THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW
The New Writing Renaissance He won’ t sugarcoat the casualty, which is the public internet itself.“ I think they’ re destroying the public internet,” he says of AI search summaries, and Medium’ s own data shows the smart writing already slipping behind paywalls, toward the Substacks, Discords and paid communities of X. Medium is following it there, one private blogging product lands in November, another in January, and the number behind the bet is stark. Offered a known, trusted audience over a declining public one, 97 % of writing on Medium’ s own data prefers the private. Nor does Tony accept that reading is dying in the wake of TikTok.“ We went from a world where we just had human-to-human writing,” he says, to“ hybrid-to-hybrid writing”, where a
Text is the universal programming language for the entire world
Tony Stubblebine CEO Medium piece is read end to end by some and pulled into a Claude window by many more.“ You can’ t get your essay fully read the way you used to, but you can get your ideas out into the world in a major way.” Far from replacing writers, the AI turns out to be desperate for them. We shared a laugh over a meme that went around, someone asking ChatGPT for a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov in the style of Marcel Proust. The machine can do an impression, but humans wrote everyone it imitates.“ Honestly, I think we are in a writing renaissance and it’ s just hard to see because writers are rightfully so annoyed with AI founders,” he says. That is the strange, bracing position Tony occupies: prosecutor and practitioner at once, convinced that voice is the one thing AI cannot fake and that writing is the ultimate human technology, the most important invention we have ever had: stories. The AI companies chose violence, by his account, and what follows is either a negotiated peace or a collective race to the bottom. Tony chose publishing, a bet that when the slop rises, readers will know the difference.“ When the slop goes cheap, go expensive … that means you can take the hard path, and no one’ s going to compete with you there.”
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