ChatGPT wants my job. It can’t (and it won’t) have it.
Time to read: 4 minutes
As a professional and experienced copywriter, AI and how it will come to influence humanity has been the cause of much recent existential dread for Anthony McNamara, content creator at The Comms Crowd. In this post, he looks at ChatGPT, AI’s risks and benefits, and what’s in store for us as the technology advances.
As a professional and experienced copywriter, AI and how it will come to influence humanity has been the cause of much recent existential dread. Especially as mine is one of the professions the technology – especially the likes of ChatGPT – is gunning for. Admittedly, binging on every documentary and podcast the topic has to offer, all with contributions from long-time experts in the field has done little to assuage my fears.
The speed with which AI is developing is raising questions that those in power seem unable to answer. This is a problem. Once artificial general intelligence (AGI) is rolled out, the technology’s passage into maturity will be complete, and humanity’s relationship with robotic intelligence will become one where we are the dependents.
It will mark the most significant point in human history since the first homo sapiens discovered how to create fire. AGI, however, will be a blaze over which we could all too easily lose control forever. Hence the recent dread.
The dread gets real
When ChatGPT trampled onto the scene like a heavily caffeinated Wildebeest in a pensioners’ yoga class, I admit not thinking too much of it. “Another AI service that I can spend my free time interrogating on whether 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 is the more effective football formation. Big wow.”
But then I used it, and beads of sweat began forming on my expansive brow. I typed in a made-up, generic title and sat back in horror as the chatbot generated a grammatically sound and, on the face of it, relevant 1,000-word blog.
If it were dread I had experienced before, I wouldn’t even know the word to describe what I experienced at that moment. It was a feeling that lasted for weeks. The gig is up. Time to start thinking about re-training.
The importance of knowing your enemy
Having sought reassurance from family members, friends, and colleagues, I began to excavate my resolve and free it from the claws of the relentless Large Language Models. I love my job, and I’m not losing it to a set of precocious algorithms.
It was time for me to step into the ring with ChatGPT, and we were going bare knuckle.
Instead of using some generic blog title, I re-engaged ChatGPT and typed in the title of an actual blog a real client had asked me to write. The blog outline was separated into different sections and looked depressingly appropriate. Next, I gave the chatbot permission to write the blog in full, and within seconds, it cascaded down my screen.
However, upon reading the blog, an almost transcendental sense of elation washed over me. It was crap. Littered with repetition, from sentence openers to entire sentences, it had zero personality and was laughably light on credible facts and figures. It was crap.
Friend, not foe
With round one going emphatically to the human, I began to recalibrate my whole attitude toward ChatGPT. Although it has undeniably improved since 2022, its ability to produce quality content remains limited, to put it politely. But it does offer other functions that have since proved to be handy.
It is superb for beating writer’s block and has become essential for brainstorming ideas. I’ve also long since learnt that the ability to construct excellent prompts is the most important skill you can acquire when using any form of generative AI.
True though this may be, even with the most professional prompts, the resultant copy is not what any self-respecting copywriter or organisation would ever think to publish. But it can give a decent starting point, a handy blueprint for a competent human to improve upon radically.
In other words, generative AI can be considered a promising work-experience student, approaching their employer and saying, “Hi, I’ve done this for you to try and save you a bit of time.” And I, the employer in this dubious analogy, reply with, “Thank you. I can probably use some of this. Now, you run along and finish transcribing that video for me.”
Even if ChatGPT does become a little too self-assured in the future, it faces another problem even more formidable than me.
The search engines won’t stand for it
When the likes of Google cottoned on that people were stuffing their websites with keywords to dope their SEO, the backlash was ruthless. Many websites were penalised so heavily with SERP (Search Engine Results Page) relegations they never properly recovered.
Expect the same for AI content. Indeed, a raft of AI content detector tools are already sweeping the marketplace, and it seems to be a matter of time before they’re integrated into search engine result generators. The last thing any search engine provider wants is for its users to be pummelled with a load of robot content during their cyber surfing sessions.
Apart from the inevitability of this development is the delicious irony – AI saving the livelihoods of copywriters from AI. *chef’s kiss*.
ChatGPT knows its place. For now.
I don’t know what the future holds for ChatGPT. That’s the one thing that’s still quite scary – no one really does.
However, I do know that in its present form, it can’t respond to detailed briefs as competently as a human copywriter. It can’t understand the unspoken reactions of clients during calls. It can’t offer original insight on any topic, question a client’s approaches or ideas, or inject personality (unless it’s pretending to be a well-known human).
Mercifully, it also seems to understand all of this. With ChatGPT draped against the ropes, sweating and bloodied, I asked it directly if it was coming for my job.
Its response?
“As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to predict the future. However, it’s unlikely that ChatGPT or any other AI language model will completely replace copywriters. While AI can be helpful in generating content and assisting with certain tasks, copywriting involves creativity, critical thinking, and a deep understanding of language and communication. These are skills that are difficult for AI to replicate, and human copywriters are likely to remain an important part of the industry.”
Maintain that attitude, ChatGPT, and you and I will get along just fine.
