There was a time when writing meant something deeply personal. The act itself carried weight a writer’s thoughts had to wrestle their way onto the page, shaped by emotion, experience, and sometimes even frustration. Those words came with fingerprints. Now, too often, they come from a prompt box. Writers are ‘generating’ more than they are ‘writing’.
In the editorial pages where ideas once collided and individuality thrived, something has quietly shifted. Every morning, new “opinions” surface, most of these pieces are written, at least in part, by artificial intelligence that you can notice the lack of human emotions before you’ve finished the first line: filler words, overused phrases, and a structure that marches in perfect, predictable lockstep. You can read ten different columns and feel like you’ve read the same one ten times. The problem isn’t a lack of creativity; it’s the quiet hand of artificial intelligence turning unique voices into uniform echoes.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s reality. Many writers now begin not with an idea but with a command: “Write me an essay about…” The result may be coherent, even persuasive, but it’s also hollow. What used to be an act of thinking has turned into an act of prompting.
You can sense when the emotion is missing when the rhythm feels too even, when the sentences never stumble, when everything is just a bit too perfect. Those are the fingerprints of a machine.
Even the most respected contributors are slipping into the habit. Teachers who once preached about authenticity now submit essays that have been “lightly edited” from AI drafts. Researchers cite summaries generated by chatbots. Columnists who used to bleed their opinions onto the page now outsource the thinking. It’s not that they lack ability it’s that convenience has become the new creativity.
But writing was never meant to be easy. It was meant to challenge us, to clarify thought through struggle. The hesitation before a sentence, the search for a word that fits that’s where the writer’s voice is born. Remove that friction, and you remove the humanity that gives writing its depth. A paragraph produced in seconds might impress at first glance, but it carries none of the scars of real thought.
What’s worse is the quiet acceptance of it all. Editors know it’s happening. Readers suspect it. Yet no one speaks of it openly, perhaps because it’s uncomfortable to admit how dependent we’ve become.
We praise technology for helping us “work smarter,” yet in doing so, we risk thinking less. If AI can think, draft, and revise faster than we can, it’s tempting to hand it the pen , but each time we do, our own voice fades a little more.
Writing, at its core, isn’t about perfection. It’s about reflection.
The crooked sentence, the awkward phrasing, even the moment of doubt , those imperfections are proof that a human mind is alive and searching. Machines don’t search; they retrieve. They don’t feel the uncertainty that drives a great essay or the conviction that gives words power.
If we continue down this path, we may end up with pages full of flawless prose and not a single original thought. Human writing isn’t just an art; it’s evidence of consciousness. The moment we surrender it, we lose the very thing that makes us different from the machines we built. The danger isn’t that AI will replace writers, it’s that writers will willingly replace themselves. When that happens, the world won’t notice the change immediately. It’ll happen quietly, one prompt at a time.
So, maybe it’s time we return to the blank page and remember what it feels like to think without a shortcut. To write without a safety net. Use your own words, your own voice, your own confusion. To let our words stumble, breathe, and become ours again. Let it be messy, imperfect, even clumsy. Because the moment we stop doing that, we are no longer ‘writers’ , we start becoming operators of machines that no longer need us.
Imna Longkumer
Dimapur
Saturday, November 15, 2025