It Doesn’t Matter If AI Wrote It
Does it?
My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
Every couple of days, someone on the internet loses their mind about AI writing.
“People will flood the web with garbage.”
“No one will care about craft anymore.”
“Everything sounds the same.”
We’ve all heard the complaints. Some of us made them. I sure did. And yes, there is plenty of AI trash out there. Pleeenty…
But the internet wasn’t full of original masterpieces before AI came along, either, was it?
That’s not the point of this story, though. We’ll get to that.
Why the AI hate?
The writers who love to write (well) usually hate AI.
And I get it. We have never had more competition, more noise, or more tools messing with the idea of what writing even is.
Half the internet is automated, half is soulless, and the rest is either trying to sell us something or insisting that they don’t use AI.
But all of this noise and complaining hides the fact that it really doesn’t matter at all if AI wrote anything.
Does it?
Before we answer, let’s talk about something else.
What people are actually afraid of
Most writers aren’t afraid of AI becoming “too smart”, I think.
Or we are, but not in terms of writing or creating, but in terms of AI becoming dangerous to us.
That fear I get.
But when we talk about AI writing and creating, we creators are usually afraid of AI making it harder to stand out.
If anyone can draft a clean paragraph with AI, where does that leave the hours we spent developing our style, tone, and voice?
If anyone can explain a topic in seconds, what happens to people who relied on being the explainer?
If anyone can sound polished, do we still need to be good?
That’s the fear under all the loud arguments. Not so much craft. More so ethics. And relevance.
Another fear I totally understand.
We worry that our identity as writers gets diluted the moment a model can produce something close to what we do.
Writing isn’t about the writer
But the thing is, writing isn’t about the writer.
Most of us writers judge writing from the inside out. We care how it was made. We care how long it took. We care about the process. Because we have a similar process.
But the internet doesn’t work that way. Books don’t work this way. Newspapers don’t work like this.
Never have. Why? Because of the readers. Readers don’t care how Stephen King wrote the book, they care about the effect.
Readers don’t see drafts.
Readers don’t measure effort.
Readers don’t grade process.
Unless the reader is a writer, they only see the final thing.
One page. One post. One story. One book.
Nothing else comes really through the screen. And nothing else matters. Metallica was right.
When we obsess about whether something was typed by hand or assisted by AI, we’re focusing on something unimportant.
The moment things click
Let’s flip the perspective for a second.
Think of the last piece you read that really stayed with you. Something that made you think differently or hit you emotionally, helped you with an issue, or just made your day a bit better.
Did you stop at the end and wonder: “Was this human or AI?”
Probably not. Maybe we writers do. But a “normal” reader? Not so much.
And I guarantee you, some of those pieces were written by AI.
Writing is not about who made it. Writing is about what it does to the person reading it.
We writers don’t get to decide what’s valuable. Readers do.
We can complain all we want. All the while, AI is winning readers.
What readers really pay attention to
Readers don’t analyze process. They read. And feel the impact.
Depending on the topic, they care about clarity, about emotion, about insight, about relevance, about whether the piece earned their time.
They don’t care who wrote it.
A story that hits, hits. A guide that helps, helps. A joke that lands, lands.
Whether AI wrote it or not.
This doesn’t mean everything AI produces is good. We all know it isn’t. Not even close. Which is great news for us writers. We are still miles ahead of AI writing in so many aspects.
But we have to know that readers don’t grade the tools.
The Bottom Line
The definition of “writing” is starting to blur, isn’t it?
The debate about whether writing “counts” if AI was involved misses the only thing that has ever mattered:
Readers decide the value of writing, not the writer and not the workflow.
Readers don’t care about the tool, they care about the effect. They care about what a piece gives them, teaches them, or makes them feel.
And in some cases, AI can do that perfectly well. Luckily for us, it sucks in most cases. For now.
I've read deeper thinking on this. And I'm tired of these reductive takes.
You say readers don't care how something was written—only what it does to them. That process is invisible, irrelevant. Effect is all that matters.
But you're collapsing two different things into one.
Readers don't "think" about process. That's true. But there's a difference between not thinking about something and not feeling it.
You write: "Readers don't see drafts. Readers don't measure effort. Readers don't grade process." True. But they absolutely feel whether someone was present while making it. Whether the work has integrity.
Not consciously. Deeper than that. In the nervous system. In the rhythm of a sentence. In the spaces between words. In whether the writer was actually attending to what's true or optimizing for what works.
Nora Bateson calls this the difference between "cold data" and "warm data." Cold data is quantitative, decontextualized—metrics, measurable effects. Warm data is relational, embodied, contextual—the qualitative truth of how something actually lands in a human being. The tone of voice. The pace. The presence.
Your entire argument is cold data.
What I'm describing is warm data.
And you can't measure warm data the way you measure effect. But it's the only thing that actually changes people.
That's what's missing from your frame. You're treating presence as decoration—something invisible that doesn't matter because readers don't analyze it. But presence is the material. It's in the grain of the work itself.
A piece can work... it can affect, land, clarify. But there's a difference between something that lands and something made with real attention to what's true. Readers feel that difference in their bodies, even if they can't name it.
This is why your argument about AI only works if you accept your reductive frame. An AI can optimize for effect. It can produce something that lands. But can it carry presence? Can it embody the warm data of human attention?
Your answer is: readers don't care, so it doesn't matter. But that's only true if you've already decided that presence is irrelevant. If you've already flattened everything into measurable effect.
I've spent twenty years watching this as a coach and mindfulness teacher. People don't return because something "worked" on them. They return because they felt that someone was actually there... that the care was real, that the attention was genuine. That presence moved through the work whether they were analyzing it or not.
That's what we're potentially losing. Not craft. Not process as technique. But the human witnessing. The warm data. The irreplaceable thing.
You're right that writing isn't about the writer. But it's also not only about effect. It's about what happens in the space between a human being present and another human being willing to receive that presence.
And readers feel that. Always. Even when they don't know they're feeling it.
Authenticity isn't invisible just because we're not thinking about it. It's in everything. It changes the frequency of what reaches people.
And that matters more than metrics ever will.