FIR #507: Should Nobody Really Ever Write with AI?

Take a stroll through LinkedIn. You’ll find no shortage of posts stridently deriding the notion that anyone should ever use AI to write for them. While that case isn’t hard to make for professional writers, there are countless professionals in other fields who struggle with writing, never trained to be writers, yet now have to write everything from emails to reports as part of their jobs. Should they really sweat for hours over wording, time they could be devoting to the core areas of subject expertise, when AI can produce content that is cogent, clear, and direct? In this short mid-week episode, Neville and Shel look at the trends in using AI for writing, despite the plethora of opinions from the pundits. Links from this episode: Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their StoriesMeet the Journalist Using AI to Write StoriesHow Journalists Feel About AIMuck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism Report Finds 82% of Journalists Use AIAI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies ItIs Writing with AI at Work Undermining Your Credibility?How We’re Using AIReview of ‘Using Artificial Intelligence in Academic Writing’Best Practices for the Effective Use of AI in Business WritingAI Tools for Business Writing5 Ways to Instantly Level Up Your Communication Using AI ToolsCharlene Li and Katia Walsh demonstrate the right way to build a book with AI help – Josh BernoffThe Truth About Writing a Book on AI The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 507. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. And if you spend any time at all on LinkedIn, you’ll see the degree to which anti-AI sentiment is ramping up. A lot of it’s aimed at using AI for writing and how absolutely wrong that is. Yet just last week, on the same day, Wired Magazine and The Wall Street Journal both published articles on reporters using AI to help write and edit their stories. So today, let’s talk about using AI to write. Specifically, is it okay for employees to use AI to help them write for work? And my answer is not only is it okay for many employees, it might be one of the most genuinely useful things AI can do. Here’s the framing I would push back on. When we talk about AI writing assistants, we tend to picture a journalist or a marketer or a communications professional, someone whose craft is writing, it’s what they’re paid for, handing their keyboard over to a robot. And for those of us who are professional writers, that raises legitimate professional and ethical questions. But that’s not the population we’re talking about when we’re communicating AI adoption in most organizations. Think about who actually has to write at work. Engineers document processes. Product managers write status updates. Safety officers draft incident reports. Shel: Finance analysts compose budget justifications. Scientists write up findings for non-technical stakeholders. These are not people who chose their careers because they love writing. Writing is a tax they pay to do the work they actually care about. And many of them pay that tax really, really badly. The idea that a structural engineer should produce elegant prose unaided is the same logic as saying a communications director should coordinate the concrete mix for a construction project. We don’t expect that. So why do we expect every knowledge worker to be a competent writer? Muckrack’s 2026 State of Journalism report found that 82% of journalists, professional writers, people whose job this is, are now using at least one AI tool. That’s up from 77% the year before. If the people whose professional identity is tied to their writing are using AI tools, it shouldn’t surprise us that everyone else is too, or that they should. Now the research does tell us something important about how to use these tools. A University of Florida study of 1,100 professionals found that AI tools can make workplace writing more professional. But regular heavy use can undermine trust between managers and employees, particularly for relationship-oriented messages like praise, motivation, or personal feedback. The study found that employees are more skeptical when they perceive a supervisor is leaning heavily on AI for those kinds of communications. Now that’s a meaningful finding and it...