For me, it’s after 5 PM on Monday night and I’m at work, just finishing up. I was thinking about this question when it hit me: AI will push authors to write more personally. I told ChatGPT that I think old-school writing — the kind that stays distant, careful, and mostly third person — will start to feel like a classic style from another era. We went back and forth and landed on a few interesting thoughts. They are still my thoughts, but AI helped me sharpen them.
Pre-AI writing is not wrong. Not bad. Just older. Still useful, of course, especially in academic and formal writing. But maybe no longer the default voice people reach for when they want to connect.
Why? Because AI can already produce polished writing on demand. It can organize, explain, and even imitate writing styles fairly well. That changes the value of writing.
When polished explanation becomes cheap, what becomes more valuable is presence.
AI can mimic, but you are you. Embrace your prose, voice, and tone. Prose is the ordinary flow of language, the simple stream of words we use to explain, argue, remember, and tell our stories. AI can mimic almost any style of prose, but your prose belongs to you. Seek out your words and embrace them.
Voice is the personality inside the words, the part that sounds like you and no one else. Sure, AI can mimic personality too, and that is exactly why your personality needs to come through in your writing.
Tone is the attitude carried by that voice, whether warmly positive, sharply critical, or distant. And yes, AI can take a tone toward something, and that is okay. But your writing is still your tone. Your view. Your position. That is where the human fingerprint remains.
I think we all will increasingly gravitate toward what feels lived-in. Real stories. Real memories. Real perspective. The sentence,
“Water expands when it freezes,”
is useful. But the sentence,
“I remember staring at a cracked garden hose and realizing winter had just taught me a lesson in physics,”
carries a person inside it. That difference matters.
So yes, I think AI will change prose. Not by destroying good writing, but by changing what stands out. The more machines can produce polished distance, the more human readers may hunger for voice, warmth, and lived experience. That means writing with “I,” “we,” and “my friend.” The personal will carry more weight than it used to. Not because facts matter less, but because human presence matters more.
In that sense, classic impersonal prose may become more niche: still respected, still needed, but no longer the only model of “serious” writing. The future may belong more and more to writing that blends accuracy with personality, structure with story, and insight with a real human voice. The story is still mine. The memory is still mine. The voice, if I do it right, is still mine.
So maybe that is the real answer.
AI will not end writing. But it may push human writers to sound more human.