LinkedIn attracts people who make money from writing and language – content creators, ad copywriters, seo and marcoms writers, brand voice specialists and all the rest. It’s a place to network, debate industry topics, and subtly showcase skills.

Recently these wordy people are posting more obsessively about two things – AI and ‘grammar’ or writing advice.

On the AI side, they talk about how AI can’t deliver some essential ingredient such as humour or character. They talk about how to spot the difference between AI and human writing, as if businesses cared (it’s more often a combo of AI + human, I’ve found, as I wrote about here).

A few clients want writers to run their copy through AI checkers, which makes for a lot of posting and talk about things to avoid so you don’t sound like AI. At the same time, however, many clients have no problem with AI and expect writers to be au fait with prompts and tools. So the writers tie themselves in knots explaining how AI can’t replicate humans but how they also use AI as a ‘collaborative co-writing tool’ because it makes sense to stay ahead of the curve. In short: we’ll be whatever you want us to be! just give us some work!

If I’m honest, plenty of the writing work I’ve done over the years was absolutely ripe for AI – spurious ‘editorial’ articles written only to shoehorn in search keywords, endless variations of the same email content for different audiences (segmentation!), repurposed product placement posts, a single piece of (painfully) signed-off messaging recycled across a hundred channels and formats.

Writers claiming that AI creating these types of assignments is some sort of tragic undermining of the human writer spirit. That whining does the writing community no favours.

The other thing writers post endlessly about is writing advice. They love to quote Ogilvy and Orwell and Strunk & White. They share ancient writing tips (Say ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’! Don’t forget structure! Say ‘you’ not ‘we’!) and discuss usages they don’t like (using possessive pronouns when you’re not describing possession means you stupid!). Regrettably, many of their takes fly in the face of actual linguistics, with which many self-appointed word nerds seem alarmingly unfamiliar.

The other thing they do is critique bits of marketing. They point out typos in product descriptions, diss the brand strategy behind ad campaigns spotted on the subway, or dispense hoary nuggets of marketing wisdom.

This group of people seem woefully fearful for their future, with too much time allotted to posting opinions and complaints. This type of voice reeks of desperation. Commercial writers are losing work, agencies that once employed us are shrinking or disappearing, and brands are using us less. Like many, I have lost jobs and projects to AI. Clearly, there are more and more of us fighting over a smaller and smaller pie.

But writers going on and on about AI and grammar-splaining are not doing themselves any favours. The only people that respond to these messages… are other writers. Round and round they go, peeving and fretting in their under-employed echo chambers.

If I was a person with a budget to spend on a commercial writer, I’d look for someone talking about interesting stuff, maybe that they are an expert in writing about, joining in debates I care about, not parading their despair. Fiction writers are often warned that a writer writing about writing is a bit of a turn-off. Likewise, nerding on about words probably isn’t going to get you that juicy copy gig, either.

Dan Brotzel’s latest novels are Thank You For The Days and The Wolf in the Woods. He
also writes widely on Medium