I used to think about "AI replacing writers" mostly as a future-facing problem. Will AI replace copywriters? Will companies stop hiring human writers? Will AI-generated content lower the value of human writing?
But today I realized I had been missing another layer. AI is not only affecting future writing work. It is also affecting past writing work.
I read a newsletter by Douglas Nascimento, who founded São Paulo Antiga in 2009, titled "How Artificial Intelligence is destroying my job." São Paulo Antiga is a long-running independent media project documenting the memory of São Paulo through its architecture. The author walks the city, photographs buildings, researches their stories, and turns them into a living archive of urban memory.
According to the newsletter, Google's AI summaries are now extracting information from the site, summarizing it, and showing it directly to people searching for answers. Traffic has dropped sharply. AdSense revenue has dropped with it.
This is the part that struck me: the content has not lost its value. The archive still matters. The research is still useful. But the route through which that value used to become traffic, revenue, and a relationship with readers is being interrupted.
If I search for something like "Was there ever an Arc de Triomphe in São Paulo?", I may only want the historical facts. An AI summary is convenient. And even though I usually click through to original sources, I can imagine asking an AI tool: "Summarize this article for me. Don't miss the interesting parts."
That is useful to me as a reader. But it may also mean I no longer visit the original site, see the images in context, discover related articles or tours, or support the archive that made the answer possible.
This is the paradox: valuable content is more likely to be read by AI. Because it is valuable, it gets summarized. Because it gets summarized, users may feel they no longer need to visit the source.
The AI debate is often framed as "AI-generated writing versus human writing." But maybe another question is just as important: what happens when AI does not replace the writer directly, but replaces the reader's visit?
And when that happens, who captures the value of the work that made the answer possible?