Chat GPT is the ‘talk of the town’ for all content creators and many businesses seeing an opportunity to cut corners. Am I worried? Not really. Here’s why. Whilst the initial dazzle of generative text on demand is gratifying for those who like to write about tyre fitting in the style of Shakespeare (with hilarious results), AI ‘burped’ copy does have challenges. Here are four insights that help me sleep at night, safe in the knowledge a career as a professional writer hasn’t evaporated into AI-generated smoke.
- AI is regurgitation
Whilst many timebound writers use the internet as a source, journalism also needs to talk to real people, edit their responses a little, make sense of their storyline and quote them accurately. Much of my work is interviewing people who are conducting new ground-breaking research.
It’s complex, there are nuances and story craft is exacting in needs. For marketing, new businesses need a human understanding of their offers and value, for PR – there is an art form for achieving press and it’s human-centred. Sure, a few blogs and essays may work well but is that a reason to worry about the future of writing? AI learns from the dumper-trucks-worth of data on the internet, in a given timeframe, it has perceptual limits.
- Experience is everything
‘I am AI, therefore I’m not’. It’s obvious, AI does not have the breadth of human experience, it hasn’t grown up as a person, and it cannot understand love and death or know what life is. My last blog post was expressing personal grief, could a machine truly carry that off and intricately, honestly, share why it’s grieving with those memories too? Unlike building a car, the blueprint for human experience is more complex to understand for a machine and so writing about it is always essentially fakery.
In addition, it can’t always discern strong bias, filter massive inaccuracies, or do half the checks needed to ensure a piece is accurate, objective and not completely bonkers. Writers aren’t perfect, but machines miss some really basic stuff.
- It’s getting noticed for the wrong reasons
Can you spot AI writing – yes, you can. Well, Google can for starters. Google can catch what it deems low-quality content and interestingly AI gets caught a lot. That should speak volumes to anyone wanting to rely wholeheartedly on AI writing when their reputation is at stake. If you want to risk SEO penalties, maybe don’t put all your faith into generative text. Without that human spark, it can also be a little boring and repetitive too. It’s become shunned by many institutions and even countries already, whilst just emerging in its infancy. Italy has outright banned it, and many schools and colleges are unhappy with how it’s disrupting learning with lazy writing. Relying on AI writing could be bad for business, literally, so… Writers – 1, AI – 0.
- Tools don’t replace minds
In the whirlwind of worry that generative AI could replace human writers, and erode schooling and academia, one lovely sentiment surfaced around a comparison to calculators. It hinged on the premise that calculators are tools, and maths is forever. We still send children to Maths lessons despite having calculators. AI for writing will never prevent learning language, writing and the expressive nature of communication. It’s who we are, it’s how we record history, it’s how we communicate. A machine tool is useful, but it won’t replace us completely.
For clarity, AI did not write this copy!
If you want a human writer to work with on content, blogs, PR or articles feel free to contact me. Here are a few examples of articles and stories I put together recently that were in the press:
Several editorial features, and the Editor’s Note, for EU Research magazine.
Press Release Driven Story on a Life Coach, Covered in The Business Exchange – a B2B magazine and the newspaper Wiltshire Times.
An editorial article put together for Descartes and Varn, for the Builder’s Merchants Sector.
Contact me, if you need written content and let’s have a conversation.
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