Writers are worrying about AI taking their livelihoods. But unless you were already writing like a robot, that’s not how it works.

Now is a truly fantastic time to be writing. The future is absolutely wide open for the first time in a more than a century. That’s because the idiom of the whole culture is transforming and it’s up to us to change it.

Just as no one these days writes like Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy or Louisa May Alcott, in ten years time, no one will be writing the way we do now. Large language models (LLMs) have taken our entire idiom and trashed it. And that’s a good thing. Our prose, and therefore the prose of AI, sounds like it’s still living in the Twentieth Century. But it’s well past time for radically new ways of speaking, writing and therefore being.

The key driver is simply fashion. What seems amazingly cutting-edge today will rapidly go stale. AI prose (which imitates our older siblings) is about to taste like last week’s dinner.

But we’re not just dreaming of what comes after content - it’s also time to seize the means of containment.

Since AI is now providing all the ‘content’ the container industry can ever handle (i.e. all the content platforms without exception), we’re now free to make new human-shaped places beyond its reach.

We’re inventing both what AI can’t say, and where it can’t say it, so let’s go!