Was I worried about AI “taking my job”? Never.
Mostly because I wasn’t sure what it was they were taking.
Oh no, is AI going to run off with all of the people who send me bottom-dollar offers through Upwork?
I will say I noticed a two-year lapse of people reaching out for content and copy – the kind of folks who just need “a paragraph or two” or “needs some stuff for my website, shouldn’t take you more than an hour.” Why would they bother working with a copywriter when they can ask a machine to produce the exact thing they want in a matter of minutes?
As an added benefit, they no longer need to have the likes of me letting them know why the copy needs to be something different than what they were expecting. They are not their audience, you aren’t buying this stuff, the sales component looks very different from where they sit.
If you ask the robot to write your website copy, you’ll take what it gives you because it doesn’t know any better. A robot isn’t tuned in to the nuances of human emotion – but it can find a heavily-indexed web page from 2007 about “how to write great copy” and barf that all over you.
And you’ll be happy with it, because what else are you gonna do…hire a professional?
I’m having more conversations with prospective clients nowadays about their branding and messaging, the copy on their site, how they talk to their customers – which means they’ve given up on their chatbots. Or, at the very least, they’ve learned what I knew all along: robots aren’t people, and for the most part, people are still iffy about engaging with robots.
If you couldn’t be damned to write it, then why should anyone bother reading it?
It’s not that I’m against chatbot and generative AI – I think it can do some interesting things and most of the population is still struggling with how to wrap their heads around it. Tell it to do something and it does it. How well it is done is all in the eye of the beholder. For example, I think it can be a great tool for bringing me to completely random trailheads that I can then progress down in an organic fashion – like going to the library through the back door.
And I have noticed a change in the quality of the AI output. Even my own interface has taken on a strangely lax conversational tone with me – perhaps reacting to my non-artificial intelligence? Additionally, the answers it dishes out nowadays are a little…off?
As in: artificial intelligence might be wrong? Then again, is not the truest sign of intelligence to know and admit when one is wrong?
This is the story that the AI Titans knew would happen, didn’t want to happen, and watched as it happened anyway. The production of generative AI was published en-masse into the same environments the AI trained upon. Garbage in, garbage out, even more garbagier stuff in. Before long you recognize that language, the subtle, invisible technology that commands so much of our conscious reality, is not something to be left wholesale to the robots.