Survey reveals writers deeply divided on AI adoption

Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com just published their second annual "AI and the Writing Profession" survey, and the number that jumped out at me was not the usage rate. It was the gap.

61% of writers surveyed now use AI in their process. Of those users, 92% say it made them more productive, and 59% say it improved the quality of their work. Fine, expected. Here is the number that stopped me: among the writers who do not use AI, only 3% see it as a positive force for the profession.

That is not a spectrum. That is two camps standing on opposite sides of a canyon, and almost nobody in the middle. The report calls it a "deep attitudinal divide," and reading between the lines, I think both camps are partly right and both are missing something.

The users are right that a tool which makes you measurably faster and, by their own report, better, is worth having in the kit. The holdouts are right to be suspicious of a technology that has been sold with more hype than honesty, and right to protect the parts of craft that come from you sitting with a hard scene until you solve it — no tool solves that for you, and it should not.

Here is what I actually want from you this week, whichever camp you are in: pick one narrow task and test it, do not adopt or reject the whole category on vibes. Try AI for a synopsis draft, or for catching continuity errors across a long manuscript, or for brainstorming five alternate opening lines. Keep everything that is actually your voice as yours. Throw out what is not.

My take: the writers who will do best over the next year will not be the loudest evangelists or the loudest refusers — they will be the ones who ran their own small experiment instead of arguing about someone else's.