A perishable ability? The future of writing in the face of generative artificial intelligence

The 2020s have been witnessing a very significant advance in the development of generative artificial intelligence tools, including text generation systems based on large language models. These tools have been increasingly used to generate texts in the most diverse domains -- from technical texts to literary texts --, which might eventually lead to a lower volume of written text production by humans. This article discusses the possibility of a future in which human beings will have lost or significantly decreased their ability to write due to the outsourcing of this activity to machines. This possibility parallels the loss of the ability to write in other moments of human history, such as during the so-called Greek Dark Ages (approx. 1200 BCE - 800 BCE).