There’s always someone announcing that AI writing is slop.
Usually in a comment, usually with some variation of “you can always tell”.
I read a lot of those.
What strikes me isn’t the argument, since the argument is mostly aesthetic.
It’s how familiar the shape of it is.
Every significant tool change gets the same reception, in roughly the same words, from people who are genuinely skilled at the thing being changed.
🐴 The complaint has a long history
Motor cars were unreliable, noisy, frightened the horses.
All true at the time.
Telephones were criticised as intrusive, impersonal, no substitute for a properly written letter.
Also fair.
Typists said word processors would produce sloppy work, since nothing forced you to get it right first time.
Arguably correct.
Photographers said digital lacked soul.
Illustrators said the same about design software.
Every one of those people had real expertise, plus a real point about what was being lost.
Every one of them was also on the losing side of the argument within about a decade.
Not because they were wrong about the trade-offs.
Because the trade-offs stopped mattering once the tool got good enough.
🚗 The road is the same
Here’s what the horse-and-cart comparison actually gets right.
Nobody’s changing the destination.
The job is still moving from where you are to where you need to be.
The person in the cart isn’t wrong about the journey.
They’re right about it, in detail, from 40 years of experience.
They’re just going to arrive later.
That’s the whole disagreement, really.
Not whether the work matters.
Whether you’re willing to change the vehicle.
😰 Most resistance isn’t about quality
The stated objection is usually output quality.
I think the real one sits underneath that.
If your professional identity rests on producing polished prose, then something producing serviceable prose in 30 seconds feels personal.
That’s not irrational.
It’s a reasonable reaction to watching a skill you spent 20 years building get partially commoditised.
Nobody says “this threatens my sense of myself”, though.
They say “the output is soulless”.
Both things can be true at once.
Only 1 of them explains the intensity of the reaction.
🔧 What actually happens when you use it
I’ve been a technical writer on and off for nearly 20 years.
Here’s my honest experience.
The tools handle the parts of the job that were never the point.
- Turning a 50 minute recording into structured notes
- First drafts of procedures, release notes, reference guides
- Reformatting into a different template
- Checking terminology across 40 pages
- Producing 5 draft examples so 1 usable one emerges
- Finding gaps across a documentation set nobody’s read end to end
None of that output is publishable.
All of it removes the friction of starting, which is where most of the week used to disappear.
My day is now mostly verification, judgement, final polish.
Which is where the value always sat.
🎯 The skill that survived
None of these tools know that a field name was guessed rather than confirmed.
They can’t tell that “approved by management” means something different in each department.
They don’t notice a step depending entirely on 1 person who’s been there 14 years.
They can’t recognise that a 5 page procedure is evidence of an interface problem, not a writing problem.
Text that reads confidently is harder to check than text that reads awkwardly, since nothing signals a problem.
So experienced practitioners matter more now, not less.
We’re the only quality control in the process.
That’s a better job than the one I had, honestly.
✅ Nobody’s coming to convince you
If someone wants to spend their remaining working years defending the old method, that’s a legitimate choice.
I’d just point out what refusing actually achieves.
It doesn’t preserve the profession.
It doesn’t slow anything down.
It means doing the same work more slowly than whoever’s competing with you for the next contract.
The technology arriving isn’t a referendum you get to vote in.
It’s just weather.
You can be scared of what you haven’t tried, which is fair enough.
Or you can spend a fortnight learning it properly, then decide.
Most people who do the second thing stop making the first argument.
About the author
Aiver Ilaya is an IT consultant based in Melbourne. For 19 years he’s worked on enterprise digital transformation programs. His experience spans ITSM, HRIS, ERP, CRM, POS, KMS and EDRMS platforms, plus workflow automation. He has worked across government, healthcare, science and medical research, finance, education, telecommunications, infrastructure, aviation, construction and property, technology, retail, logistics, pharmacy, insurance and professional services.
His work covers business analysis, process optimisation, technical writing, knowledge management and UI / UX design. He has worked on multi-million dollar programs running years at a time, for national organisations and global firms, reaching millions of end users.
He has run his own consultancy for 12 years and works with a small number of clients at a time. Available for remote and hybrid contracts.
alisodigital.com
