Why Write Articles?

An Article, Ironically

A quick note before we begin: this piece is slightly different to my usual writing. It's less academic, less structured, and considerably less concerned with whether it's citing things correctly. It's more human… unfiltered, a little opinionated, and written in the kind of voice I usually edit out before publishing. Given that the entire article is about the importance of genuine human expression in an age of machine-generated content, it felt only right to actually mean it this time.

Right. On with it.

There is something beautifully self-defeating about writing an article to explain why articles matter. You are, in a sense, already convinced — you're reading one. And yet here we are, several hundred words from the end of a piece that will earnestly argue for its own existence, like a lifeboat making the case for water.

Still. Someone has to do it.

The World Runs on the Written Word (Allegedly)

We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. At any given moment, a person can pull a small glass rectangle from their pocket and learn, within seconds, the height of the Eiffel Tower, the capital of Burkina Faso, or the closest Greggs to appease the craving for a sausage roll. Knowledge, we are told, has never been more democratised.

And yet.

Scroll through the average social media feed for more than four minutes and you will encounter opinions stated as facts, facts stated as opinions, and a remarkable number of people who have very strong feelings about things they have clearly never read a single article about.

Articles, proper ones, written with care, edited with scrutiny, and published with some vague hope that they will improve the reader's understanding of the world — are, it turns out, not optional. They are the scaffolding of informed society. They are how complex ideas get communicated across the gap between expert and layperson. They are, in short, quite important.

We know this because the alternativ, a world without them, is increasingly easy to glimpse.

The Brief, Glorious History of People Writing Things Down

Humans have been recording their thoughts in organised written form for roughly five thousand years, which is either a very long time or a very short time depending on your perspective. The Sumerians did it on clay tablets. The Greeks did it on papyrus. The medieval monks did it in candlelit rooms with aching wrists and extraordinary patience.

The printing press arrived in the fifteenth century and promptly caused several wars, a Reformation, and the gradual democratisation of literacy. Newspapers followed. Pamphlets. Journals. The essay as a form. The investigative piece. The long read. The op-ed.

Each of these represented something radical: the idea that ordinary people deserved to be informed. That truth was worth chasing. That the act of reading and thinking carefully about the world was not merely a hobby for the leisured classes but a civic responsibility.

And then, in 2004, someone invented the Facebook News Feed, and we started getting our information from our astranged cousin Jeff instead.

Enter the Machines

Here is where the article in question becomes somewhat awkward to write, because the honest reader will at some point wonder: was this written by a human?

It is a fair question. And given the note at the top of this piece, the one about dropping the academic armour and writing something more honest, it feels like exactly the right moment to sit with that discomfort rather than sidestep it.

In 2025 and beyond, an enormous (and growing) proportion of the content you encounter online has been generated, in whole or in part, by artificial intelligence. News summaries. Product descriptions. Blog posts. SEO content. Opinion pieces. Explainers. Even, reportedly, entire "news websites" staffed entirely by language models churning out articles at a rate no human team could match.

This is not, strictly speaking, a problem with AI. AI-generated content can be accurate, useful, and readable. The problem is volume, velocity, and the collapse of accountability. When a machine writes ten thousand articles overnight, nobody is responsible for any of them. When errors propagate, there is no journalist to correct them, no editor to be embarrassed, no publication to issue a retraction. There is only the content, sitting on the internet, being indexed, shared, and slowly mistaken for fact.

The deeper irony is this: AI was trained on human writing. The entire architecture of large language models is built on the corpus of human thought — articles, essays, books, forum posts, academic papers, journalism. AI did not invent the ability to explain things clearly. It learned it. From us. And now it threatens to replace the very source material it depends on.

If we stop writing, eventually, there is nothing left to learn from.

This is not a theoretical concern. It is already happening. Content farms powered by AI are flooding search results with plausible-sounding nonsense. Readers, increasingly unable to distinguish the genuine from the generated, are losing trust in the written word altogether. And the writer, the ones who actually know things, who actually went somewhere or spoke to someone or spent three weeks trying to understand a topic before daring to publish a word about it, are being priced out of a market that no longer seems to value the effort.

The internet is becoming a hall of mirrors, and most of the reflections are AI.

Why Your Voice Still Matters (No, Really)

There is a temptation, when faced with the sheer scale of AI-generated content, to give up. Why write an article when a machine can produce one in four seconds? Why spend three hours researching, drafting, revising, and agonising over a single paragraph when a prompt can generate something passable before you've finished your coffee?

Here is why.

A machine cannot have a bad week that changes how it sees a topic. It cannot walk through a neighbourhood and notice something that wasn't in the data. It cannot be wrong about something, realise it publicly, and earn back credibility through the honesty of the correction. It cannot be accountable in the way that human writers are accountable — to their readers, to their communities, to their own sense of integrity.

Human writing carries fingerprints. It carries the weight of experience, the friction of genuine thought, the small imprfections that signal a real consciousness wrestling with a real idea. These are not flaws. These are, paradoxically, the things that make writing trustworthy.

That note at the top of this piece (the slightly self-conscious admission that this isn't quite my usual register) is a fingerprint. A machine would not have written it, because a machine does not have a "usual register" to depart from. It does not feel the slight vulnerability of dropping a professional tone in public. It does not worry, even briefly, whether the reader will think less of it for being direct.

That worry, that friction, that decision to publish anyway, that is the thing worth protecting.

The challenge for readers in this new landscape is not finding content. Content is everywhere. The challenge is finding content that is true, that is considered, and that was produced by someone who actually cared whether they got it right. Someone who put their name on it. Someone who will still be around next week if it turns out they were wrong.

That is still, overwhelmingly, the domain of human writers. But only if human writers keep writing.

The Case for Reading (And Writing) More Articles

So, why are articles important?

Because they are how we share knowledge across the barriers of profession, geography, and expertise. Because they create a public record of events as they actually happened, not as algorithms decided you would prefer to believe they happened. Because they model careful thinking in a world that is increasingly hostile to it. Because the act of writing something down, properly, forces the writer to understand what they actually believe, and the act of reading it, properly, forces the reader to do the same.

Articles are important because the alternative, a world fed entirely on short-form content, AI-generated summaries, and engagement-optimised outrage, is not a world that tends to make good decisions.

And they are important because someone, at some point, has to sit down and produce something real. Something with a perspective. Something with a point of view shaped by actual experience of the world, not a statistical prediction of what a point of view is supposed to sound like.

This article, for instance.

Which was written, unfiltered, a little nervously, irony fully intended — to make that very argument.

You're welcome.