Artificial intelligence has led to job losses and client cut backs. However, it’s important to notice that AI has been used mostly to replace impersonal, cheap copywriting or content jobs. High-quality sites and news-worthy publications won’t replace their authors with artificial intelligence anytime soon. If you’re an author, your stories are still human enough to sell to the right market—but still, fewer authors are making an income from copywriting.

Writing and the Human Element

The type of client who chooses to replace human authors with Artificial Intelligence isn’t the kind of publication or client an author wants. Usually, these are entities that never paid their human writers what they were worth anyway, so for these companies, using AI is just another reach for cheap results.

Focus selling your stories to publications, literary journals, and websites where content expresses clear human elements. Essays, personal stories, and interviews hinge on human elements and interaction outside of AI’s scope.

Only Gay Talese could have written Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (1966), and my account of living with connective tissue disorder (Spider Hands) was unique and human.

Writing About AI

Even writing about artificial intelligence needs a human writer who understands the topic. Learn about AI instead of fearing its applications. Pitch to tech-publications or essay markets, usually about artificial intelligence and how it’s affecting writers. Of course, that means you have to understand it.

Digital Mescaline (2025) sold to Voertaal and explored flaws in computerized research versus human knowledge. Deus Ex Machina (2024) sold to LitNet and looked at how generative machine learning affects authors and artists.

Talking about AI from a human’s perspective could sell your next story.

My FundsforWriters piece Can Writers Stop or Slow AI? told authors how to protect their work from AI violations. Authors can also write AI fiction, as suggested in Writing the AI Character as published in Writers Write.

Writing Essays

An essay is a short article focusing on the author’s thoughts or observations. Some authors have become especially known for their thought-provoking or evocative essays. They often have a slanted voice of some sort.

Essays are excellent author-to-reader connections. That’s why markets and literary journals buy them. Readers enjoy essays for the focus of the piece as accented by the author’s voice or style.

The Wild Hunt published an essay on inaccuracies in podcasts (2025) as an international, personal perspective piece. AI couldn’t have written this, because it came from a real author’s point-of-view.

Effective essays have personality, puns, style, and your voice.

Voertaal featured Leaving Your X (2025) when I’d written about recent social media experiences. Similarly, this perspective essay about translation and its value featured in the August 2024 LitNet newsletter.

Literary Ladies’ Guide published this essay about Zelda Fitzgerald’s writing that I’d written from—again—personal perspective.

Telling Your Personal Stories

Very personal stories can also sell to magazines, literary journals, and websites.

A Medium-based publication purchased this story about my genetic connective tissue disorder, which rested on my perspective of being diagnosed and living with it.

Voertaal purchased The Crossroads in South Africa’s Language Gap (April 2025), focusing on my experiences with different languages living in Southern Africa.

What can you write about that another author (or impersonal artificial intelligence) can’t?

Personal stories get candid and create connections between authors, readers, and perspectives: they’re essays with more room for the author’s personality. Some of my own essays and personal stories are set to be published by Dark Moon Press in 2025. Uniqueness, not AI, sells authors to readers.

Selling Interviews

Interviews are another story requiring interaction between the author and subject. Seize opportunities for interview-based markets—magazines and literary journals, but popular websites, too.

I interviewed mystic and author Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, and I interviewed celebrities about technology for Maroela Media in 2024. I was even lucky enough to interview card players (and teachers) for the ACBL Educational Foundation 2025 Spring Annual Report.

My point is that interviews are beyond artificial intelligence’s scope, and people still read them for the human elements.

Anywhere a story requires you to speak to people (or get involved as a person) it could sell as a human-driven feature in a world filled with cheap, AI content writing.

About the Author: Alex J. Coyne is a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for an array of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo, and the weird.