The Organization of the Future Still Needs Tech Writers Who Can Roll Their Eyes

AI may generate, but people still drive (and tech writers still navigate)

Every time I open LinkedIn these days, someone is announcing that AI has taken their job, or worse, that AI has taken their soul. They don’t say it quite like that, but the melodrama is there: “I used to write copy, but now ChatGPT does it in 30 seconds.” Cue ominous violin music.

As a technical writer, I can’t help but laugh. Not because it isn’t serious—it is—but because most of us know the dirty little secret: the hardest part of this job has never been “writing words.” If it were, we’d have been replaced long ago by marketing interns with liberal arts degrees and a case of LaCroix. The real challenge is making sense of a world where nothing stays still long enough to document it.

Enter generative AI, the latest character in our tragicomic office play.