The Original Purpose
Human societies have always depended on communication to survive, to teach, and to preserve meaning beyond a single lifetime. Writing emerged not because humans preferred symbols on stone or paper, but because it was the most effective tool available for recording ideas, laws, beliefs, and experiences across time. Think of the Code of Hammurabi carved into black stone, or the Buddhist sutras copied by hand across centuries, or even your grandmother’s recipe for Sunday roast scribbled on a grease-stained card. The medium was never the point. The message was. Writing was simply the vessel through which truth, belief, authority, and interpretation flowed from one generation to the next.
This principle hasn’t changed. Whether information arrives through ink on parchment, pixels on screens, voices in podcasts, or text generated by algorithms, the fundamental question remains the same: are we willing to engage with the message itself, or will we be distracted by debating the vessel?
Power, Fear, and the Human Mind
Throughout history, this flow of information was never pure. Writing has always been shaped by power, fear, and human psychology. Some wrote to comply, to praise rulers, or to reinforce existing structures. Court poets in ancient China composed odes to emperors they privately despised. Medieval scribes copied church doctrine whilst harbouring quiet doubts. Others spoke uncomfortable truths and paid with exile, persecution, or death. Galileo recanted under threat. Even then, people tended to believe what aligned with their desires, identities, or sense of security. This is not a modern flaw, it is a fundamental feature of the human mind. Humans seek coherence, certainty, and belonging, often before accuracy.
The medium didn’t determine whether people engaged honestly with ideas. A handwritten letter could spread lies just as effectively as a printed pamphlet. What mattered was whether the reader was willing to think critically about what they encountered.
The Removal of Barriers
What has changed is not the existence of distortion, but its nature and scale. In earlier eras, distortion was often enforced through fear and authority. A banned book stayed banned because there were only so many printing presses, and the people who controlled them could be watched. Today, distortion is sustained voluntarily. The information age has removed barriers to expression whilst removing friction from belief. Anyone can become a teacher of morality, a bearer of “truth,” or an authority figure, not through wisdom or accountability, but through visibility and emotional resonance.
A fitness influencer gives mental health advice. A celebrity tweets about geopolitics. A teenager’s conspiracy video reaches millions before breakfast. Algorithms reward affirmation over accuracy, speed over reflection, and confidence over humility. Truth is no longer suppressed, it is filtered out by preference. This isn’t a problem created by any particular technology. It’s a problem created by how humans choose to use every technology.
When Speed Replaces Thought
As communication accelerates, cognitive effort declines. Faced with overwhelming information, many people skim rather than understand, react rather than reflect, and reject messages that feel misaligned before grasping their full meaning. I see it in myself. I’ve scrolled past a long article because the headline annoyed me, only to find out later it said something completely different. I’ve shared a post because it felt right, not because I’d verified it.
This is not caused by writing itself, nor by video, speech, or AI. Every medium is neutral. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull. The danger lies in how messages are designed, incentivised, and consumed. When engagement replaces understanding, surface-level interpretation becomes the norm, and misjudgement becomes frequent.
This pattern repeats across every new medium. When radio emerged, people worried it would make society superficial. When television arrived, critics claimed it would rot brains. When the internet became widespread, concerns shifted to information overload. Now with AI-generated content, the anxiety has found a new target. But the medium has never been the problem. The problem is whether people are willing to do the work of thinking carefully about what they encounter, regardless of where it comes from.
The Fragile Environment
This creates a fragile moral and social environment. Without widely respected mechanisms to slow ideas down, test them, and attach responsibility to those who spread them, distortions accumulate. Radical narratives do not create violence on their own, but they lower thresholds, normalising extremes, hardening identities, and eroding shared reality. Look at how quickly online communities can spiral from legitimate grievance into calls for harm. Look at how conspiracy theories that once lived on the fringes now shape elections and public health responses. The result is not immediate collapse, but rising tension, fragmentation, and volatility. Freedom remains intact, but its cost increases.
The Problem with Control
Censorship and control are not the answer. Humans did not evolve to live in cages, and history shows that suppressing speech breeds resentment and myth rather than wisdom. During the Inquisition, banned books became more valuable and more widely read in secret, their ideas spreading precisely because they were forbidden. In more recent decades, countries that have attempted total control over publishing and broadcasting have found that people simply stop trusting official channels altogether, turning instead to rumour, underground publishing, and word of mouth. The information doesn’t disappear, it goes underground and becomes harder to correct when it’s wrong.
The true challenge of freedom is not restraint from outside, but discipline from within. Freedom demands effort: discernment, patience, humility, and the willingness to endure discomfort. When someone challenges your deeply held belief, sitting with that discomfort instead of dismissing them outright takes work. Reading a full article instead of reacting to the headline takes work. Admitting you were wrong takes work. When societies abandon these habits, freedom becomes unstable, not because it fails, but because it is mishandled.
Sleepwalking Through the Web
What we are witnessing is not the decline of writing, nor the rise of new media, but a deeper imbalance in how humans relate to truth. The web of communication, belief, influence, and reaction has grown so dense and fast that many move through it unconsciously, sleepwalking between partial truths and comforting distortions. I catch myself doing it. Nodding along to a podcast whilst washing up, absorbing opinions I haven’t examined. Accepting a narrative because it arrived in my feed three times in one day. Feeling informed when I’ve only grazed the surface.
If left unattended, this imbalance invites correction, sometimes abrupt and painful, as history has shown repeatedly. But this pattern will continue with every new technology humans invent. The next communication tool, whatever it may be, will bring the same debates, the same anxieties, the same tendency to focus on the medium rather than the message.
The Distraction of Debating Tools
Consider how much energy is currently spent debating whether something was written by a human or generated by AI. People scrutinise sentence structures, looking for clues. They argue about authenticity, authorship, and what “real” writing means. But these debates miss the point entirely.
If an AI generates a piece filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, or harmful rhetoric, the problem isn’t that it came from an AI. The problem is the content itself. If a human writes the exact same piece, it’s equally problematic. Conversely, if an AI generates something insightful, well-reasoned, and truthful, dismissing it simply because of its origin is just another form of intellectual laziness.
The obsession with identifying the source is a way of avoiding the harder work: engaging with the actual ideas. It’s easier to say “this was written by AI, so I can ignore it” than to read carefully and decide whether the argument holds up. It’s more comfortable to say “a human wrote this, so it must be authentic” than to question whether that human is informed, honest, or thinking clearly.
But there’s something else worth considering. Whilst some debate the authenticity of AI-generated text, others are using these same tools to find their voice for the first time. People who lost their sight can now communicate freely. Those with dyslexia or motor disabilities who struggled for years to put thoughts into words can finally share their ideas with the world. Someone who thinks brilliantly but never mastered formal writing can now participate in conversations they were previously locked out of.
These tools have given voice to the voiceless. When we obsess over whether AI “really” wrote something, we’re effectively questioning whether these people have a legitimate right to be heard. We’re creating a new form of gatekeeping, one that privileges those who happen to have been born with or developed certain physical or cognitive abilities over those who rely on technology to bridge the gap.
The technology is neutral. It empowers and it destroys, depending entirely on how we choose to wield it. A person using AI to amplify their genuine insights is using the same tool as someone generating endless spam for profit. The difference isn’t in the technology. It’s in the human intention behind it.
This fixation on tools rather than truth is not new. Every generation has found ways to avoid the difficult work of discernment. The medium simply provides a convenient excuse.
Acts of Resistance
Yet this trajectory is not inevitable. Awareness itself is a form of resistance. Every act of slowing down, questioning, and engaging deeply, regardless of medium, restores a measure of balance. It might be reading a book instead of a thread. Having a face-to-face conversation where you listen more than you speak. Sitting with an uncomfortable idea for a week before deciding what you think.
Writing may one day fade into a specialised tool, replaced by other forms of recording and expression. AI might become the primary generator of content. Brain-computer interfaces might enable direct thought transfer. Whatever comes next will bring new debates about authenticity and value. But the underlying responsibility will remain unchanged. The health of any society depends not on how messages are delivered, but on whether people are willing to process them actively, honestly, and with care.
The question, then, is not whether humanity will invent better tools to communicate, but whether it can cultivate the wisdom to live freely amongst them. This is the same question humans have faced since the first symbols were scratched onto stone. The answer has never been about the tools.
A Personal Reflection
The purpose of these words is not dictated by audience size or popularity, but by the clarity and integrity of the ideas themselves. Writing, at its core, is an act of communication and reflection, a way to externalise thought and share it with those willing to engage. I write this knowing some will skim it, others will reject it, and a few might sit with it for a while. Some might even ask whether I wrote it myself or used AI to help structure the thoughts. That question, whilst understandable, misses what matters.
What matters is whether the ideas are true, whether they’re worth considering, whether they might prompt reflection. Those who focus on the source rather than the substance do so of their own cognitive choice. That doesn’t diminish the value of the message.
By focusing on truth, depth, and careful reflection rather than approval or metrics, I honour the original essence of writing: to convey, preserve, and provoke thought. Those who are ready to engage will benefit, and even those who resist may carry a seed of reflection planted unconsciously. In this way, writing becomes a dialogue across time and perspective, not a race for attention.
This is my pledge, not to an audience, but to the act itself. To seek truth regardless of how it arrives. To engage with ideas regardless of their origin. To remember that the medium will always change, but the work of thinking carefully never will. And to recognise that when we focus on the tool rather than the message, we risk silencing voices that have only just begun to speak. The responsibility has always been ours, not the technology’s. That double-edged sword cuts according to the hand that holds it, and the hand is always human.
