Like any normal American, I’m terrified of the future.
As an endlessly procrastinating content writer, I’ve been particularly afraid of the future lately.
This fear is because of ChatGPT, a powerful chatbot.
This kind of model is often referred to as Artificial Intelligence, though there are quite compelling and granular arguments about why ChatGPT both is and is not AI according to its technical definition). ChatGPT is scary because it reveals the power of machine learning tools to perform work usually done by humans. ChatGPT is particularly powerful when it comes to the analysis and synthesis of information — or, what we often call writing, at least when mortals do it.
The buzz around AI and ChatGPT gets louder everyday. Lately it’s even freaking Google out. This, of course, makes me (and most people on the internet who care about writing, namely making a living from writing) very scared. So as more and more people ask some variation of “is this the end?” with some degree of panic in their (online) voice, I’ve found myself doing what I do the most when I’m afraid: collecting information.
Usually, the more I learn about a topic related to the future, the more afraid I become (climate collapse, microplastics, methane gas in the Arctic, I’m looking at you).
This was also true of my early stage research about ChatGPT, by the way. Most arguments against its efficacy and the eventual rending of writers as obsolete focused on its current power: the fact that it currently publishes inaccuracies, that the prose itself was limited, and that most prompts required quite a bit of tweaking. These, of course, are all bugs, not systemic issues with ChatGPT — and knowing that the newest version of ChatGPT was far more powerful, these arguments just made me more anxious about the future.
But something strange happened when I started a deeper research frenzy into ChatGPT’s abilities: the more I learned, the less afraid I was.
In fact, the deeper I’ve dived into the AI hyper-fixation wormhole, the less concerned I’ve felt about ChatGPT as an obstacle to a writing career. And though I’m prone to despair and anxiety, I haven’t felt either of these emotions as the internet loses its collective mind over ChatGPT’s ability to write.
It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of AI. But now my fears of AI are a little more nuanced, though also a little more apocalyptic. I find this gradient of fear comforting (though your mileage may vary), so I wanted to share this potential comfort with you.
Here’s why I’m not so scared of ChatGPT:
AI Makes Me Better at Writing —
AI Makes Me Better at Things Besides Writing — Once upon a time I was a podcast producer with great ambitions of writing a science fiction television series, which requires producing, sound editing, graphic design, marketing, directing, casting, acting, and myriad other skills I can’t even list. None of these things would ever be possible for me to do before major advances in technology. With AI, however, I could potentially do many of these things with help, or least with the guidance that comes with this stupid chatbot.
In the short term, this is kind of heinous: it devalues craft, art, and makes everything homogenous.
It also helps me get better at the things that I’m interested in that prior to AI, I never would have been able to figure out without an unrealistically deep investment in terms of time and money — from deploying automations that save me time to trying to understand how the fuck chemistry works.
But in the long term, it also means that our ability to make bigger things — . Even with the time and resource limitations ChatGPT will no doubt deeply exacerbate (including you know, the resources of the world consolidated into the hands of the few), our ability to teach ourselves new things, things that did not used to be possible for a single person to do, has grown exponentially.
Content Writing Has Goals Beyond Content — Becoming a paid writer requires writing things people want to pay you to read. This usually means establishing a niche. A niche is a space where you have relationships, expertise, credibility, fantastic samples and where there is demand in the market for content. This sounds technical, but it’s not that complicated (though I know many people, myself included, who have struggled greatly to find this space for their work).
For me, as a middling successful writing generalist who has written a lot of weird stuff over the years but never quite been sure what would sell, content writing to me has been about exploration. My previous writing (not for fun) focused on nonprofits, an area where my style and skillset was not particularly appealing. Most nonprofits focus on sustaining themselves through grants. If I was providing digital strategy or web content and expected to get paid for it, I usually needed to include many other components in my services, including website development, social media strategy, design, and overall communications strategy. At a certain point, this wasn’t sustainable for me — but I know that in many other industries, quality website content on its own is appealing because it factors into the bottom line for that business (this is because of SEO and a number of other ranking components that I won’t dive too deep into in this post). The problem is that I’ve never worked in those industries, and I don’t really know what they need.
So — how do you get enough knowledge and insight into those industries be helpful as a content writer?
One way is to, well, write: learn more about what businesses are looking for, what kinds of keyword research matters in their industry, . For me, the appeal of content writing has been to build relationships, expertise, credibility, and fantastic samples in niches with more demand where I can set the terms of my work a little easier.
I Have a Weird Writing Style, And You Probably Do Too — I was a journalist, romance ghostwriter, and podcast producer before diving into content writing. I have a very distinct voice. People comment on it, a lot. Particularly in the business world. Though I love the way I write (and that’s for the best, because I’m not very good at writing completely OUTSIDE of my style), I’ve tried to mute it a lot over the years in order to be able to make money and provide what say, an HVAC company needs in their articles about appropriate insulation. Over the years, I’ve had to do quite a bit of work to stop the voice I used in my personal project from bleeding into my professional content.
But here’s something interesting: I’ve noticed even in the last few months that many of the projects in my personal portfolio (things like, interviews with sex workers, science fiction about the future of work, other random stuff) has gotten more attention from potential employers than before. I think part of this is related to ChatGPT. The more we use ChatGPT , the more a streamlined and standardized single writing voice will become ubiquitous. Since it’s not advantageous to have your writing look like everyone else’s, businesses will put more effort into trying to make their content stand out.
There are caveats here, of course: one of ChatGPT’s more colorful functions is its ability to write as a particular person, like Buddha or Jesus Christ (who can then give you life advice). Though I definitely find these components compelling and a little alarming, my experiments with trying to get ChatGPT Ursula Le Guin to tell me how to be less depressed were less than fruitful — I got fairly generic advice on mindfulness across a variety of tones. While I don’t doubt that’s an important component of treating depression, it speaks to the caliber of the giant data sets ChatGPT is based on — a giant mishmash of marketing, advertising, good stuff and bad.
Even as specific AI tools appear that are designed to refine that dataset (for example, Lavender, which relies only on high quality sales emails for its data), the challenges of getting a consistent tone says to me that voice, tone, and unusual content will stand out more as AI takes over.
I Just Want Practice — Until I started as a content writer, I wrote either what people at nonprofits wanted me to write, or only what I wanted to write. Both meant that I was often flailing around quite a lot in terms of figuring out where there was actually a demand for writing.
There’s a whole bunch of research that says, in essence, consistent practice is the best way to get better at something (er, that’s also common sense).
A friend of mine in sales always says, “It’s better to get paid to fail than not.”
You will encounter unpaid failure a lot in every field, but I appreciate the opportunity content writing presents to understand an industry better without having to say, get a job in the field in order to figure out what they’re looking for. AI does not replace this opportunity, in my opinion, even if jobs become more limited.
Adaptation Is Part of Every Career — AI in the future may require content writers to incorporate other skill sets — but in a way that remains fundamentally about content writing. Being able to understand your niche industry is part of this, as is understanding metrics that indicate your writing is worth investing in.
Creating quality, timely, tailored content might mean building other technical skills as AI progresses, but ultimately the skills and sensibilities required to be a good content writer won’t be valueless.
These Aren’t New Problems — A few years ago, I saw a YouTube comment on a video designed to help people beat their internet addiction. The person making those videos, a young woman with a soothing voice, had made hundreds of videos. Her first video was very different from the ones she had made most recently, which were far more optimized, better lit, with graphics in the thumbnail images and titles like “WATCH ME DESTROY YOUR TECHNOLOGY ADDICTION”. They also had very different levels of engagement and views — though it’s always somewhat of a crapshoot to determine if anyone is making money online, it was clear that if this girl made any money at all, it was because of her later videos, not her original ones. “It’s wild,” the comment I was struck by said. “It’s like, she’s trying to train us how to beat the algorithm, but we’re training her to be more and more tailored to the algorithm as she does it.”
When people talk about how ChatGPT will disrupt the world, I often hear concerns about how impossible it will make distribution for newcomers, how it will consolidate the power (including the power to determine what gets viewed) into the hands of the few, and how irrelevant those unwilling to follow certain standards for writing will become. None of those things are NOT true — but they’ve been a seismic problem with our internet long before ChatGPT appeared on the scene.
ChatGPT poses truly alarming problems when it comes to questions of writing, distribution, and the future of work — but ultimately ChatGPT accelerates these problems, it doesn’t create them.
The pace of modern technology and the ways capitalism rewards monopoly, volume, and growth at a level dictated primarily by the algorithms of particular technology companies, unfortunately, far predates ChatGPT.
Did this help your fear about ChatGPT?
Let me know. And, PS — I didn’t use AI to write any of this, though honestly I wish that I had.
H Kapp-Klote writes about writing, technology, fundraising, marketing, and the future of work. They’ve ghostwritten content for romance authors, politicians, and their weirdest friends. Their podcast, Working 2050, a speculative oral history about workers of the future, was good but couldn’t make money, so they started an interview series called “How Does This Make Money?” to figure money out.
That didn’t make money either, so now they’re mostly writing Yellowjackets fanfiction and feeding their reddit addiction.
