With all the research coming out saying that no, it doesn’t, you’d think my answer would be a definite no.

Instead, I’m going to be annoying and say: It depends.

For AI to help you accelerates work, the user needs to use it the right way.

Yes, it all depends on how well the user uses AI, and also, whether the user has the domain expertise in their field to ensure that what comes out of AI doesn’t require extensive rework.

I can only speak from my personal experience.

For me, I think AI does accelerate writing work but not in the way you think. (Meaning: Generate reams of text and voilà, work is over.)

The main benefit of AI for me is that it eases cognitive burden. That it allows writers to create without burning out. Writers like me, anyway, whose day job involves writing cognitively demanding copy about highly technical concepts 😅.

In the past, my work took so much cognitive and creative energy out of me that there was often nothing left for my personal creative work. So, I often had to sacrifice my personal writing.

If my blog, newsletters, or social media posts drop off – it’s usually a sign that things got so busy at work that there’s little energy or creative juice left for me to create for myself.

However, these days, these furloughs are getting rarer, and this is due to the ability of AI to now help me with things that drain me, I can focus on things that matter to me.

I like writing so AI is never going to be my ghostwriter; I won’t let it take that away from me.

That’s part of the reason why I don’t pay for AI services because I don’t really rely on it to generate much text.

Writers often subscribe to models if they want to generate a lot of text as the free versions do not generate a large amount of text.

The open source Deep Seek is enough for me, because I use it mostly for planning, organizing my thoughts and to do detail-oriented work like editing. I also realize that I like to dictate my writing and I often use AI to help me organize my thoughts. And then I fix it by rewriting it. This has accelerated my blogging and writing by quite a bit.

Oddly, I can’t do all this with fiction. I find it too weird to dictate a scene, so if I do use an AI transcriber like Otter.ai, it’s usually to flesh out the story beats for my chapter, and then use AI as a sophisticated swipe file to start my writing.

And yes, I still write my fiction with my own fingers!

With that cognitive savings I gained from using AI, I can now write fiction, or my newsletters and Cdrama reviews without feeling like I am draining my brain dry or burning out every month.

So I think AI doesn’t exactly accelerate my work per se. (Because I do rewrite extensively, and some argue that it’s just faster to write from scratch instead of rewriting and editing like crazy.)

What AI does is that it enables me to produce more because I am no longer exhausted as quickly or as often. I imagine in the days of yore (like a few years ago before Gen AI was publicly available), people would hire personal or writing assistants for all the tasks I’m outsourcing to AI.

How does that translate to the corporate world?

I foresee that in the future, writing teams for corporations will be much leaner. They will be staffed by people who are adept at using AI to create content; AI will be the copywriting juniors or interns. Writers are still needed, but they will have more strategic roles. They manage content workflows, plan, strategize content pipelines and ensure editorial quality.

But the question is, how do juniors become these people? Because expertise is something that gives AI users an edge. Without expertise, you won’t recognize quality copy.

That’s the biggest dilemma of the day – how do we give younger writers the training they need to be strategic writers and editors of the future?