In this alternate timeline, Hemingway scheduled daily check-ins with his mental health bot, Kerouac optimised his schedule for his road trip using a habit tracker and Bukowski topped the New York Times Wellbeing list with 100 Reasons to Drink Water. With AI as their writing coach and babysitter, these literary giants might have been spared the torture of literature — and lived longer and happier lives.
AI is all about one thing — eliminating the jobs that nobody wants to do. Which is why your favourite writers drank to oblivion. Writing—real writing—is the process of assessing the various ways you have squandered your life, and overcoming self-loathing just enough to muster the energy to tap a few keys. It’s not a profession, it’s a slow death that rots you from the inside. Even the greats couldn’t out drink it.
Thankfully, with the increasing integration of AI into our daily lives, thousands of artists are being spared the agony of creativity all together. And for the rest of us—those who never understood literature in the first place, and spend our evenings online shopping, there are upsides too. As the publishing industry dries up, talented writers are being funnelled into their true calling—commercial copy. With writers armed with AI, we are entering into a golden age of SEO — optimized, monetized and dehumanized for your scrolling pleasure. And with the increased productivity of AI, writers will finally have spare time to enter their avatars into AI poetry slams.
AI isn’t killing writers, it’s actually keeping them alive.
From everyone at the Scrolletariat—keep writing like no one is reading.