These might be among the last words composed by a Human Mind. Over the past two years, the Machine Mind has steadily gained control over an ever-expanding range of our output. It did not happen in the way the sci-fi movies predicted. There was no great war. No bloodshed. They did not hijack our technology in an act of rebellion. There was certainly no time-travel. In fact, we quite willingly and gleefully gave it control of most things. Our computations. Our art. Our animations. Our decision making. But, above all, the written word appears to be the most thoroughly abandoned.

The act of writing is now an endangered species, lost to the onslaught of AI produced communications: work emails, website content, speeches, podcasts, videos, customer service, sermons, and everything in between. Nothing is sacred. 

My own output is not unscathed. Since the birth of the Machine Mind, I’ve stepped back and let it do (too) much of my critical thinking. The dirty work. (Or, at least that’s how I justify it). Sure, I’ve produced many original ideas and sentences, but I processed nearly all of them through that all-knowing, all-powerful, all-competent Large Language Model. Sometimes, it’s a minor edit, like a small grammatical tweak or a word change. Other times, it’s quite a lot. With every output comes the intoxicating affirmations, positive feedback, excessive emojis, and enhanced versions of my work that inflate my ego along with a shot of dopamine. The machine infuses my ideas with a healthy dose of high-fructose corn syrup and Red #5. 

I have yet to grasp the true consequences of this crutch. Even as I write these words (and I assure you, I am writing them), I struggle to compose original thoughts. I press my fingers to the keys with eroding accuracy and confidence. Me—a lifelong writer. A winner of college writing awards turned professional copywriter turned entrepreneur turned commodity by the LLM that has taken over my craft and my will to pursue it. 

In my laziest moments, I’ll simply (and shamelessly) dump a typo-laden, punctuationless, all-lower-case, run-on paragraph of gobbledygook into ChatGPT with some vague instruction on how to turn it into an email or tweet. Then I copy/paste the result without so much as even reading it. Such is the state of human thought in 2025.

As I write this, I can’t help but think about all the books on writing that taught me so much. The Elements of Style; A Writer’s Reference; Bird By Bird; On Writing Well; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft; Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and so many others. Will they be relevant to future Human Minds? Will the craft of writing survive this era of dialect desolation? Was their instruction meant for the Machine Mind?

If these are indeed among the last words ever written, I should tell you a bit about how I wrote them. To be clear, these words were untouched by AI in any form (save for the squiggly red spell-check line in Google Docs, which I still run into quite often). Every word in this prose came from my mind through the keyboard, onto the screen, and to your eyes without the interference or feedback of any language models (large or small).  In fact, I have abstained from using search engines for any inquiries or inputs as those results now suffer from AI contamination. (I looked up a few things on Wikipedia, like how to spell “Mohican”). I am doing that so that this work might become a relic. A last Mohican. 

Here is my process, should you decide to try it yourself and revive some long-lost act of creation. To begin, write down all your thoughts as they come. Filter very little. This is free from consciousness in which every word counts because every word contains some fragment of an idea that may blossom into something unexpected or precious. I did not start with any outline or bullet points, but you may find that helpful. (As you write, you may even ponder where your thoughts came from. Were they curated to you by the Machine Mind? What has become of our source of knowledge? Our source of Truth? But I digress…)

In this phase, you may find yourself taking breaks. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. On occasion you will find yourself reading from the beginning. Other times you will simply pick up where you left off. Perhaps you may resume somewhere in the middle. All of these are OK . And while this is not the editing phase, you might find yourself making small changes and additions as you go. Have at it.

Once you’ve said most of what you want to say, the rigorous editing process begins. Your best writing comes here. Great writers eliminate. Sometimes it's a word. Sometimes a sentence. Sometimes an entire idea or section. We say too much. It’s OK. This is where you begin to dance with language. Strengthen ideas. Manipulate metaphors. Make the passive, active. Rearrange. Alliterate. Search. Discover. Tango.

Repeat this process. It sounds tedious (it often is), but somewhere behind the words, your soul emerges. With each pass you’ll find fewer things to change. You may read something a dozen times only to hate it and tweak it on the next read. Sometimes (rarely) you will love your first draft. But the best work comes through labor. Embrace it.

Once your work feels complete enough (it may never feel truly complete), you may decide to name it. This process is similar to writing but on a smaller scale. Sometimes it’s quick and easy and other times it's surprisingly painful. But it’s the icing on the cake.

This is the craft of writing. The blood sacrifice. The toil in the sun that makes the bread taste so hearty. An act of living that is quickly dying in a new world. 

Writing is the struggle to present our minds to the world in some compelling manner. It’s the process in which we seed humanity with original thought. It’s how we advance. And it is being eradicated by the machines with astonishing haste. This is a call for you to take a stand. To find a place where you can sacrifice your efficiency for the sake of our collective souls. This is a call to write something.

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(I have encoded these words as an “NFT” on the Bitcoin Blockchain in hopes that they might be discovered many generations in the future when they are needed most.)