Rage Against the Writing Machine

July 16, 2025

On the 12th August 1981, IBM's first Personal Computer was introduced, setting a mass market standard for PC architecture. The personal computer arrived like a quiet revolution. In 1982 The PC was named Machine of the Year by Time magazine. Compact, blinking, and brimming with promise, machines like the IBM PC and Apple II promised to make writing faster, more efficient, and less prone to human error. But not everyone rejoiced.

Some writers, famously creatures of habit, pushed back. Ray Bradbury, for one, reportedly rejected the idea of composing on anything other than a typewriter. Others feared that word processors would encourage laziness, clutter prose, or break the intimate link between thought and the tactile rhythm of keys and paper. To many, a computer seemed cold, mechanical, and too detached from the messy humanity of storytelling. The machine, they argued, could not possibly understand the subtle dance between a writer’s mind and the page.

Today, a similar resistance echoes across the literary world, but this time, the machine isn't just helping with spelling, formatting or storage. It's writing.

Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT and others are now capable of producing essays, poetry, dialogue, even full drafts of novels. And again, many writers are up in arms. But this time, the stakes feel higher. Critics argue that AI threatens the very soul of authorship. If a model trained on millions of texts can produce readable prose in seconds, what does that mean for originality, voice, and creative labor? Who owns a story written by a machine? Does using AI cheapen the act of writing, or democratise it?

There’s also the fear of the erosion of craft, of careers, of the deeply personal struggle that defines what it means to write. Just as 1980s purists feared that spellcheckers and copy & paste would dilute the writer’s discipline, today’s authors worry that AI may turn writing into a kind of writer's fast food, abundant, convenient, and ultimately less nourishing.

History offers a humbling lesson. The computer did not destroy writing, it changed it. Writers who once clung to typewriters eventually embraced laptops. Editing became more flexible, publishing more accessible. Blogging and digital journalism flourished. The machine became part of the process, not the end of it.

Might the same happen with AI?

For every critic, there are writers using AI as a creative partner, to brainstorm, to break writer’s block, or to translate ideas across styles and genres. Used thoughtfully, AI can be a powerful and precise aide, but still guided by a human hand. The truth is, every generation of writers faces its own machine. And every generation must decide to resist or adapt, without losing the soul of storytelling.

It’s not the tool that tells the story. It’s the person behind it.

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