I Want My Hands on the Wheel

Autopilot be damned

In 2023, I lost all my freelance writing work to ChatGPT.

That’s a gross oversimplification, but it’s also the truth—compressed into a nutshell.

Generative Artificial Intelligence wasn’t new two years ago, but it had suddenly become easier to use and more accessible than ever, thanks to the sudden uptick in awareness of software like Wordsmith, Copy.ai, Storylab, Hemingway, Jasper, etc.

At the time, I was primarily writing for a company (woman-owned and run) that provided leadership training to creatives in tech. Workshops, webinars, career coaching—our staff was small in number but determined and scrappy. Women who knew how to get shit done.

When we started losing clients, it wasn’t because of any big mistakes or miscalculations on our part. (We know that because we triple-checked our work.) We were losing clients because the tech industry was imploding, folding inward upon itself, battening down the hatches and laying off hundreds, then thousands of writers and designers.

Where once budget spreadsheets held generous line items for learning and development, paying for their employees to receive further education and training, third-quarter budgets for 2023 were scraped bare of all but the necessities. Employees who had survived multiple rounds of layoffs were saddled with all the workloads of their former colleagues and none of the support.

The justification of all of this was the uptick in newly capable AI software. (Yes, there was also over-hiring during the pandemic and inflation and lots of different equations that only accepted one correct answer: profit.) But for the purposes of this diatribe, I’m pointing a finger at AI.

I’ve been through lots of layoffs in my career as a writer-for-hire. Whenever belts need to be tightened, the people in suits cast their eyes upon the jobs they don’t understand and say things like: “What the hell do we need all these writers for?”

One of the first times I was laid off, way back in ye olde tech bust of 2001 when I got made redundant three times in one year, the person with the axe said, “I mean, writing isn’t really that hard, is it? We can get marketing to write stuff for us.”

Suit logic is always about how to do more with less. How to make more stuff and get more customers and hoard more dollars because no matter how many zeros they add to back end of that net profit number, it’s never enough. That part hasn’t changed in the last twenty-odd years. The thing that did change was the technology.

In 2023 when writers lost their jobs, they heard: “What do we need all these writers for when we’ve got ChatGPT?”

To be fair, my client didn’t end my contract because she wanted a robot to write for her rather than me. But all of her clients were slashing budgets with machetes, left and right. They were balls deep in AI, screaming prompts at shiny new software and watching it spit out fifteen versions of a logo in five seconds flat. No need for brainstorms or drawing boards. So fast! So cheap! Even better, robots don’t need to attend pricey workshops about how to gracefully and courageously lead a team through a time of upheaval and change. Robots don’t have feelings. Which is great, because feelings slow shit down.

One of the last things I wrote for my client in the summer of 2023 was an article called “Is AI Writing Any Good?” In it, I tried to be open-minded. I tried not to be a curmudgeon. I tried to think about using this new tech as a tool, a crowbar to pry open a door held shut by the shortcomings of my squishy human brain.

“AI won’t replace you. A person using AI will.” That’s what some person on Twitter said back when it was still called Twitter.

And I get the sentiment, I do. The thing is, I don’t want to be a person using AI.

Most of the time, the old scapegoat of “Writer’s Block” isn’t the problem of a quivering and unreliable human brain versus a system of robot synapses firing faster than the speed of light. That blinking cursor or blank page is usually a symptom of fear.

When I can’t get started, it’s because I’m afraid to fail or afraid of what the words on the page might reveal to me about myself, or maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep the night before and I need to get up and stretch and take some long, slow breaths and walk around the neighborhood until I jar some words loose.

And you know what? I love that process. That discovery. That block/stuck/panic and then the audible ping in my brain when the door unlocks and I break though. I love the need to scramble for the nearest keyboard or piece of paper so I can capture the thought, the phrase, the sentence of sheer perfection before it flits away.

“Struggling through the work,” Toni Morrison said, “is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it.”

If life is about the journey and not the destination, then writing is about the act of creation, not the final edit.

In a workshop I taught recently, I told my students that it doesn’t matter if they ever show anyone what they have written. Not everything needs to be show-and-tell. Just finding the right words, just getting them pinned on a page—that is the act that matters the most. That is the transformation.

Writing doesn’t have to be lauded to be healing. There are millions of people who keep journals that will never be read by another soul, who write their morning pages or keep records of their dreams not for any great literary purpose, but for the act itself. For that unlocking, that unraveling. For hearing the sound of their own voice.

A few months ago, my fellow Substacker Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm wrote a note that I screenshot and saved because it rang a bell deep in my chest:

“I’ve never used AI. Never used ChatGPT or downloaded software. I’m not even interested, it’s insulting. Why would you want anyone else speaking on your behalf? Why would you give that up?”

As often as I am able, I join a group of writers in Lisbon for “Writer’s Hour.” We meet in a bookshop in the morning, before the store opens for the day. We go around the table and share our intentions, like: “I’m LaDonna and today I’m working on an essay about goats.” And then Alex, the bookshop owner, starts a 60-minute timer and off we go. Nothing but the scritch of pen nibs and patter of finger pads on keyboards for one blissful, distraction-free hour. I break through so many doors at that table, in those minutes, surrounded by other writers writing. I write far more than I do in twice the time at home, interrupted by kid and dogs and duties.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Monday when the bookshop was closed for the whole day, we met for 150 writing minutes instead of our usual 60. I was so excited for the largesse of time because I had a submission deadline for an essay I hadn’t even begun, but around the 55 minute mark I began to drift. I’d written 600 words, I’d outlined the rest of the essay. I’d gotten a lot done. Usually this would be the time I’d start winding down, signing off. I kind of wanted to quit.

Then I stared around the table at the other writers, heads down, eyes narrowed in concentration. I put my fingers back on the keyboard. When the alarm on Alex’s phone warbled 90 minutes later, I had written 1,759 words. I stretched my neck and saved the document, folded my laptop shut with a sigh.

“How did it go for you?” asked the writer to my left.

“It got rough in the middle but I pushed through. I think I got somewhere really good,” I said. “How about you?”

“Oof,” she rolled her eyes. “I’m having such a bad brain day. Thank god for ChatGPT, right?”

So. You know. To each her own.

“I asked ChatGPT,” well I asked the three Fates and the one with the scissors got very agitated when I told her you were using your one precious life thread talking to that cursed thing.

There are a thousand million reasons why technology is amazing. Why it saves people time and effort and maybe even lives. You don’t have to take to the comments to convince me that it’s okay for you to continue using bots to write your emails and whatnot. I hear you, I get it. Live and let live, right? I shouldn’t yuck your yum.

Just two quick things before I go back to minding my own business:

1. AI sure doesn’t help with that whole critical thinking thing, according to this grim Intelligencer article about how AI is making a new generation of college students functionally illiterate: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College: ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.”
   

   There’s also this spot-on statement from Miriam Reynoldson, an Australian PhD researcher and “militant environmentalist” who writes The Mind File here on Substack: “Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives. Generative AI use is degenerative to literacy.”

2. Operating generative AI is also degenerative to the planet. It uses a lot of resources—most notably water and electricity—and multiple studies repeat again and again that it’s horrible for the environment. Just something to think about next time you feel like asking ChatGPT to give you the weather report or show you what your cat would look like as a human.

I know, I know, lots of things are bad for the environment. And it’s very Old Man Yells At Clouds for me to complain about “these kids today” and their screen/chatbot dependencies.

It’s okay. You do it your way.
I’m gonna keep my hands on the wheel.

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Copyright © 2025 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}