Good writers know that the ability to write is the ability to think and turn cultural capital into problem-solving
I know what great AI and LLMs are available and how their output is so fast and time-saving, and that the machine can essentially do a lot of useful things for free, especially for freelancers like myself. And that is also a seductive argument for those who simply do not want to pay humans to do the same job.
John Ebejer, a lecturer at the University of Malta with decades of prior professional experience in architecture, urban planning, project management, and tourism consultancy, examined the effect of generative AI on student writing skills in this contribution to the Malta Review of Educational Research.
The skill gap AI is making worse
Ebejer’s opening premise is that employers appreciate written communication and critical thinking as skills that most reliably separate competent professionals from mediocre ones. And I hope he is indeed right: journalists like myself with 20 years under our wing like to show how those two particular skills can help businesses.
But Ebejer says the evidence suggests the widespread availability of AI text generation is actively degrading both skills. Among students for example, he notices that when a shortcut is available, people take it; that shortcut therefore becomes plausible-looking output, and also normalised; it is when it becomes normalised that the underlying skill of being able to structure an argument and interrogate a problem, and also communicate it, starts to lose muscle.
Research from MIT’s Media Lab cited by Ebejer, found that regular ChatGPT users became progressively less engaged with each subsequent writing task – dedicating less thought, doing less analytical work. The work produced does looked competent, and yet it also becomes increasingly hollow. In my own personal experience, the output and language of entry-level ChatGPT prompts seems to be quite samey, suggesting that the machine has a basic language with which to communicate.
Writing is thinking – and thinking cannot be outsourced
As Ebejer states, writing and critical thinking are not parallel activities. As an editor I have always said: clear writing reveals clear thinking. A person who writes well demonstrates, in real time, that they can break a problem into its components, sequence an argument, even anticipate the reader’s objections to arrive at a conclusion the evidence actually supports.
Ebejer illustrates this by taking his own career as an example, where policy documents, development briefs, or draft legislation he authored all existed within a specific context: you get stakeholders, a political environment, budgets, even history. And that means you cannot separate the writing from the contextual understanding. To delegate this kind of writing to an AI system trained on scraped internet text would be risky… the tool is trained on general data that cannot understand the specific circumstances that makes each document necessary. Especially in the Malta context!
Consider professional copywriting for regulated financial products, a crisis communications document, or a policy position paper; in each case the writer must make judgements about what the audience needs to hear, in what order, the tone and register, and at what level of technical detail.
And those judgements are also the product! The words are how the judgements are delivered.
The social analyst behind every good piece of copy
As a journalist who spent 20 years in the trade, writing thousands of news stories, interviewing people in authority, and writing features and op-eds, I understand how professional communication exists within a social context – audiences have expectations, anxieties, prior knowledge, and competing interests.
Good copywriters are, in this sense, social analysts. Their value lies in understanding what the brief is actually asking for – which is often different from what it says – and in producing copy that achieves the organisation’s real objective rather than its stated one.
That requires the same critical apparatus Ebejer identifies as the defining characteristic of effective professional writing: understanding a complex problem, then constructing a response that holds under scrutiny.
What this means if you are hiring for communications
The risk is clearest in high-stakes communications: any document that will be read by an audience with the expertise and motivation to identify weakness in the argument. In all of these contexts, the cost of getting the copy wrong can be a reputational event: because critical thinking is a foundational human competency, whatever the eventual shape of AI’s role in the workplace.
