If Writing Is a Calling, Why Is It So Easy to Replace?

If you love to write, the work is its own reward, right? 

Getting paid for it is secondary. If it’s not a lot of money, that’s fine — you’re writing after all. Getting paid at all is a pleasant surprise. Anyhow, more money will follow if you’re good: if you’re talented enough, visible enough, or persistent enough.

The story we’re told about creative work is a romance. It’s heavy on the “creative” and light on the “work,” but it’s just that: a story.

The world is absolutely littered with underpaid creatives, and it’s not necessarily because they’re not trying. Some are super-talented, some are very visible, and others are doggedly persistent. 

In my experience, that last bunch is most likely to get paid, but even that isn’t certain. The most successful writers tend to be the ones who understand the business of creativity, who have connections, and those with a support system in place to help them get started. 

Writing has simply never existed outside of economics. Believing it does, however, persuades people to give away their labor while thanking the system for the privilege.

Who gets to write: a quick history

For a long time, the cost of creative work was hidden behind gatekeepers: editors, publishers, producers, institutions. Those groups (often homogeneous) decided whose work would be read. 

The result of this was that whole categories of people were told their work was niche. In publishing, this looked like putting every Black author in the African American section of the bookstore. In journalism, this looked like a monthly Women’s Voices section. Niche-ifying work sends a message: if your work is niche, it’s not expected to scale or generate capital. It exists off to the side somewhere, and you’re paid accordingly.

Then came the internet, which promised to democratize all voices. This worked, but introduced its own challenges. The gates fell…and so did the floor. Anyone could publish, but charging became more complicated. Exposure replaced pay. In many writing circles, pay seemed correlated to how enjoyable the work is. The more fun you’re having doing the work, the less you should expect to charge for it. After all, there are so many people willing to replace a pop culture writer. If you’re not making money writing on the internet, maybe you aren’t hustling hard enough. 

Now AI is here. It doesn’t burn out, it doesn’t want health insurance, it doesn’t ask inconvenient questions, and it’s inherited the biases of the systems that feed it.

Gen AI is absolutely changing the economy of writing. I see it as a freelance writer all the time. Suddenly LinkedIn is flooded with long-form posts that were clearly written by ChatGPT.  Entry-level writing gigs for content mills are becoming scarce. And most surprising to me so far: a respected content agency last year dismantled its stable of writers in favor of building an AI writing tool and offering that to its clients instead of the work of human writers.

AI and the voices of women 

While the AI-ification of writing affects writers of all genders, LLM models like ChatGPT are most likely to steal from women. How do I know? I asked. 

You know the ChatGPT cadence you’re seeing everywhere, from long LinkedIn posts to Facebook posts about adoptable pets? It’s a formula. When I asked ChatGPT which writers that cadence comes from, its answer was this: 

“That cadence does map to a demographic:

• Educated, professional class
• Politically left or left-adjacent, but wary of slogans
• Often women, or men shaped by feminist critique
• People whose power comes from competence, not charisma”

When I drilled down, ChatGPT went on to explain that its cadence is shaped by women and other marginalized groups because they “have had to argue for what is invisible without sounding aggrieved. The cadence is a survival strategy in institutions that reward calm competence and punish overt dominance.”

So there you have it. The voices most likely to be absorbed without credit by AI, are the same ones that were already underpaid and expected to be grateful for exposure. 

It’s a weird irony that ChatGPT itself values the tone of feminist work enough to copy it, while the market only cares that the work can be generated more quickly.

All of this affects who is able to write: 

• Who can afford to keep writing when the pay drops again? 
• Who has a safety net: a working partner or a job with benefits?
• Who knows the editors who have the budget for human writers? 
• Who is expected to write for love rather than for money? 

Feminism has always insisted that choice means very little if there’s no structural support. The same is true here; you can’t choose to write if the cost of choosing is insolvency.

So. What now? 

It’s not like humans are going to stop writing. Writing persists not because it is profitable, but because it is how power is named and negotiated. Whoever controls language controls legitimacy. AI can generate text, but it can’t decide what matters. 

This is where the economics may begin to shift again. 

In a flooded market, generic writing collapses in value — which is probably why entry-level content mill jobs have disappeared first. Context-rich writing will always be valuable. Writing that is embedded in lived experience, professional judgment, and ethical positioning is harder to replace, not because it is more beautiful, but because it is more expensive to fake. Feminism has long argued that situated knowledge matters and AI makes that argument unavoidable. The more automated the surface, the more valuable the depth beneath it.

Of course, this can’t resolve the payment problem on its own. Markets do not self-correct toward justice; they correct toward efficiency. If writers want to be paid, the work must be framed not as content, but as labor. We writers must all emphasize this in how we talk about our work, and  we can’t apologize for charging — even if we were socialized to apologize for everything. 

AI will continue to produce text; that isn’t the threat. The threat is a system that uses abundance as an excuse to erase the value of human judgment, especially when that judgment comes from people already trained to doubt themselves.

I don’t think the task ahead of us is to outproduce the machines. It’s never been about making more stuff. I think the task is to refuse the lie that production was ever the point. Our task is to tell the truth about what our work is worth, and insist on being paid accordingly.