It Sucks Being A Writer in the Era of Generative AI
Someone had to say it.
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In May, Rolling Stone reported that a professor at Texas A&M University gave all his students the equivalent of an “incomplete” for the class, which made many of them inelligible to graduate.
The reason? The professor, a rodeo instructor, ran all the essays through ChatGPT and asked if it had written them. I guess ChatGPT said yes. That was good enough for the guy to accuse every single one of his students of cheating.
And while generative AI is making academia paranoid, it’s an even weirder story when it comes to the world of business. Knowledge workers — a term broadly used for anyone whose job requires peddling expertise versus producing something tangible — began worrying if they, too, could be replaced.
Then, a couple of lawyers used ChatGPT to do research for a case. They subsequently discovered that the quotes and citations they submitted to a real-life judge came from two cases that ChatGPT completely made up.
So, bullet dodged, white collar knowledge workers. You don’t have to worry about your jobs (for now.)
It’s quite a different story for the creators of the world. Being a writer — or any kind of artist — in the era of generative AI is unsettling. It kind of feels like we’re being hunted.
Writing is hard. It takes time. It takes an astonishing amount of editing to get a polished and finished product. Readers don’t see any of this work because it happens behind the scenes. It’s what turns mediocre writing into good writing. It’s what brings it to life. In his book, Several short sentences about writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:
“A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences,
The relentless exploration of possibilities,
The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say
The possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”
The book is incredible. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be a better writer.
One good thing about generative AI tools like ChatGPT is they’re teaching people how difficult it is to replicate the process Klinkenborg describes.
You might be thinking, “But isn’t getting generative AI to produce good work all about the prompting?”
No, shut up about the prompting. I’ve been working with generative AI writing tools for a year. Good prompts make bad AI writing better. Real-life writers (and editors) are what make ChatGPT’s homogenized garbage readable.
That’s true for whatever you’re writing — a screenplay, a deeply researched journalistic piece, or a school paper about rodeos. That’s only my opinion, of course, but writing is what I do all day, every day. Hopefully that counts for something.
I don’t mean to rain on your AI parade. There is absolutely a place for generative AI Tools. They’re exciting — even intoxicating. I don’t, however, think they’re quite ready to spit out content in a way that’s remotely interesting to human readers.
Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. I’m a freelance content writer and my beat is technology. Lately, all my clients want me to write about AI, especially generative AI. I feel like I’m caught in the middle of some kind of mass hysteria.
On one hand, every single tech company is frantically adding AI features to their platforms and everyone else is desperately trying to incorporate AI into their creative and marketing workflows. The peer pressure is enormous.
This isn’t great news for those of us who write content for a living. John Rudaizky, EY’s Global Brand & Marketing Lead, giddily told Business Insider that generative AI has the potential to “democratize creativity.”
If that doesn’t make your blood freeze in your veins, then you’re not paying attention.
I hope everyone isn’t as excited about the machines making our art as Mr. Rudaizky is. EY (formerly Ernst & Young) is one of the largest accounting firms in the world. I guess that checks. I can see how a company filled with tax lawyers and accountants is fine with outsourcing creativity to the robots. It’s art by way of complex mathematical formulas.
But I don’t want everyone to be okay with this. I want companies to value real writing by real humans who have real experience.
And I want there to be a place for personal writing — stories that make you weep or gasp or call your mother. I wonder if generative AI will one day be able to write sentences like these by Kira Jane Buxton in her luminous book, Hollow Kingdom:
“Listen; life is worth a fight. Expectation must be shed like winter leaves. Even in death, there is wondrous beauty. And death is not The End.”
How can a machine understand simile? Connecting unrelated images in a way that evokes something completely new is entirely human. Or is it? Maybe it’s all just math in the end.
I don’t know anything anymore. I have no idea what this technology will be capable of 3 or 5 or 10 years from now. I resent the implications though. I think it’s an abomination.
Even if generative AI wins in the end, blanketing the internet with its democratized creativity, I have hope. I hope there will always be people who want to be moved by human writing.
I hope they find me.
I’m not so sure there will always be businesses that see the value in human generated writing. But if some remain, I hope they’ll hire me.
I understand the drive for efficiency, scalability, innovation, and agility. These are the buzzwords that describe economic growth. As long as technology makes it easy to pump out commodified art, then Big Business will use it without worrying about writers or customers or readers.
Look, I know there were shortcuts before generative AI. There were content mills that paid writers a penny a word to regurgitate mediocre writing meant to appease Google’s algorithm. There has long been a push for volume over quality for business blogs. It’s all about that search algorithm.
But for those of us willing to put the work into writing good content, there were businesses willing to pay us a good rate for a job well done. I hope that doesn’t go away.
Robots aren’t enough when it comes to creating good art. We need people who understand the process. Otherwise, what we get is a flat replica of human-created art. You need to be alive to create something that authentically communicates life experiences. Right now, generative AI is only capable of producing dead things. At least, that’s my nonmathematical opinion.
