Evolution refers to the gradual changes that occur in living organisms as their bodies adjust to shifts in their environment. In biology, this happens through natural selection. Organisms adapt, survive, and pass on traits that help them cope with new realities. Strangely, something similar is happening in the world of writing today. What we once knew as a stable craft has been thrown into a whirlwind of transformation, all thanks to the rapid rise of generative AI.
Since the evolution of generative AI, the writing community has been in significant agitation. In other words, the changes have been quite disruptive. Many writers have lost their source of living. I personally have lost a major source of my income. Why should anyone pay you when they can generate something better within a couple of seconds using the right prompt?
Those who used to trust your writing are now in constant doubt as to whether you used AI or otherwise. Many human-written posts are now touted as AI-written. No thanks to the so-called AI detectors. I've seen different testimonies of people spending several days and nights carving original content, only for an AI detector to flag their work, sometimes as high as 99%.
The result? Evolution of writers and their writings.
Personally, my writing has evolved greatly as a direct effect of AI evolution. Do I now write better? Not necessarily. Do other writers who have also adjusted not to appear AI-like now write better? Not necessarily. Nowadays, posts are judged to be original when they are not perfect. I mean, how dare a mortal man write a post without typos and fanciful vocabulary? In fact, some people go as far as concluding a post is AI-written once they see certain words in your posts.
Those words belong to AI, not humans. After all, AI was not trained with human-written posts.
So, where do we move from here? Much damage has been done to us. I am someone for whom writing comes naturally. I think better once I get to my keyboard. But we are in an era where we could become endangered. Is our creativity going obsolete? Do we continue on this path, or does something have to change?
What makes it worse is that this storm is everywhere. Even academia is not left behind. I have an intention of reviving my moribund PhD by next year, and I can't help thinking about the challenges ahead. Imagine spending weeks writing a conference or journal paper, only for it to be labeled as AI-written.
The fear alone is enough to drain one’s enthusiasm. Scholars now worry that originality is no longer measured by depth of thought but by the imperfections AI detectors (humans or machines) expect to see. It’s heartbreaking to think that genuine intellectual effort might be dismissed because an algorithm decided it “sounds too good.”
Yet, despite the chaos, I believe something deeper is happening. Writers are learning to rediscover their voices. Those messy, emotional, imperfect, and beautifully human. We’re being pushed to reflect on why we write in the first place. For me, writing has always been more than producing content; it is how I think, breathe, and make sense of the world. And no machine, no matter how polished its output, can replicate that internal journey.
Still, it doesn’t erase the reality that many of us feel cornered. The ground is shifting under our feet, and we don’t know where we will land. But maybe evolution works this way. Species don’t always survive unchanged. It could be that they transform into something stronger, more adaptable, and unexpectedly brilliant.
Perhaps that is where we are headed. Not extinction, but transformation. Writers may be bruised, doubted, or even misjudged. But we are still here, creating and fighting for our space.
And maybe, just maybe, that fight is where the real evolution begins.