If any content creator, creative freelancer, or journalist tells you they’re not concerned about the march of artificial intelligence (AI), I think they’re telling you porkies.
Hands-up - I’m concerned about it. But I’m also mightily impressed by it.
Have you tried ChatGPT? The now infamous AI chatbot is so good and so surprisingly useful for my business that it has earned a coveted place on my bookmarks bar in Safari.
For those who aren’t aware (surely there aren’t many of you left?!), ChatGPT is a software-based expert in all things… well, all things. You can ask it to do pretty much anything: write a blog post, create an iPhone version of the game Doom, explain a complex topic - it can even write song lyrics.
You can have spookily human-like conversations with ChatGPT, too. It remembers your past answers, refers to them, and can be guided just as easily towards an answer as a real, living, breathing expert.
It is frighteningly good. Although it isn’t perfect - ChatGPT’s knowledge bank runs out after 2021 and there are some hilarious - and, occasionally, uncomfortable - examples of it getting stuff biblically wrong.
ChatGPT is just one example of the seismic advances we’re starting to see in AI. I heard the guys on the AppleInsider podcast last week talk about the new AI-generated narration for select books in the Apple Books store. Similarly, if you’ve spent any amount of time on Twitter over the last few months, you’ll have witnessed countless people reveal AI-generate images of themselves.
I have, thus far, resisted the temptation to do the latter. It’s a life goal, in fact.
Put simply, the robots are indeed starting to take over and there’s no escaping the fact that they’re threatening a great many jobs.
I used to write blog posts for businesses. I’ve written thousands of the things for all sorts of industries and practically every single one was as dull as dishwater.
5 Ways to Make Your Manufacturing Plant More Efficient
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Rubber
The 5 Most Exciting Bathroom Trends for <Insert Year Here>
We Won an Industry Award!
You get the idea.
However, the time I spent writing those blog posts taught me how to write consistently, how to build a process around my writing, and, most importantly, how to turn it into a profitable endeavour. It wasn’t wasted time.
There are so many people still doing that kind of work. Freelancers, marketing execs, retirees, graduates - and I’m sorry to say that tools like ChatGPT threaten that entire industry. With one sentence, you can ask ChatGPT to write a unique blog post on any of those topics above, and it will do so in seconds. For free.
It’ll be really well written and SEO’d, too.
The aforementioned AI-based book narration is concerning, too. What does that mean for the voiceover industry? If a bunch of code can turn a book into an audio book in seconds, why on earth would publishers pay handsomely for a human to sit down and read it out, word by word, in an expensive recording studio?
Then, there’s my industry.
I write an awful lot of stuff for Mark Ellis Reviews. There’s this Substack newsletter, my daily blog posts, social content, and, of course, the bare bones of my YouTube video scripts.
Could a robot replace me for those tasks?
Of course it could. As an editor of Mac O’Clock on Medium, I’ve already spotted a coupe of story submissions which I’m pretty sure have been created by AI. The giveaways were the suspiciously stock-looking author profile image (I was sure I’d seen her before somewhere) and rather too much efficiency in the writing.
It’s very hard to spot AI writing unless you know what to look for. It’s well written, as previously noted, and if you’re reading it passively or simply to gather some information, you probably won’t notice it.
But if you’re reading something because you like the author, that’s a different matter. The robots can’t - thus far - replace personality. If you read my stuff, I guess it’s because you either agree with some of my opinions or (and I feel rather icky saying this, so please bear with me) you like me. I don’t think you can feel the same affinity with AI. It can’t have an opinion, and it certainly doesn’t have a personality.
For now, I’m going to make use of tools like ChatGPT. For me, it offers one of the best solutions for brainstorming video and blog titles. Its ability to throw up a bunch of genuinely useful options is uncanny and I’ve it used several times already.
I’m not naive, though. Artificial intelligence will only get better and even more human-like. What that means ultimately for my industry, I don’t know, but I’ll continue to view it as a friend, rather than a foe - I’m pretty sure that’s the best approach.
And, no - this newsletter wasn’t written with ChatGPT 😉