Copywriters, content writers, journalists etc, do you worry about Chat GPT?

[WeAreAllLionesses]

If you write for a living or are freelance, are you concerned about your potential loss of income?

I am a freelance copywriter and wonder how much we will be affected.

YABU - nothing can replace writing by a proper human being
YABU - not long until the robots take over...

Obviously YABU. Do you know any proofreaders?

😂Shouldn't have started this so late!

Meant to say:

YANBU - nothing can replace writing by a proper human being
YABU - not long until the robots take over...

I don't think it's all or nothing.

There's a place for both.

Bottom feeder blogs written for £10 a pop are likely to be hit hardest.

Well, I've seen it happen in the translation industry. No one would have believed it 15 years ago that machine translation would one day be so good, and now clients pay 3p and less per word for posteditimg only. Copywriters are still very sought after though, so I'd take advantage while you can.

Nope. Not worried.

Yep. I'm a novelist really but it worries me.

I tested it by asking it to guide me in writing a statement in my technical area. I didn’t end up impressed with what it suggested.

My thoughts are that it’s a great tool, however it doesn’t shoot off high quality text pieces. If you’re a subject matter expert, you can see where the tool falls short when explaining complex matters. It sometimes didn’t contain key information. It certainly repeated phrases and the flow isn’t perfect either.

It’s still in development after all. And frankly, this isn’t the purpose of the tool so it’s not a concern for developers. It’s designed to be a more conversational tool ie Siri but better.

Therefore, no, it will not replace high quality work by industry experts. It can easily replace low quality work however.

I think it depends on what kind of writing you do. If you are writing for consumer publications and you have to come up with 10 things to do on Valentines day, then yes, this software could probably generate an article much more cheaply than a human being. If you ask it how the transition from LIBOR to SOFR is going and if people should be using Term SOFR, I doubt it could come up with something as well-written as a journalist who understands the subject matter, interviewing experts who are talking to the market 24/7. It will probably kill off a lot of the consumer market for people but the rates are already pretty low.

I wanted to add that I am all for AI and the automation it provides. It’s the cycle of life if your role can be completed just as well or better by a machine, unfortunately. Automation offers many benefits to businesses. I just don’t think this specific tool at this specific time is there yet. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

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AI does not need to expand into the creative world. It needs to take over mundane stuff so people have more free time to be creative. Margins are already tight for most writers and artists.

I'm not worried. Bloomberg for example has had an AI story generator turning out market movements copy for a while.
I think it just means there will be fewer entry level terribly paid jobs turning out click led rubbish and more focus on our actual skills. It will lead to redundancies (what's new!) but better work

I work in marketing and it's been a great assistant for me. So far I've used it to write Twitter threads, a press release, a blog article and other small bits but they've all needed me to tweak and edit them.

They lack that human tone so I don't believe it can totally replace a copywriter as of yet. What it can do is help with research time and create a foundation.

I think ai can only get more advanced though - I think there is a more advanced version out there but not been released to the public yet.

It depends on your definition of “need” to be frank. If your employer feels the tool is more valuable than their employees ie it can produce the same quality work but exceptionally faster, then those tight staff margins will narrow further unfortunately.

It’s not something you’ll be able to prevent, however the biggest issue with AI is it being as authentic and genuine as a person. It isn’t there yet so it can’t always produce the same quality work. Could be a good tool in your arsenal to get a rough edit. It can blast out 1000s of words in seconds in a relatively coherent way, but needs tweaking by a person before publication. Might be a new way of working for some.

Presumably having access to the tool on a corporate level and being able to publish the work it produces may be a costly endeavour. I can’t see the developers of it just allowing major businesses to use it for free anyway so could be a storm in a teacup.

It’s already having a huge impact on university students’ essays, now that you can use a bot-generated one that fools the extent plagiarism software.

Not overly worried for my day job (journalism).

But I do a lot of (too!) cheap low end copy freelance and I assume that'll disappear. It's not that I think that the stuff AI produces is better - more that it's not so significantly worse as to make the comparative cost of a human worth it for what amounts to website filler for SEO purposes.

I’m in a FB page for romance novelists and there was a thread on this last week. One author is already self publishing using AI, she says she is producing a book every week. I bet it’s bland as fuck but a lot of self published romance is quite samey yet sells so maybe it works for her.

I'm not worried. I think that it should be used as a tool to assist, rather than replace. A bit like spellcheck/Grammarly.

I've used a few AI tools when I've got a bit of writers block and it can help with inspiration. But ultimately, a robot can't write like a human for a human. I personally think Google may penalise sites that are overly AI-content, especially with the new helpful content guidance.

My view is that people buy people. Therefore, you want to read and consume content that is written by someone you can relate to. A lot of my clients are in the financial services sector which is heavily regulated in terms of what you can/can't say. An AI generator wouldn't be able to correlate with rules/legislation so there will always be a need for human content writers.

Copywriter here (some of the time).

You know the old saw about how work can be good, quick, or cheap, but you can only pick two? AI is the definition of that in copywriting terms. It can do quick and cheap. It can't (in my view) do good. Yet.

All the AI-generated copy I've seen has been very... ploddy. It's grammatically correct, appropriately spelled and makes sense. But AI only seems to have one rhythm. It's dull to read. It can't seem to do wit, playfulness or that wilful bending of linguistic rules to create earworm wording.

Nevertheless, I've been slowly losing a segment of work to AI for about four years now. The sort of work I've been losing has tended to be the copy editing work — smoothing out Ts&Cs, policy wording, that kind of thing. Or writing functional stuff like nav for apps and websites, customer service comms and staff handbooks. Half-spammy social media posts that are more SEO and hashtags than meaningful content.

For some clients, who don't care if their site's modern slavery statement is crafted to within a gnat's fart of Hemingway, AI can do a 75% good enough job in a few seconds. Quick and cheap.

Overall, though, I'm not worried; more wary.

What AI can't do (for now, anyway) is pair up with an art director to toss around ideas for a campaign. It can't do jokes, plays-on-words or duality.

When AI writes the next VW 'Lemon' ad, I'll worry. Until then, nah.

@FuckabethFuckor I agree. I also think these days, people want to see warmth and compassion within content and an AI generator can't do that.

I think good copywriters shouldn't be worried. As a PP said, it's the copywriters who claim to offer a researched/written, and SEO-optimized blog for £10 that should worry.

My clients don't just pay me to write for them. They pay me to come up with the ideas, to find new ways of matching business priorities with customer service, to help them raise their profile and increase their reputation. They want me to update their websites for them so they can concentrate on their daily tasks. I personally think being a copywriter is about so much more than just writing.

I'm a writer. My boss, a scientist, was banging on about the glories of ChatGTP yesterday n a meeting. I didn't say anything.

It will be jumped on by people who don't value content anyway.

AI art is more of a threat imo e.g. Stable Diffusion and Dream.ai

The v2 Beta about to become $45 a month, but is going to have significantly more data points. When it's fully released the cost is likely to increase, which will make it not worth it for some companies.

Either way, it'll hugely impact industry. The people writing £10-20 articles through Fivver & PPH will loose the most business. They'll be replaced by people selling ChatGPT generated articles for £2-3.

I suspect the copyrighters that work with large companies charging higher fees will be expect to reduce their prices to compete with ChatGPT. The work will still be their, but unfortunately valued less.

Any copywriter will common sense will accept the reduced prices and then try to increase their turn over by using CharGPT to create first drafts that they can edit from.

I'd rather not do it than charge less. And I'm not a Fiverr rates of pay person either.

Someone was saying to me last week they think it's artists that will really suffer, they'd produced visuals using one of the art related AI programmes and said it was really good.