If you have been on the internet in the past month or so, you will have heard of ChatGPT. Everyone, from Twitter to bosses to LinkedIn to flatmates, seems to be talking about it. A revolution is coming, and like many other professionals, commercial content writers are on the cusp of this sea change. So here are my unsolicited two cents.
Resistance is futile
We are not the only people who are or will be affected with this technology so first things first: It is at times pointless standing in front of the wheels of change as they march forward. For millennials like me, several such industry-upending changes have occurred within our own lifetimes. We have lived through the age of floppies and CDs (remember the burning software Nero?), pirating music, going from an analog camera to digital to smartphones, and ironically even this, blogging. Things that were once central to our lives, we look back on with nostalgia now.
The anxiety
As a content writer for small businesses, I am at the frontline of this upheaval. So, like any big change, these are mentally taxing times. As the portal catches on, a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, will find it more economical to get their content written by artificial intelligence than paying a human to do something slightly better. This will render many unskilled writers – and as a profession with an imperceptible entry barrier, we have a fair share of them – jobless. In fact, this will become the entry barrier and the writers who want to survive will have to hone their craft and develop a voice that does much better than the computer programme.
Infusing personality
However, if you have a business, you also know it’s important to differentiate yourself. Hence, if you are considering using ChatGPT for your branding, you would know that while it can give you plain vanilla but SEO optimised content to populate your website, you will still need to layer it with your brand’s personality. ChatGPT content should act as template, not the end-product itself. Writers should also embrace it as such; rather than thinking of AI as a direct competitor, we should use it as an efficient research resource.
Keeping AI on its toes
Ultimately though, AI will be able to write in a very specific tone of voice too (what with people even training them to write songs and movie scripts like a particular creative). This is especially the case if you consider your brand’s personality as something static and constantly put out content in a single tone of voice. Because like the imperfect humans who created them, brands can’t be static or perfect, and their language needs to keep evolving.
For instance, if you define your clothing brand’s personality as “quirky but sustainable”, and keep that aspect central to your communications over a long period of time, AI will eventually learn and codify your brand language and be able to produce copy in that unchanging tone. And eventually, your customers will be bored with the sameness of the content.
Temporary relief
A silver lining to this dark cloud is the fact that writing is catered to actual people. Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century says that algorithms like those on search engines are getting more powerful and we are producing things to appease them, and not really people (looking at you, SEO writing).
However, the jobs that cater to humans – like nursing, the care of children and the elderly, philosophers and ethicists – are likely to be the ones that will still be needed, he feels. Commercial writing, like advertising copywriting, is still targeted at people’s desires and insecurities. As long as we make such human decisions as buying jewellery or donating to charity, writers will still wield some power.
My takeaway
AI will take over writing a lot of the generic content that appears on the internet while human writing will need to go back to its roots of writing for people, rather than solely for algorithms (time to up your game, SEO writers). This will help businesses pick out good writers who can infuse the brand’s personality in their content.
For more such anxious reflections on everyday things, and to watch the process of a writer experiencing an identity crisis in real-time, keep reading this blog.
No robots were harmed during this thought exercise.