T. H. Mercer

The Funeral Was Last Decade

Writing communities are at war over artificial intelligence. The villain is satisfyingly legible: a technology that ingests human creativity and produces cheaper approximations of it. If you write with AI, you’ve felt the heat. You’ve been called a fraud, a scab, a collaborator in the destruction of a profession that matters.

But what if the profession everyone is defending was already dead before ChatGPT shipped? Not declining. Not under threat. Structurally gone, with the data to prove it.

The Collapse Predates the Technology

The clearest numbers come from British publishing, which has tracked author income for decades. Between 2006 and 2022, UK author median income fell 60% in real terms, from roughly £12,000 to £7,000. The percentage of full-time professional writers dropped from 40% to 19%. All of this happened before generative AI existed as a consumer product. When a 2025 survey shows 86% of authors claiming AI has harmed their earnings, those authors are describing conditions that have persisted since the mid-2000s. AI gave them a new name for it.

The mechanism was structural. Publishers consolidated and shifted resources toward potential blockbusters and viral candidates. The midlist author, the backbone of a sustainable literary economy for decades, lost advances, marketing support, and shelf space. Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory promised that digital distribution would let niche creators find their audiences profitably. What happened was closer to the opposite: Amazon’s algorithms preferentially surfaced bestsellers, the head grew faster than the tail, and self-publishing produced enormous volume with almost no viable livelihoods. The distribution didn’t flatten. It went Pareto: a few superstars at the top, a vast unprofitable tail at the bottom, and nothing in between.

There is no lateral move. A musician whose recordings stopped generating income could pivot to touring; being in a room with a live performer is an irreproducible experience. A character actor can build a resume over twenty years that generates consistent work. An author has no equivalent. A book is a fixed artifact. There is no night-by-night version of a novel that audiences attend. The compounding career is largely gone; each book resets to zero unless it goes viral.

By the time ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the social contract between writers and the publishing industry had already been voided. Develop your craft, build an audience, earn a modest living doing serious work: that was the promise. The economy had already broken every clause.

A Brief Aside on Legitimate Grievances

Two things can be true simultaneously. The structural collapse of writing as a profession predates AI, and some of the specific concerns about AI are worth fighting over. Training on copyrighted work without licensing raises legal questions that courts are actively adjudicating. The flood of low-effort AI content on retail platforms is a genuine pollution problem that degrades discoverability for everyone. These are real issues. They are also not what killed the profession, and conflating them with the structural collapse makes it harder to see what has actually happened.

AI as Accelerant

AI did not murder the writing profession, but it is accelerating the decomposition. The mechanism is price compression at the commodity end: AI-generated genre novels at $2.99 competing for algorithmic placement against human authors at $9.99. A race to the bottom in content valuation for anything readable but undifferentiated. It doesn’t touch Colleen Hoover. It obliterates the mid-tier genre writer who was already barely surviving on volume self-publishing.

The deeper problem is homogenization. AI trained on existing popular fiction optimizes systematically toward what has already sold. It regresses to the mean. The midlist author’s historical function in literary culture was never just commercial; it was evolutionary. Midlist writers took formal risks. They failed more often than they succeeded, and when they succeeded, they produced the next generation’s defining voices. They were the R\&D department of an entire art form. If that experimental layer disappears, replaced by AI commodity content at the bottom and proven IP at the top, the pipeline for genuinely new work dries up from both ends. The ecosystem stops renewing itself.

What the Furor Is Actually About

The anger in writing communities is misdiagnosed but emotionally legitimate. Writers are not angry about AI specifically. They are angry about the disappearance of any path that rewards the patient accumulation of craft. They got better over years. They did the work the culture told them to do. And the economy that was supposed to reward that work dissolved underneath them, quietly, across a decade and a half, with no single catastrophe to point to. AI is the catastrophe they were waiting for: visible, nameable, resistible. It is easier to fight a technology than to fight a Pareto distribution.

This is where the homogenization problem becomes your responsibility. If AI-assisted writing means prompting a model and smoothing the output, you are feeding the regression to the mean. You are producing more of what the training data already contains. The market does not need that; it is drowning in it. But if you are using AI the way any ambitious work gets written, taking formal risks the tool would never generate on its own, pushing toward structures and voices and concerns that the model has no template for, then shaping and reshaping until the result could not have been produced by the model alone, you are doing something the anti-AI crowd cannot see and the slop merchants will not attempt.

The human contribution is not editing AI prose. It is the willingness to reach for something the training data does not contain.

Writing as a practice will survive; humans need to make meaning through language regardless of economics. Writing as a profession is probably gone for good. AI showed up after the funeral and got blamed for the body.

The only question is whether what you build next is worth reading.

Sources