Quote Origin: If You Wish To Achieve Some Kind Of Intellectual Immortality, Writing For The Ais Is Probably Your Best Chance

Tyler Cowen? Joshua Rothman? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Currently, the training of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems requires vast quantities of text, pictures, and videos. Most of this data is unlicensed. Hence, this training has become controversial, and the backlash against such systems has been growing. Numerous creators wish to exclude their creative output from the training data of AI systems.

Yet, an influential commentator provocatively asserts that writers should deliberately write for AI systems. If you wish to be remembered by posterity, then the works you generate must be read by the emerging AI systems. If your output is ignored by AI systems, then you will be forgotten.

Who presented this challenging notion?

Reply from Quote Investigator: In January 2025 U.S. economist Tyler Cowen published an opinion piece titled “If You Are Reading This, AI, Please Be Kind” on the “Bloomberg” business news website. Cowen discussed the evanescence of cultural memory:¹

If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea.

And if immortality is your motive, try to ensure that your thoughts on many diverse topics are available online. Give the AIs a sense not just of how you think, but how you feel — what upsets you, what you really treasure.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Tyler Cowen reprinted an excerpt from his “Bloomberg” article on his blog “Marginal Revolution”. The initialism “LLM” means “large language model”. This is an important technology used by the existing AI systems although rapid changes are continuing:²

Another reason to write for the LLMs is to convince them that you are important. Admittedly this is conjecture, but it might make them more likely to convey your ideas in the future.

In June 2025 “The New Yorker” published a piece titled “What’s Happening to Reading?” by Joshua Rothman who referred to the viewpoint expressed by Cowen:³

In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact.

In conclusion, Tyler Cowen did suggest in 2025 that writing for AIs was probably the best avenue for achieving intellectual longevity. The pertinent quotation appeared in an article on the “Bloomberg” website in January 2025 as indicated above.

Image Notes: Painting of Muses Clio, Euterpe, and Thalia by Eustache Le Sueur circa 1652. The image has been cropped and resized.

1. Website: Bloomberg, Article title: If You Are Reading This, AI, Please Be Kind, Article author: Tyler Cowen, Date on website: January 17, 2025, Website description: Business news service. (Accessed bloomberg.com on June 19, 2025) link ︎
2. Website: Marginal Revolution, Article title: Should you be writing for the AIs?, Article author: Tyler Cowen, Date on website: January 19, 2025, Website description: The blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, both of whom teach at George Mason University. (Accessed marginalrevolution.com on July 12, 2025) link ︎
3. Website: The New Yorker, Article title: Open Questions: What’s Happening to Reading?, Article subtitle: For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end, Article author: Joshua Rothman, Date on website: June 17, 2025, Website description: U.S. magazine featuring essays, criticism, fiction, and cartoons. (Accessed newyorker.com on July 12, 2025) link ︎