Josh Bernoff has just completed the largest survey yet of writers and AI – nearly 1,500 respondents across journalism, communication, publishing, and fiction.

We interviewed Josh for this podcast in early December 2025. What emerges from both the data and our conversation is not a single, simple story, but a deep divide.

Writers who actively use AI increasingly see it as a powerful productivity tool. They research faster, brainstorm more effectively, build outlines more quickly, and free themselves up to focus on the work only humans can do well – judgement, originality, voice, and storytelling. The most advanced users report not only higher output, but improvements in quality and, in many cases, higher income.

Non-users experience something very different.

For many non-users, AI feels unethical, environmentally harmful, creatively hollow, and a direct threat to their livelihoods. The emotional language used by some respondents in Josh’s survey reflects just how personal and existential these fears have become.

And yet, across both camps, there is striking agreement on key risks. Writers on all sides are concerned about hallucinations and factual errors, copyright and training data, and the growing volume of bland, generic “AI slop” that now floods digital channels.

In our conversation, Josh argues that the real story is not one of wholesale replacement, but of re-sorting. AI is not eliminating writers outright. It is separating those who adapt from those who resist – and in the process reshaping what it now means to be a trusted communicator, editor, and storyteller.

Key Highlights

• Why hands-on AI users report higher productivity and quality, while non-users feel an existential threat


• How AI is now embedded in research, brainstorming, outlining, and verification – not just text generation


• Why PR and communications teams are adopting faster than journalists


• What the rise of “AI slop” means for trust, originality, and attention


• Why the future of writing is not replacement – but re-sorting

About our Conversation Partner

Josh Bernoff is an expert on business books and how they can propel thinkers to prominence. Books he has written or collaborated on have generated over $20 million for their authors.

More than 50 authors have endorsed Josh’s Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write, and Promote a Book That Matters, a comprehensive guide for business authors. His other books include Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean and the Business Week bestseller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. He has contributed to 50 nonfiction book projects.

Josh’s mathematical and statistical background includes three years of study in the Ph.D. program in mathematics at MIT. As a Senior Vice President at Forrester Research, he created Technographics, a consumer survey methodology, which is still in use more than 20 years later. Josh has advised, consulted on, and written about more than 20 large-scale consumer surveys.

Josh writes and posts daily at Bernoff.com, a blog that has attracted more than 4 million views. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, an artist.

Follow Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshbernoff/

Relevant Links

• https://bernoff.com/


• https://bernoff.com/blog/ai-writer-survey-results-analyzing-royalties-neuroscientific-sneakers-newsletter-5-november-2025


• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/99019-new-report-examines-writers-attitudes-toward-ai.html


• https://gothamghostwriters.com/AI-writer

Audio Transcript

Shel Holtz

Hi everybody, and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And we are here today with Josh Bernoff. I’ve known Josh since the early SNCR days. Josh is a prolific author, professional writer, mostly of business material. But Josh, I’m gonna ask you to share some background on yourself.

Josh Bernoff

Okay, thanks. What people need to know about me, I spent four years in the startup business and 20 years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Since that time, which was in 2015, I have been focused almost exclusively on the needs of authors, professional business authors. So I work with them as a coach, writer, ghostwriter, an editor, and basically anything they need to do to get business books published.

The other thing that’s sort of relevant in this case is that while I was at Forrester, I originated their survey methodology, which is called Technographics. And I have a statistics background, a math background, so fielding surveys and analysing them and writing reports about them is a very comfortable and familiar place for me to be. So when the opportunity arose to write about a survey of authors in AI, said, all right, I’m in, let’s do this.

Shel Holtz

And you’ve also published your own books. I’ve read your most recent one, How to Write a Better Business Book.

Josh Bernoff

Mm-hmm, yes. So, this is like, the host has to prod you to promote your own stuff. Yes. Yes. So by my two most recent books, I wrote a book called Writing Without Bullshit, which is basically a, a manifesto for, people in corporations to write better. and I wrote build a better business book that you talked about, which is a complete manual for everything you need to do to think about conceive. write, get published and promote a business book. Yeah, so they’re both both available online where your audience can find them.

Shel Holtz

Wherever books are sold. So we’re here today, Josh, to talk about that survey of writers that you conducted, asking them about their use of AI. What motivated you to undertake this survey in the first place?

Josh Bernoff

Well, I’ll just go back a tiny little bit. About two years ago, Dan Gerstein, who is the CEO of Gotham Ghost Readers and a really fantastically interesting guy, reached out to me because he knew my background of doing statistics and said, let’s do a survey of the ROI of business books, get business authors to talk about what they went through to create their business books and