Writing in the Age of AI

Writing on the internet today is probably a waste of time.

In fact, I think all of us who write online have asked ourselves this question:

What’s the point of carrying on if AI is going to take our content and use it without even citing us?  

Never mind sending traffic back to our website. And paying us? Even less…

And yet, after thinking about it more than once, I’ve decided to keep doing it.

What’s more, I’m not only going to continue, but taking advantage of the extra free time I expect to have soon after closing other projects (I’ll talk more about that soon) I’m going to significantly increase my publishing volume.

I’ll tell you why.

The current dilemma

Let’s look at some data:

• The arrival of Google AI Overviews has caused a 35% average drop in traffic to websites.
• The #1 position for a search query has seen its traffic reduced by 59%. These are German figures that can be extrapolated to any other country where Google is the main search engine.
• The traffic that AI sends to our websites does not make up for the loss of organic traffic.
• ChatGPT has already surpassed Bing in number of queries. And the growth of searches in LLMs does not look like it is going to stop there.
• Google has patented something terrifying just to think about: a technology that can COMPLETELY modify the content of our website, with AI in the middle, if its algorithm believes what its LLM generates will be better for the user. If this goes into production, it is an earthquake for the internet.
• Historic Spanish internet media outlets such as Genbeta are closing. Jotdown is thinking about it. The magazine Pronto is removing its online version and keeping only the print one.
• And the worst part is that all this is not going to get better, but quite the opposite.

As you can see, with the data in hand, it is hard to find reasons to keep generating written text in the current era.

But while the situation is quite critical at a business level, at a personal level things change. At least a little.

Fundamental reasons to keep writing

I start from the premise that, if my livelihood depended on continuing to publish on my website, I would probably stop doing it and spend my time on more profitable activities.

But fortunately it does not, so if we remove the economic reasons from the equation, the picture changes quite a bit.

#1. Organising my ideas

This is, for me, the fundamental reason.

And the thing is, I’m clear that it is when you write that you really learn or fully understand something.

It happened to me when creating training materials and it happens to me when writing a post: I realise that the content in my head is abundant, but it is neither ordered, nor prioritised or hierarchised, nor properly connected.

It is when you put it down on paper -in my case in a mind-mapping tool- that you really start to visualise and understand the relationships between the points and the structures of the concepts.

And that stays safely stored in two places:

• In my brain, at a high level.
• In the article, in much more detail.

This way, if I need to return to that concept, I first have it better connected in my head. And if it still requires more detail, then I go to the published content.

I can’t count the times I’ve gone back to my article on how to configure a corporate email in Gmail.

In my head I know it is advisable to do it with every new client.

In my article there is the step-by-step process for doing it. At least until Google predictably removes the option at the end of 2026.

#2. I think I have things to contribute

I have always been interested in many different things.

I am what you might call a complete scatterbrain.

But with a nuance that changes things quite a lot: I go VERY deep into what truly interests me.

Whether they are business or leisure matters.

And when I talk about going deep, I almost mean obsession:

From dinosaurs when I was a child (is there any kid who didn’t like them?). Besides asking my parents to buy me every possible collection from the newsstands, including one that let you assemble a real T-Rex, with all the skeleton pieces glowing in the dark and even skin you could paint to make it more realistic. It was so cool…

On top of that, I even spent all my Sunday pocket money buying chewing gum and throwing it away without putting it in my mouth, just to try to win plastic figurine prizes of those creatures to play with in the car while we came back from the village on Sunday afternoons.

Or being clear that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park were not velociraptors, but deinonychus, which were similar, but bigger. Without my not-very-marketing-minded parents being able to explain the reason for the name change in the film when I asked them.

Later I got into radio-controlled cars. After buying every month the only magazine on the subject that reached my newsstand, and with my first earnings from playing the clarinet when I was around twelve, I bought myself a competition one: a Tamiya that you had to buy in parts (the car, the controller, the battery, the paints…) and that came disassembled.

The whole joke cost me 35,000 pesetas back then. And it took me more than a month to have it ready, spending every afternoon on it after school.

Of course, the same level of obsession later came with video games. At one time or another I have owned most consoles on the market, including oddities such as the NeoGeo Pocket, which I bought imported at the time because it wasn’t sold in Spain and which I enjoyed a lot despite having only two games.

And the same happened to me with the books of Pérez-Reverte and Asimov, the films of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino -when I believed the most important thing in a film was the actors and not the director- and with superhero comics, about which I even wrote a doctoral research paper.

The football since Johan Cruyff (coach), technology and the audiovisual world have also always been present in my life and I have devoted many, many hours to them. And I still do today.

When I started working I was already crazy about making websites: SEO and classic layout with HTML and CSS (today’s JS-based version is not the same to me). And I was blown away reading posts from Smashing Magazine and Search Engine Land.

That led me to learn and apply everything I could in the world of digital businesses, ecommerce and how to make money on the internet.

And from there to investments: property, index funds, stocks, gold and BTC. The typical order, and one where I honestly haven’t done badly.

I could go on (music, computing, health, personal development…) but I think you get where I’m going. The summary is the same as at the start of the section: I have studied and spent time in many different fields.

That means I have a formed opinion on quite a few topics and can write about them offering my point of view without being ashamed of it.

It is undeniable that behind that statement there is some ego. Especially because I think my opinion might matter to anyone. But I am clear that people’s time and interest, measured in web traffic and comments, will show me whether I was right or, on the contrary, my content is not useful and does not entertain anyone.

#3. Maintaining a free internet that helps

I have enjoyed an internet with excellent free content and I still do every day. And I think it is only fair to give some of that value back.

Because without that content, it would have been much harder for me to meet certain professional challenges.

And the thing is, I have spent a huge amount of time reading websites. I have seen how the content published by people such as Avinash Kausik, Simo Ahava, Dean Romero or Chuiso was, at the time, of extremely high quality and helped me improve my professional skills.

Or any doubt you might have when using Photoshop, Premiere or Excel, solved by some random website. Not to mention StackOverflow and its excellent solutions for everything related to web development.

Of course, for personal matters, in the pre-ChatGPT era, content published by people with no profit motive also made my life easier.

Because in 2010 no course explained how to play FullHD films in H264 on the modest first living-room PCs Zotac.

No, you had to search for that on Google. In Spanish and in English. Until you found someone talking about the right video codecs , the best players and how to enable hardware-accelerated playback.

Or how to change the way you output audio from a Windows laptop to a Home Cinema, leaving aside Dolby Pro Logic -which you assumed was what surround sound at home sounded like, without knowing it was a simulation- for AC3 and the feeling of listening to Gladiator with real 5.1 sound at a good volume in your living room.

Also the hundreds of reviews I have devoured before buying anything I knew nothing about (the first time I bought a washing machine comes to mind). Or people who explain what you should see in London depending on how many days you are going.

Or how to make a delicious egg flan. 

Or how to tie a tie knot.

All this is super useful free content that I have consumed. And that is why I think it is right for me to keep this habit and contribute value by publishing articles that help solve someone’s specific problem, just as they have helped me.

Thinking about this is rewarding and has helped me decide to keep writing, when the easiest thing would have been to stop, since I am in the process of retiring thanks to having achieved financial independence.

Secondary reasons

Apart from the three above, which are the main ones, there are also other reasons that carry less weight in the decision to keep publishing articles, but that help answer the initial question of why continue.

#4. Doing something different

I have spent a lot of time in marketing. And there I have seen the importance of differentiating yourself from the rest. It is the only way to create a brand that is remembered.

If everyone stops publishing text content because of AI, continuing to do so is a way to stand out.

And for what?

Honestly, I don’t know, but I’m sure that doing it will take me down paths that I would not travel if I stopped publishing.

And I feel like seeing what is cooking there.

#5. Protesting against the system

This one is even more abstract, so let’s see if I can explain myself properly.

I do not like the path the internet has taken for years.

Call me crazy, but I prefer reading to watching videos. Social media has never thrilled me (probably because I have not known how to prioritise its positive aspects over the negative ones).

And the complete loss of privacy and the abuse of our data, especially by big tech (not the media, which have to make a living somehow), make me somewhat uncomfortable.

Like the pebble in your shoe that you know is there, that bothers you a little, but you don’t take it out.

But then I read this from the director of Jotdown:

Counter-algorithmics

And something inside me clicked.

I immediately knew that I wanted to support the values promoted by the manifesto. And that I wanted my project to be part of it.

#6. Improving my writing

There is another, much less altruistic reason: wanting to improve how I write.

I am absolutely clear that writing every day helps improve your writing.

And this is a skill that, like some others such as mastering English, playing an instrument well, or knowing how to sell and manage money, I consider fundamental in anyone’s life. 

Anyone’s.

Because I cannot think of any alternative in which mastering any of these skills leads you to a worse life than not mastering it.

So you might as well learn them. And the sooner the better.

With writing I’m a bit late, but in any case it is training for the novel I started and will finish someday.

#7. Avoiding the delegation of thought

This last point, related in a way to the previous one, has been on my mind for a while. With the arrival of AI, it is tremendously easy to write the right prompts and have AI answer you correctly.

I believe that, in my work as a consultant, as of today -April 2026- AI is capable of carrying out 80% of my tasks to an adequate standard.

And the other 20%, which is based on judgement and experience, I do not know how long it will take to surpass.

But of course, however much productivity improves with its use, the studies that have been done so far (this one , this one , this one or this one) stress that delegating thought to AI encourages a certain brain atrophy, and we do not know how serious it may become.

As seems logical, the damage varies depending on how much of our thinking we delegate. Delegating everything is not the same as delegating the basic tasks we do automatically.

And it is not something new or exclusive to AI either, since, for example, GPS negatively affected our memory and made us worse at finding our way around. And despite that, everyone uses it today.

The thing is, since this brain atrophy stuff sounds pretty bad to me, I want to avoid it. And planning and writing articles helps me do that.

Conclusions

As you can see, there are strong arguments for those of us who have decided to keep publishing on our websites, even though we know in advance that AI is going to cannibalise our content.

What is clear is that, none of the arguments in favour are economic. Honestly, if what you are looking for is to make money, I think that today, unlike less than five years ago, there are far better options, even within digital businesses.

That is why I completely understand those people or media outlets that have stopped doing it. Or that have moved their content to other formats such as video (we will see how long AI’s entry barrier lasts) or newsletters.

I have reached the conclusion that I do not write so that you read me. I write so I do not stop thinking. And that is why I’ll keep writing here, hopefully for a long time. So if you like what I write, I’d be happy to see you back soon.  

And if you feel like leaving me a comment with your opinion on this topic or subscribing to my newsletter (just below), then you have my most sincere thanks.

See you around.