Drowning Out The Voices

2026-01-04

“It’s not like anyone reads these anyway.”

To hear that as a content writer can be somewhat disheartening. And even that feels like a mildly put statement.

What made this particular utterance slightly sadder was that it came from a client. I admit that it made me question both the quality of my work and the purpose of my… well, entire career.

Now, the client wasn’t actually questioning the quality of the work at all. In fact, they were delighted with the material. This comment wasn’t even directed at me.

It was more of a frustrated observation that, these days, it seems no one reads the full content themselves. It’s fair to wonder that we might have grown out of reading. After all, we can now paste everything into an LLM and ask for a snappy summary.

And I don’t think this is just a feeling based on conveniently selected data — something that could be said about much of the conversation around attention spans.

Take data by the National Literacy Trust. They’ve been quizzing children and young people on their reading habits since 2005. And in 2025, only 1 in 5 said they read daily, which is the lowest level yet.

I also remember recently reading a piece in which a university professor said students were overwhelmed by their course reading lists.

The issue?

Tough topics? Controversial materials? Foreign language?

No. Just full-length books.

Students had supposedly not come across the requirement to read a whole book before, let alone multiple.

To someone who found university reading lists the best thing about the courses, this was rather shocking. I loved having curated lists built around topics I was interested in!

It’s also saddening to someone who lives off writing words, creating content for people to read.

But I’ve felt this shift.

I recently began working with a new client. I did the usual things, researching and analysing the ideal reader (i.e. the client’s client). I thought about what type of text would resonate with this person. The usual bits and bobs of being a content writer.

And while in the past, we content writers also needed to consider search engine optimisation (SEO), especially in terms of keyword placement and such, there is now another ‘reader’ in my mind.

Now, I’m also conscious, not only of search engine rankings, but how LLMs will read the content. I need to consider that my ‘ideal reader’ may never, in fact, read that content directly but only hear about it through these models.

And so, I need to ensure that, however the AI clips and summarises the content, the context isn’t lost and the message I’m trying to convey always gets through.

For a moment, I felt a slight dread. I felt like my future is now not to write for people but for machines. And frankly, I’d much prefer human eyes.

After a moment of existential crisis, I remembered another truth.

People and clients I’ve interacted with still want the real deal. Good content and good writing still matter. It is still possible to capture audiences with words. Many people do still simply use AI to find good content to interact with directly, not just to read summaries.

For all the conversation around AI and spotting AI-written content (looking at you, countless em dashes and lists of three posts on social media), I find that it’s the humanity behind the text that still shines through (and often quite glaringly!).

We human writers add richer context and lived experience to text, even when it sometimes is just cheesy marketing text. And so far, it is exactly what’s often missing in these machine-written pieces.

To me, this realisation of being a writing human being came through the strongest recently as I worked on my first blog post.

I like writing. I like reading. They both bring me joy.

Taking a client story and turning it into content is a process I always look forward to. Crafting a compelling narrative and picking the right words is just so much more interesting than purely prompting an AI.

I believe — and know — that there are still people out there who feel this joy and appreciate the effort that content writing takes.

And even if you’ve only ever come across my writing through an AI summary, I hope it gave you the information you were looking for, and perhaps just a bit of joy to brighten your day.

And with that, I wish you all a successful start to the new year.