain and suffering. I have no desire to feel tangled and suffocated beneath words that no longer feel like my own.
There is only one thing to do while we wait for things to get worse.
I will just keep writing until someone is moved — because I like it; I need it; I also don’t know how else to cope.
Godspeed, fellow writers. May your words touch someone’s soul, if they so happen to stumble upon them in the wild.
