The Robots Can Replace Me
Worrying about my impending irrelevance isn’t going to change what’s coming.
Iam a content writer. I started 2023 with nine clients. I’m ending it with three. This is largely — even entirely — because of generative AI.
At least two of my disappeared clients confessed they were moving content writing in-house with the help of a tool like ChatGPT. That’s fine. That’s totally cool. I’m glad they were honest with me (gazes despondently into the void).
And since we’re all being honest, I’m going to confess something. If the content you want to produce can be easily created by ChatGPT, then I probably don’t want to write it anyway. Writing 30-part listicles about how to earn money online or 2500-word blog posts about the importance of having a business plan tends to strangle my creativity — and my will to get out of bed. The robots can have at it.
When you’re a writer for hire, it’s easy to focus on the wrong things — like being happy to have any work at all. Right now the outlook is very bleak for content writers, so saying no to any work — even the terrible stuff — seems like a gamble. But I don’t want to write the stuff that any old robot can write.
“Does anyone even read a 30-part listicle,” I asked one client who explained that their marketing…
