Is Writing Turning into Rewriting in the Age of the Chatbot?

Anyone who has had much experience of writing knows that it is hard, time-consuming work, which is why anyone who buys a book "by" a celebrity who takes it for granted that the celebrity on the cover actually wrote it is very, very ignorant, gullible, or both.

One reason for this is that writing is in large part rewriting, a notoriously tedious and painful process.

Still, as people increasingly rely on chatbots to generate "content," with the artificial intelligence pouring out lots of words that they must then polish, the polishing seems likely to be ever more of what it means to "write."

In considering the situation we should remember two truisms about writing, namely:

1. You can't rewrite well unless you know how to write well in the first place--and people do not pick up that skill just cleaning up chatbot content.

2. Most people who take pleasure in writing at all take pleasure in the experience of writing, not the rewriting, which they are apt to experience as a chore, and want as little as possible to do with.

Together 1. and 2. mean that increasingly relying on chatbots for text creation will leave people with less of the skill needed to polish that created text--and the wherewithal to go about that polish properly (which comes down to a readiness to tough out the tedious, painful process because they care about the quality of the content). The result may well be a decline in the quality of written content from what we get today--especially if the required skills go faster than the improvement in chatbot functioning that would make up for them.