A.I.: This was once essential to so many writers. Now it’s vanishing across the internet.
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My T-shirt was already clinging to me like I’d entered a wet T-shirt contest when I spotted him across the street. I’d flown 35 hours to be here, playing Frogger with San Salvador traffic, dodging motorbikes, arms already open for a hug I’d been planning for years. Joe stepped off the curb with a massive smile, and for a second I just stood there, jetlagged and slightly delirious. Two colleagues, finally meeting.
Except we’d never worked in the same country. Or even the same hemisphere. Or for the same company. I’m Australian. Joe is Salvadoran. We are writers who met online in a writing community I’d spent years building. Then A.I. arrived. Every warning was about my income. Nobody mentioned it was coming for my friends too.
Six years earlier, I’d been hunched over a laptop in Melbourne, writing my way into a new career after selling my business. I found a few online freelance writing groups and joined them the way you join a party where you don’t know anyone. Hovering near the edges, mostly lurking.
Then I met Kelly. She was a more experienced writer who had no obvious reason to take an interest in someone who’d decided, against the advice of his high school English teacher, to do the same. She corrected my rookie mistakes, pointed me toward opportunities I didn’t know existed.
We designed writing courses together, ran group calls, built more communities. We had Zoom sessions where everyone kept their camera on, but nobody talked, just wrote in companionable silence. I loved it when someone coughed or a phone rang. When Kelly visited Australia, we had dinner, and it felt like catching up with someone I’d known for decades.
As my profile grew, I was invited to more writing groups, including a private one for some of the biggest freelance writers online. I stayed silent in that group for days, convinced someone would realize I was an impostor. Eventually, I typed something and hit send. Nobody kicked me out. Apparently, I had them fooled.
Because I’m in Australia and most of the group was American, I’d wake each morning to a wall of overnight messages. I’d sit with my coffee and catch up: Duncan’s article had gone viral, Lisa wanted someone to review a draft, Sarah had been invited to give feedback to a new platform for writers. It was like an office meeting that kicked off my day. I’d been working alone for years and somehow assembled a group of colleagues who had absolutely no HR department and even fewer boundaries.
Joe entered a writing competition that Kelly and I ran. His entry was raw and honest and he won. We started messaging and reviewing each other’s work. He’d explain I’d gotten the conjugation wrong and I’d quietly Google what that meant. Yes, English is his second language and my first. When a signed copy of my first book got lost in the Salvadoran postal system, I joked I’d hand-deliver it. My sarcasm was missed. We ate revuelta at his favorite pupuseria, hot filling running over our fingers, locals watching me fumble with the etiquette.
That was three years ago. Over the past 12 months, every one of those communities went quiet. Not all at once. The tone shifted first. Celebrations became complaints. The Slacks that used to be full of someone’s article going viral or a pitch getting accepted became places where people vented about A.I. slop flooding the platforms we wrote for. One news platform I’d been writing on allowed writers to use A.I. as long as they disclosed it. It soon filled up with so much generated content that the real articles were buried. But the human writing was easy to spot: It actually made sense.
Readers left. Writers followed. No goodbyes. I still wonder where they went. The conversation is always about jobs, as if the only loss worth measuring is income. But most of the writers I knew didn’t pivot to A.I. and carry on. They just stopped. When writing feels like competing with software that works for free, the impulse isn’t to fight harder. It’s to close the laptop. I don’t think A.I. writing is bad because I’m threatened by it. I think it’s bad because I’ve read it.
It’s not just writers. After ChatGPT launched, Stack Overflow, the world’s largest online community for software developers, saw web traffic drop by roughly 12 percent and question volumes fall across its most popular topics. The company laid off 28 percent of its staff. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports examined the collapse and found that communities built primarily around information exchange were hit hardest.
My writing groups weren’t as big as Stack Overflow. They were small and private. We knew each other’s names and read each other’s drafts. But the dynamic was the same. Once the professional reason to gather disappeared, even genuine friendships couldn’t hold the group together. The virtual staff room emptied not because people stopped liking each other, but because there was no staff left.
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Kelly Eden, the writer who first pulled me into this world, worked alone for over a decade before she found these groups. She described them recently as an amazing group of people who understood each other. “It was fun while it lasted,” she told me. “I loved it so much.” Apparently my constant errors were part of the appeal.
One of my closest friends from those years still messages me. We only talk about the NBA now, coincidentally now that my San Antonio Spurs have a winning season. Writing hasn’t come up in months. The Zooms stopped getting scheduled. There was no announcement. No Friday farewell drinks with a goofy card everyone signed. It happened the way things end when nobody decides to end them. I noticed fewer messages. Then fewer still. Then one morning, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had posted.
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This morning, I hovered in the doorway while my wife, who works from home a few days a week, laughed on a call. She was telling her team about her weekend. They moved on to a client tender and she was scribbling notes. After the call she began messaging on Teams. She caught me standing there, my coffee going cold, and asked what I was doing. I was doing what I do most mornings. Standing awkwardly on the outside of someone else’s water cooler. She pointed out, not unkindly, that working alone is the arrangement I chose six years ago. She’s right. I knew I’d be working alone. But I didn’t know I’d build something to fix that, and then watch it dissolve.
When colleagues move on, you lose touch. That’s normal. You catch up less, the messages thin out, and one day you realize you’re not really in each other’s lives anymore. Kelly got a full-time job outside writing. She’s the one who brought me into this world, and now she’s left it. Joe and I still message, but it’s every other month now.
None of us chose to leave. I’m still here. Same desk, same laptop. Alone again.
