If the Internet Died Tomorrow, I’d Still Be Writing

YouTube became the first major platform to stop paying for AI-generated content. Is that the right approach? And why does it matter especially to writers like me, who’ve been at this for a couple of decades?

AI is learning fast. Faster than any human could dream of. It’s hoovering up language from millions of websites, endless Reddit debates, PhD papers, Yelp reviews, memes, and one too many breakup poems. :)

It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t question its existence at 3 a.m. It doesn’t get distracted by a sudden need to reorganize the spice rack instead of writing.

And that’s part of the concern, right?

Because sounding human? That’s no longer the hurdle. AI is already throwing out hot takes, stitching together arguments, and quoting Aristotle like it went to liberal arts college. The hard part now isn’t coherence it’s being real.

Meanwhile, I’ll sit with an idea like it’s a splinter. I’ll poke at it for hours, toss it out, chase it down again, and slowly wrestle it into something that feels not just logical but true.

Yeah, AI can write a birthday wish in ten seconds. But when I do it? I bring twenty years of friendship, that one inside joke from 2011, and the exact tone that won’t make them cry but might make them pause.

Still, someone might ask: “Was this ChatGPT?”

I get it. But I also don’t.

Even Dubai Is Drawing the Line

On July 16, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai announced initiative to standardize “content labelling system” . You will know whether it was written by a human, AI, or both.

Plus tags that show where AI was used, was it idea generation? Grammar? Translation? Entire paragraphs? This is more than a novelty. It’s a message: authorship still matters. It’s also a quiet admission that many of us are losing track of who’s really speaking and maybe, what is speaking.

Dubai’s not banning AI. Let humans stay accountable for what they put out into the world.

That’s what AI has done, it’s made people second-guess sincerity. We’ve entered the uncanny valley of language, where anything well-worded raises suspicion.

I once texted a heartfelt birthday wish to a friend. Her reply? Did AI write this?

But here’s the difference.

If the world went dark tomorrow, no internet, no apps, no predictive text, I’d still write. Pen. Paper. Back of a receipt, if I had to.

AI is fascinating. Useful, even. It’s a tool. A really smart tool. But it’s not me. And it’s definitely not you.

When YouTube stopped monetizing machine-made content, they aren't just drawing a line, they are making a point:

Effort still matters. Intention still counts.

Human creativity, messy, slow, imperfect, is still worth something.

AI might beat us in speed, stats, and scale. But it can’t sit in silence and stew on a single idea for hours. It can’t change its mind after a vulnerable conversation. It doesn’t write through heartbreak. It doesn’t revise after reading something that gutted it.

Most of all? It doesn’t care. So, here’s to writing without shortcuts. To leaving typos in drafts and feelings in margins. To staying fluent in your own thoughts.

And to a world that still knows the difference between writing that sounds human and writing that is.

Written by,

Chaya Mathew