Google is testing a product that uses AI to produce news stories.

The distance we’ve come in my professional life as a journalist is amazing. I wrote my first stories for a newspaper in Mexico City on a manual typewriter.

The debate over whether AI should or will be used by journalists is not worth having. The technology has arrived and people will use it. No one goes back to a manual Smith & Corona.

It will obviously be disruptive, but may or may not cost jobs in aggregate.

Much is made of the shrinking of the professional media; rarely do people mention the massive growth of online writing jobs.

A friend just got a job script writing for MagnatesMedia, a YouTube channel with 1 million subscribers that tells business stories. The videos garner as many as 5 million views.

That may not count as a “media” job in the same way as working at the New York Times, but it is a writing job and it’s a type of media that is growing.

There is a vast market and appetite for machine-written content. The written word will be our portal into data sets and information that was previously inaccessible.

If you read a story today that could be written by AI, it will be.

But the market for bespoke writing will also flourish in much the same way as it has for fashion and food, two industries upended by technology. Gucci is still Gucci. Whole Foods co-exists with Foodtown and Acme. Photographs changed portraiture, but artists continue to paint.

Writing for the high-end market requires journalists to write stories that have not been told, cite original data and quote new sources. Essentially, write something that cannot be written by AI.

Reporters could use AI to detect whether a story has already been written and by whom. AI could help find new sources who haven’t been quoted and better detect plagiarism.

A decade working on automated news at Bloomberg LP convinced me that AI will produce useful low-end content while a high-end market for human-written stories emerges.

People will generally notice the difference.

No one confuses Zara with Gucci or Noma with Shake Shack.