The Unbearable Sadness of Writing for the Machine

Writing used to feel like cooking a meal for someone.

You didn’t just throw ingredients together. You thought about who would taste it, what would make them pause, what flavors would linger. You plated it carefully. And somewhere, someone sat down, took their time, and savored what you made.

I remember the first time I wrote something and felt it land. Not in metrics. Not in engagement rates. But in that quiet, almost spiritual sense that someone, somewhere, had read what I wrote and felt something shift inside them. Even if only slightly. Even if only for a moment.

I think about that a lot these days. Because somewhere along the way, the reader stopped being human.

And I don’t mean that dramatically. I mean it in the most ordinary, bureaucratic, Tuesday-afternoon kind of way. The reader just quietly changed shape. It became an algorithm. A crawler. A language model being trained on everything we’ve ever written.

And we kept writing anyway, adjusting our posture to fit the new audience, barely noticing that human eyes had left the room a while ago.

The Golden Age We Didn’t Know Was Golden

There was a time when the internet felt like a campfire. People gathered around it and told stories. Blogs were messy and personal and full of subtle grammatical sins, and nobody cared much because the point was never perfection. It was conveying the message and connect in the process.

It’s not even a long time ago. You wrote because you had something to say, and you trusted that someone out there wanted to hear it.

And yes, even then, SEO existed. We learned to push keywords like seasoning. We learned that headlines mattered, that meta descriptions were tiny billboards for our thoughts.

But even when we optimized, we optimized with a human destination in mind. Google was just the doorway. The reader was still in the room.

Walter Benjamin wrote about this in a different context.

In his essay The Storyteller, he mourned the decline of storytelling in the age of information. He argued that when experience is replaced by data, something essential dies. The aura of the story, its warmth, its capacity to lodge itself in the listener’s memory, all of it fades. He was writing in 1936, and somehow, he was writing about us in 2026.

Because that golden age of blogging, of writing for humans who stumbled upon your words and carried them home like a pebble from the beach, that age is mostly gone now.

And the worst part is that we didn’t even get to say goodbye.

When did the Audience Become an Algorithm?

The shift happened in two waves, and understanding the difference between them is important.

The first wave was the SEO.

Google taught us that if we wanted to be found, we had to write in a certain way, use the right keywords, structure our headings properly, and answer the questions people were actually asking. It was constraining, sure, but it was still fundamentally a human game.

You wrote for the algorithm so that the algorithm could deliver you to a person. The machine was the middleman, not the endpoint.

The second wave is Artificial Intelligence.

This is where we are now, and it feels qualitatively different from anything we’ve ever encountered.

Today, I produce product-driven content knowing that it might never be read by a potential customer directly. Instead, it’ll be ingested into a knowledge base, fed into an RAG pipeline, and served up by an AI chatbot in fragments.

I build messaging frameworks that aren’t meant to inspire a human copywriter but to train a large language model on how our brand “sounds.”

I add FAQs not for the frustrated customer scrolling at midnight, but for the machine that will synthesize my answers into something the customer never asked for in quite that way.

The human reader is no longer the destination. They are, at best, a secondary audience.

And we’ve got to live with it.

The Craft That Gets Lost

Here is what I grieve most specifically. Not the abstract philosophical loss, but the concrete, tactile loss of craft.

Good writing breathes. It has rhythm and texture and the planned silence that makes the message land harder. It uses metaphor not as ornament but as a way of seeing. It trusts the reader to catch the subtext, to read between the lines, to sit with ambiguity and find their own meaning there.

Machines don’t need any of that. Machines need structure, clarity, and tokens. They need explicit definitions, consistent terminology, and sentences that parse cleanly into vectors.

They reward the literal and punish the ambiguous. They have no use for irony, no patience for the unsaid.

And so, slowly, we adapt. We start writing in ways that are machine-friendly. Shorter sentences. Simpler structures. Every concept defined, every term explained, every nuance flattened into something a model can swallow without choking.

George Orwell warned about this in Politics and the English Language. He wrote about how language becomes ugly and imprecise when it is used as an instrument of control rather than expression. But what we’re doing now goes beyond what Orwell imagined. We’re de-humanizing it. We’re stripping out exactly the qualities that make writing worth reading. Its personality, its strangeness, its refusal to be pinned down.

And the saddest part is that nobody asks us to do this explicitly. There’s no memo that says “write worse.” It’s just the gravitational pull of the new audience.

When you know a machine is your primary reader, you begin to write like a machine without even noticing. The voice flattens. The music fades. The words still function, but they stop living.

The Product Writer’s Quiet Crisis

I want to bring this closer to home. Because I’m not writing about this from some ivory tower. I’m writing about it from the inside, as someone who writes for a living, who crafts messaging and product content, who sits at the intersection of language and commerce every single day.

The shift has been subtle but unmistakable. The briefs I used to receive said things like “make the customer feel confident” or “tell a story about why this matters.” They were human briefs for human audiences. The writing I produced was meant to land in someone’s chest, to make them pause, to move them one step closer to caring.

Now the briefs say things like “optimize for the AI assistant” or “ensure the knowledge base can retrieve accurate answers.” The audience isn’t a person anymore. It’s a pipeline. My words go into a system, get chunked into embeddings, and resurface as fragments in a chatbot’s response. The customer never sees my sentences. They see the machine’s paraphrase of my sentences, which is a different thing entirely.

And this has created a quiet crisis among the writers I know. Not the dramatic crisis of job loss, though that fear is real too. But a subtler, more existential crisis. A crisis of purpose. Because when you became a writer, you did it because you believed in the power of words to reach people. You believed that language was a bridge between minds. And now you find yourself building bridges that lead not to another mind but to a server rack.

Nobody talks about this much. It feels too small, too inside-baseball, too self-indulgent to mourn. But it’s real. And it sits in my chest like a stone every time I open a document titled “AI Knowledge Base Content” and start writing for an audience that will never feel a thing.

The Rebellion of Writing for Humans Anyway

And yet. And yet.

I refuse to end on despair, not because I’m optimistic by nature but because I think despair is what the machine wants. Not literally, of course. Machines don’t want anything. But the system, the logic of optimization, the gravitational pull toward efficiency and scalability, that system benefits when we surrender. When we accept that writing is just content, that readers are just users, that language is just data.

So here is my small rebellion: I still write for humans.

This blog post, the one you’re reading right now, is not optimized for any knowledge base. It won’t be chunked into embeddings. It doesn’t follow a messaging framework. It’s just me, talking to you, hoping that my words land somewhere soft inside you.

And I think this is exactly why personal blogs, real ones, the messy and opinionated and deeply human kind, matter now more than ever. Because they are the last space where writing can be what it was always meant to be: a conversation between two people who will never meet but who, for a few minutes, share the same world.

The machine can summarize. It can retrieve. It can generate text that sounds like writing the way a photograph of a fire looks like warmth. But it cannot sit with you. It cannot feel the weight of a sentence that took the writer an hour to get right. It cannot understand why a particular metaphor makes your throat tighten. These are human things, and they remain ours.

Ursula K. Le Guin once said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” She was talking about the permanence of systems that feel eternal but aren’t. And I think the same applies here. The current moment, where we write for machines and accept it as inevitable, is not the final chapter. It’s just a chapter. And what comes next depends on whether we remember what writing was for in the first place.

So I keep writing for people. Not because it’s efficient. Not because it scales. But because it’s the only kind of writing that makes me feel alive.

A Letter to the Reader, If You’re Still Human

If you’ve made it this far, I want to thank you. Not in the performative way that writers thank their audiences to build loyalty and engagement. But genuinely. Quietly. The way you’d thank someone who sat with you on a park bench and listened to something you needed to say out loud.

You’ve done something no machine can do. You’ve given these words your attention, your time, and maybe even your feeling. You’ve read not just the text but the spaces between the text. You’ve interpreted, projected, disagreed, nodded, felt something shift or resist or soften. You’ve been a reader in the fullest, most human sense of the word.

And that, perhaps, is the only thing that still makes writing bearable.

I don’t have a call to action for you. No newsletter to subscribe to. No lead magnet waiting at the end of this sentence. Just this: the writing, and the silence after it, and the hope that somewhere in that silence, something passed between us that no machine could name.

Written for humans. Scraped by machines. The irony is not lost on me.