Log into your LinkedIn profile and search the term “Content Writer”, or “Blogger”, or even “Copywriter”. You’ll be surprised of how many individuals have associated themselves with these terms as their profile will appear in your search feed.
I have always though that being a digital content writer, or a copywriter is easy. I have seen people engaged in copywriting and content writing for websites and adverts who are not even in this field and yet they do one heck of a job.
My cousin who is an electrical engineer does not need to hire a professional copywriter or a content writer for his B2B business since he himself can craft an impressive copy that feels appealing and likely to grab the scroller’s attention.
I have similarly seen multiple people writing down amazing content despite the fact that they do not belong to the field of content or copywriting. And yet they do not need to hire one for their start-up.
As a writer myself, it often makes me perplexed about whether content writers and copywriters are really wanted at all with all the free resources being available on the internet to become one.
And just when I thought observing the shrinking need of professional writers was vexing me enough, I got further baffled recently when I came across ChatGPT, an online search engine tool that offers information or solutions in text form with written queries and questions. It answers questions and creates long essays regarding almost anything. But it isn’t something to be trusted, not just yet.
I searched the internet and discovered people around the globe experimenting with it with hilarious queries.
One of them asked for a letter about explaining to their kid that Santa Clause is not real.
The other asked for a generation of sick leave.
Another one got me in stiches. It was an explanation of something really important text regarding astrophysics but in the language of a fictional sea pirate.
The software does not shy away of giving out as many words as possible unless you ask for a limited set of information. It gives the freedom to be addressed with the common language and replies with the same style of conversation, unless told not to.
All these queries hailed from around the world, asked by people of different professions. But the most surprising part of the AI backed search tool’s ability to respond with a befitting answer.
It was not always corrects though. While people noticed some slip ups in its answers, they were equally thunderstruck by the AI tool‘s capability and responsiveness.
And that made me think, If I can get a whole 1500 words blog out of it, why the need to hire a professional content writer? Or why the need to hire a copywriter when you can generate a few liners and descriptions in literally seconds?
This might sound controversial to some. YouTubers and content creators, even AI experts themselves are conforming that AI will not replace human writers in the coming future. I don’t know whether to believe them or not. Because the most striking quality possessed by today’s AI tools is not the ability to generate relevant responses, but the ability to learn and adapt.
If the AI isn’t taking away the jobs in the coming 5 years, it will certainly swipe it in the coming 15 years. That is because it is learning how to be better, how to be more human.
The “free for now” ChatGPT is astonishing. It answers almost everything you type. It helps you cope with stress, assists you in rectifying errors in coding, and even write emotional letters and essays and even movie scripts. This is really fascinating, and probably dangerous at the same time.
Although there are many AI writing tools available in the market such as copy.ai and Jaspers, the thing that differentiates ChatGPT from its counterparts is the aspect of remembering the history of user for quite a decent amount of time.
The AI writing tool creates a conversation like relationship with the user and keeps generating content based on the previous conversion which it was engaged in.
You can ask ChatGPT to point out 10 points on how the social media landscape in shaping businesses. After a decent 5 minutes later, one can type simple “give me 5 more” and it will generate 5 more points for you.
Ok, ChatGPT and similar tools may take away jobs of contemporary digital writers, but alongside this, they carry much more threat to the future generation.
Chat GPT can reduce the curiosity of the newer generation to think creatively. It isn’t doing much now, but it will in the coming years due to its outstanding feat of adaptability.
Furthermore, while of the content of ChatGPT is copied, it will learn better, and try to become more original in its content generation approach, what will we do then?
People are searching for numerous questions because according to them, it reduces the need to scroll through every webpage for relevant content.
This November the very AI Chabot of OpenAI had garnered more than a million visitors in its first week of launch and successfully managed to freak out Google and question its search engine business model.
It is possible that Google will further stricken its guidelines and policies regarding the AI generated content. For now, the Google can detect if the content is AI generated through inconsistencies, fluency of the writing style, grammar mistakes, and any other thing that seems unusual to the search engine.
But what if the new tool does not have any mistakes and unusual writing pattern? For the record, it does produce some misplaced content, but the possibility of improving it for future is very high. Then it would become harder for Google to hunt down AI generated content which would seem more organic and genuine.
OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT along with a number of other AI based tools aims to earn a revenue of $200 million in 2023 and a staggering $1 billion in 2024. An article says in The Reuters
Want to know a fun fact? Elon Musk is one of the founders of OpenAI and now it is being heavily funded by Microsoft corp. The company currently is valued at a whopping $20 billion.
This could not only replace content and copywriters in the near future, it is a full blown threat to the entire customer support sector which is operated through online chatbots.
A research study by the company of Ujet depicted that 72% of 1700 Americans which it surveyed presented their views about AI chatbots as a waste of time as compared to human representatives while interacting with the customer support.
The main reason for this is that they seem untrustworthy and are non-reliable for addressing customer’s concerns.
However, few more updates and the humanization of these AI based writing and responding tools, customer satisfaction is likely to increase since they will be listing and responding in a more “human” way. And one thing is assured that it will happen, if not in 10 years, then in 20- but it will.
When team Morocco unexpectedly made its way to the Semi Finals of FIFA, it created a hope that it can be seen in the finals during the next World Cup, or even can take the cup home.
Similarly, if ChatGPT can dumbfound us all with its real time responsiveness and comprehending capability, it surely has created a vision of the future where it can be seen solving complex, serious problems, without any mistakes and misplacement.
As a writer myself, am I comfortable with ChatGPT’s arrival? For now I am but I can’t say the same for the coming years.
I strongly believe that human writers will become more valuable with the arrival of AI writing tools. Mediocre writing style will not be tolerated in the market since it could be easily replaceable by an affordable writing tool (Even today a mediocre writer is easily replaceable).
So the only way to stand out is become highly exceptional and result oriented if you are wanting to beat out the notorious AI tools.
Plus another thing about this new ChatGPT is that it gathers information from content around the web that has been written by human writers and journalists. Means that it still relies of human generated data. It still lacks the capability of creating content directly from data source.
In the future, if majority of data is written by writing tools, what are the chances that we would be getting unique pieces content for every webpage or content site?
And for now Google has come to the rescue for the content writers declaring that it can detect AI generated content and can penalize it, but the question is, for how long?
Only time will tell, but I tell you one thing- If anyone wants to survive in the future with the AI, they would have to highly focus on their niche and produce healthy organic content. Only and only then would they be able to stand out in the industry and become more in demand and expensive, similar to how organic food is more costly than the other one nowadays.
