Why the world needs more human writers

For the very first test of GPTZero, I inputted a piece of writing from John McPhee, the legendary New Yorker writer who also happened to be my writing professor. He always told us, “No one will ever write in just the way you do” – and that has always stuck with me, reminding me why human writers are indispensable. Certain elements define us, our voice being one of them. Without human writers, there are no unique voices. 

McPhee’s renowned nonfiction seminar wasn’t just about learning to write well – it was conveying something real – something that algorithms, no matter how sophisticated, could never achieve. If we live in a world without unique voices, there will be no challenging of societal norms. There will be nobody to capture ideas that go against the status quo. 

In that world, writing morphs from an art form into a lifeless stream of algorithmic outputs – where there is no creativity or innovation in how we describe ideas to one another. If the world loses its human writers, we also lose the memory of writing as we know it, as it will cease to exist. 

Going beyond words

The essence of great writing transcends structure. Great observations come from a level of awareness and emotional awareness that LLMs can only mimic. LLMS are essentially stochastic parrots of human writers and are unable to create outputs of their own. It’s that inability to create that leads me to believe that if LLMs were in charge of creating all the writing in the world, we would miss out on this generation’s greatest writers. 

After all, if LLMs had existed in the 15th century, would we have had Shakespeare? While we might use different language, the essence of his work – the way he captures the corrupting influence of unchecked ambition in Macbeth; the intensity and all-consuming power of young love in Romeo and Juliet – is a brilliant observation of the human condition, which even the most sophisticated LLM cannot grasp. 

That’s because the value of human writing goes beyond the words itself. As Edgar Degas once said, “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” When we accept that LLMs simply can’t see – and only regurgitate – we can start to fully grasp the importance of keeping human writing alive.

The best writers don’t just change the way we describe the world; they change the way we see the world, and our place within it. They uncover new perspectives that we might not have considered, and they put into words what we might have suspected or felt but didn’t have the means to articulate. That clarity might be made up of words but goes deeper than the sentences themselves. 

The power of journalism 

Creating GPTZero was driven by a shared passion for journalism. Unlike most tech startups, which rely on the usual circle of San Francisco investors, we had media leaders themselves backing our vision. Notably, Mark Thompson – former CEO of the New York Times, former Director-General of the BBC, now the Chairman and CEO of CNN – became an investor, as well as Tom Glocer, the former CEO of Reuters. 

This was more than a vote of confidence: it was concrete affirmation that preserving what’s human is a mission that matters. At GPTZero, we’re committed to supporting journalists in uncovering truth, especially in an age where misinformation can spread unchecked. Through our partnership with NewsGuard, we worked to uncover the truth behind AI-driven content farms, and we supported The New York Times in an investigation of AI’s impact on Amazon’s books.

One particularly meaningful moment for me was speaking at Media Party last year, and I gave the same talk this year. It felt very journalistically relevant because it was at Pulitzer Hall. I shared GPTZero’s mission with journalists from all over, and it felt like coming full circle. 

I started my career in journalism, and even during my time at the BBC World Service in 2020-2021, I saw firsthand the mushrooming impact of AI. Back then, we were writing algorithms to detect AI-generated images and fake profile pictures going around social media during the election cycle. This brought home to me the importance of real reporting. Unlike ChatGPT, which can’t get live facts, journalists are the ones gathering information on the ground and making sense of it in real time. 

Journalism is a prime example of why we need human writers. Great journalism holds up a mirror to those who need to be held accountable. It involves probing, questioning, and understanding context. AI can gather data and summarize events, but it will never reassure a nation like Walter Cronkite or move a guest to tears like Diane Sawyer. 

Journalism in the 21st century is already under threat, with economic pressures slashing investigative reporting budgets worldwide, reducing the resources available to pursue in-depth stories. There might be more “news” than ever, but word-salads from bots can hardly be expected to maintain the journalistic integrity or ethical standards we’ve associated with the profession in decades gone by.

The danger of model collapse

George Orwell once said, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” This goes to the heart of why human writing is irreplaceable: it is intertwined with our ability to think critically and independently. The act of writing is an extension of the human mind, requiring analysis, reflection, and synthesis. 

It is through the process of writing that we communicate ideas while refining our own understanding of them. When we rely too heavily on AI-generated content, we risk losing the ability to think deeply and originally. Learning how to think is a muscle that starts to atrophy without use, on both an individual and collective level.

In a world devoid of human writing, our collective thought will become homogenized, guided by patterns learned from existing data rather than new insights. This is because writing is how we make sense of life’s complexities. No machine can replicate that, because it hasn’t lived a life. It’s merely been fed the observations of others. 

Technically, not even AI could survive in a world that’s all AI. This concept of model collapse is when AI-generated outputs become incoherent due to training data being mixed with repetitive, AI-generated content outputs with less diversity and depth. 

Today, many AI companies rely on us to help filter this issue. They’re contracting writers to create training data but face the problem of writers themselves using ChatGPT. So now, these companies are using tools like GPTZero to filter out AI-generated content and maintain quality. Research shows that training AI on other AI-generated data leads directly to model collapse – degrading the model’s quality and reducing its ability to create coherent responses. Basically, even AI needs human input to stay sharp!

Our mission to preserve what’s human

I visited my writing professor, John, a year after launching GPTZero. He looked at me and asked, “What do you think AI will do? Could it ever write like a human? Could it truly change content?” 

Then he asked, “Could AI ever tell you, ‘This is perfect. Keep it. Don’t change a word’?” I said I hadn’t come across a program capable of that. He smiled and said, “Aha—that’s the work of a good editor.”

From the start, our mission has been inspired by journalists and the human art of editing. Drafting is one thing, but elevating that and refining it into something brilliant requires skills that only humans can bring. You can never edit a piece to be better than AI if you are only using AI in your toolkit. 

What does our mission mean to us? It’s about celebrating the space where we make improvements in writing – and fiercely protecting and valuing the space for human work in a world of AI. Lastly, it is also about keeping the internet clean, and full of quality content. It’s about detecting and reducing disinformation and spammy content on the internet. 

In a world filled with fake AI-generated news, humans deserve the truth. GPTZero supports journalists by being more than an AI detector. We preserve what's human, bringing transparency to a world filled with AI content.