From World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) by Franklin Foer:
But reading through the papers [of Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic during the worst of the Great Depression], I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site. I stared at the page. Eighty years of inflation . . . and stagnation. Writers are still paid precisely the same sum they received at the lowest moments in the economic history of the modern world.
Over my time as a journalist, I’ve seen the proprietors of journalistic outfits come to the conclusion that writers don’t really need to get paid very much. My career began at Slate, one of the first of the magazines created to live exclusively on the Internet. In those golden years, back in the midnineties, we paid one thousand dollars for each book review, and a few of our stars made even more than that. Today, Slate pays about three hundred dollars for a review.
We don’t need to rely on anecdote. There are studies to be examined. In 1981, the Authors Guild surveyed its members. It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year — if we adjusted that sum for inflation, it would now be about $35,000. That doesn’t sound like much at all, until we compare it with the Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000. Sadly, the number rolls further down the deflationary spiral. In 2015, the median income dropped to $17,500. Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water. The value of knowledge has been deflated and depressed, just as the tech companies intended.
From “The Lost Art of Not Pitching” by David Macfarlane, Canadian Notes & Queries 115, Spring 2026:
Two dollars and fifty cents (USD) per word was as high as I ever got (GQ) before the tide receded. And kept receding. The water’s out way past the lighthouse by now. It’s more a beach of stranded Substacks and gasping podcasts than an ocean. Magazine writing was a slightly odd career choice when there were lots of publications in the sea. (One dollar to one dollar and fifty cents was about my average.) It would be downright eccentric now. I recently read (online, don’t ask me where, and who knows if it’s true) that seven cents a word is the going North American freelance rate.
Alex Good 
Yeah, AI is going to plunge us into a new dark age of ignorance and total mediocrity.
LikeLike
If there’s no money in writing then people won’t write.
LikeLiked by 1 person
and it becomes a vicious cycle.
and before you know it, pi’s are flying all over the place and smacking people in the face.
LikeLike
Getting smacked in the face with a pi is half the battle.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I prefer banana cream pies myself.
LikeLike
Yeah those are great. Haven’t had one in a long time.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had a very brief stint in writing. I wrote fiction for an interactive game under a pen name. I made £600 for two months of work which was less than sustainable, to say the least, so I didnt write for them again.
I also wrote for a pop culture news outlet. The content was bad but there was no money in it at all unless you wrote the bottom of the barrel content too, due to the structure of the company, and internal demands of writers there. I made $60 (US) per article which was even less in British pounds. I once wrote an article that was only a couple hundred reads from a nice bonus, and fell shockingly short in the end.
I gave it up and stuck to my blog. My blog doesn’t pay but at least I’m my own quality control. And to be fair, writing as a job takes a lot of the love out of it for me… not that there’s noney in it at all.
LikeLike
I think your experience is pretty common. And it’s precisely that kind of writing that AI can be expected to replace. Even a number of popular bloggers and podcasters have admitted they’re using AI to write their copy. Writing is difficult and if there’s no money in it then people will just give up.
LikeLike
So your point is that AI is simply continuing a trend already well under way?
LikeLike
Yep. It’s like when people started writing about the narcissism epidemic and social media. The studies show that narcissism had been growing for decades. The Internet just amplified it. That’s been the case with a lot of trends. The Internet didn’t change anything, it just accelerated everything.
LikeLike
Ah, good, then no reason to blame AI for everything: the real problem(s) lie elsewhere. Got any solutions?
LikeLike
Can’t blame AI for anything as it was engineered by people who maybe didn’t think things through, and taken over by greedy b***ards who did. They, I would posit, are the real problem. I can think of a solution but I don’t have a gun 🤣.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, blame the greedy bastards but I think we (or the people who use it) share some blame.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In another context, these are my thoughts exactly. : -)
But as for AI and automation there are so many potential positives that I think we’d be better off thinking of solutions to the real problems, like Shouldn’t there be another way for humans to find purpose and meaning without resorting to monkey work?
LikeLike
No, I don’t think there’s any fix. Reading and writing aren’t coming back. I think that culture will be remembered as a historical blip.
LikeLike
Which only matters if thinking goes with it and that’s a problem that CAN be fixed, don’t you think? Humans are pretty clever…..
I understand doom and gloom, but if that’s really the way of it, then we would have destroyed ourselves anyway, with or without AI.
LikeLike
Oh my title wasn’t a swipe at AI in general. I was just pointing out that in the context of paid writing work it’s a new force that’s going to make things a lot harder, and possibly put an end to the whole idea of a professional writer altogether.
The downstream effect of all of this I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. But I’m not optimistic. We’re getting rid of a lot of cultural memory and thinking skills and not replacing them with anything of value that I can see. So I’m doomy and gloomy on that front.
LikeLike
I definitely think writing has been undervalued and underpaid for as long as I have been alive. I went to school for Journalism/Humanities and was planning on a fulltime career in college sports information, which would have involved a great deal of writing. Yet, the salaries were shockingly low, and in researching other avenues of writing found that compensation was also not a living wage. And that was 45 years ago…when writing talent was not enhanced by AI…or the internet for that matter lol.
LikeLike
Yep, I’d say 45 years ago you could still make a living as a writer, even as a freelancer. I knew people who did it. But they didn’t make much money and they were really good at it and worked like hell. Today I don’t think you can do it.
LikeLiked by 1 person