What photography did to painting, AI is now doing to writing. Once the domain of technical skill and representational fidelity, writing may soon be redefined not by what it can explain, but by what it can evoke. The word processor has long made writing efficient, but generative AI has made it prolific—frictionless, competent, and eerily coherent. This forces a new question, one that echoes the anxieties and awakenings of 19th-century painters confronting the camera: If machines can write, what is writing for?
Photography liberated painting from realism. Painters were no longer bound to perfectly mimic the world—the camera could do that better and faster. So they turned inward. The result was Impressionism, then Cubism, then Abstraction. Form fractured. Color pulsed. Meaning came not from accuracy but from feeling. Painting was reimagined as perception, not reproduction.
AI may offer writing the same release. If machines can deliver summaries, reports, student essays, product blurbs, and even halfway decent fiction, then human writers may no longer be rewarded for producing merely coherent text. Instead, they might be freed to explore what only they can offer: the glitch, the affective pulse, the voice that wavers. Writing can become more like painting in the post-camera era: expressive, fragmented, deeply subjective.
We may be entering an era of Impressionist Writing: prose that prioritizes mood over message, fragments over form. A novel that reads like vapor. An essay punctuated with silence. Emojis as brushstroke. Grammar undone to make space for emotional truth. If AI can mimic syntax, then syntax becomes less interesting. The writer’s power returns to what the machine cannot simulate convincingly: rhythm, contradiction, associative leaps, the raw.
In this light, we might imagine a Clement Greenberg of the AI-writing age. His massively influential essay “Modernist Painting” (1960) argued that painting, under threat from photography and mass reproduction, began to preserve itself by turning inward and focusing on what was unique to the medium. For Greenberg, modernism meant self-criticism: art shedding what it borrowed from other forms and intensifying what was most inherent to itself. In the case of painting, that meant flatness, the integrity of the picture plane, and the visibility of the brushstroke. Painting, in his view, became most itself when it stopped pretending to be something else. Think Mondrian’s Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow—a painting that embraces geometry, flatness, and the surface itself as its subject.
A modernist writing theory might ask: What is irreducibly human about writing? What aspects of the medium resist automation? Voice? Rhythm? Intention? The refusal to explain?
Of course, this doesn’t mean abandoning structure or the art of craft. Just as painters still learn perspective and portraiture, and musicians still study scales, writers must still be taught how to form an argument, how to hold a reader, how to revise. The process of learning to write—the discipline of shaping thought into form—remains essential. But the output may now need to be read differently than before. We are not teaching writing merely for replication; we are teaching it for nuance, for voice, for expression.
We are not at the end of writing. We are at the end of writing as reproduction. The future lies in writing as presence. As texture. As residue.
AI has taken over the job of being legible. We get to be alive.