Excited and exhausted: My honest take about life as a techwriter in the AI age – Elizabeth Tai

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Excited and exhausted: My honest take about life as a techwriter in the AI age

Aug 19, 2026

TL;DR: As professional writers, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring AI; it’s learn the skills or get left behind. Still, I’m excited because AI has genuinely made me more productive and work (personal and work-work) has become a lot more fun. However, I’m also exhausted because there’s so much to learn. However, rather than whine about it, I have decided to "attack" the challenge strategically.

Table of contents

A few weeks ago, I told my online tech writer friend Fabrizio of Passo.uno that I  wrote a whiny journal entry about how overwhelmed I was about the amount of things I have to learn about AI.

At the end of the conversation, I asked him to write a blog post about how we technically inclined writers can cope with the speed of change in AI tech and learn fast.  He kindly obliged me in a day, writing this fantastic post: Advice for tech writers on a job hunt in the AI age

I love his suggestions, especially #2, which is my favorite way to learn: create your own projects. I found #1 a bit challenging. Books and courses are my go-to way of learning. But it’s true what he said: things are changing so fast now that by the time a book is out, it’s already old news.

How I first reacted to LLMs

Before I talk about how overwhelmed I feel about the amount of learning I had to do, I’ll have to go back to the past a bit.

When AI first landed, and I saw what ChatGPT could do, my heart sank. I knew that the content profession would change yet again. It was particularly discouraging  back then because I was just getting my feet steady as a technical writer. Although I was pretty confident my profession would never disappear, I knew that the road ahead will be tough for us.

When ChatGPT debuted in 2022, I didn’t understand how the tech worked and was resentful. I wasn’t upset that writers’ work was "stolen", per se. I was more upset that the tech was mostly locked behind paywalls. As these services are in US dollars, that meant Global South knowledge workers with weaker currencies (like me) were at a serious disadvantage.

Fortunately, the DeepSeek moment happened, and now open source LLMs and coding agents are giving Global South folks a fairer shot at development and modernization. That’s why I’m pretty grateful to DeepSeek! (It remains the primary LLM model I use.)

The Deepseek moment melted away my resentment and I immediately got to learn how to use AI. Fast.

It was a huge learning curve. Fortunately, I’m a tech nerd who loves playing around with software, and have a natural inclination for it. After all, I write software technical documentation and blog posts about tech services such as app rationalisations, data centre to cloud migrations and more. New tech is exciting to me.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for all writers.

A merciless time: Anti-AI writers will be left behind

Writers have not been exactly receptive about AI tech; the creative writing communities are especially hostile about AI use in writing workflows. (Each time I write about my experiments with AI in my fiction writing, I inevitably get aggressive hate-filled comments.)

It’s not just about generating copy; some don’t even want you to use AI to edit the copy, which is ironic since tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid have been using it pretty actively.

For those of us working in the professional content space, we don’t have the luxury to ignore AI or write Substack essays about why we hate it. It’s either learn the skills or be left behind by your colleagues who are ahead of you in AI skills.

I’ve been a professional writer since the 1990s when I was stringing for the national newspaper and writing ad copy for advertising agencies, "faxing" it to them via a clunky, beeping fax modem. When I started as a journalist, my newsroom had only ONE Internet-connected computer. Years later, every computer was connected to the ‘net.

After being a journalist from 2000-2018 (with a break of a few years  in between when I had fantasies of being a nurse), I transitioned to the corporate world, working in corporate and government communications, wrestling with content strategy in a world where one wrong word on social media could make your day hell as a PR exec. Finally, I moved on the tech world where I’ve honed my skills as a technical communicator.

This is my long-ass way of saying that I’ve been in the trenches for decades and have seen the industry evolve with every tech wave.

Having lived through the journalism profession’s collapse thanks to the Internet,  this is not my first rodeo with technology upending my profession.

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