Will tomorrow’s freelance writers be the custodians of bots rather than wordsmiths?
Will overseeing AI bots be the fate of tomorrow’s freelance writing generalists?
This morning, I received the following contact form via my writing website.
Among a competitive field, it might just be the worst inbound query I’ve received through my writing site this year (thankfully there have been good ones too but a lesson worth learning early: when it comes to lead generation, inbound does not automatically translate to quality).
While my normal course of action would be to hit the delete button in half a second and move on with my inbox patrol / morning, this message shook me up just a little. Blinking and groggy, had I just unknowingly stared into the grim abyss of the future for writers?
Whether it was human or bot authored is irrelevant to me (to me, it looks like the work of a scraping bot).
It was proposing something that I sensed might lurk just over the horizon for tomorrow’s freelance writers:
We’d like you to supervise the work of our AI bot.
And we’re going to pay you even less for it.
How much freelance writing work will AI bots capture? An open debate
The debate around to what extent we can expect AI bots to replace the work of human writers has been a staple fixture of discussion on online writing communities for the past number of years.
My viewpoint — which I’ve aired here and elsewhere— has been that I predict that AI bots are going to scoop up much of the low end, volume-dominated side of the content writing market.
The type of bulk work and dubious “reviews” that affiliate marketing site operators commission to drive traffic to their sites. If you’ve already started out on the journey of trying to make a living at this, then you probably know the type of work that I’m talking about.
My contention was — and remains — that this will be a broadly good thing.
The rationale? Writers won’t have to work the tedious entry level part of the market that’s comprised mostly of low rate clients who don’t care an ounce about quality. This type of writing isn’t fun to write, edit, or commission. Keyword-stuffing can be left to the robots. Less miserable, soul-sapping work to go around.
But what if there’s more to it than that?
What if writing will indeed be viewed as a supervisory rather than creative skill? What if this is the future not just for low level clients — but for the whole market?
The situation, perhaps, can be compared to the rapid developments in automation that we’ve seen in the aviation industry over the past 100 years — still a formative period in the history of flight.
These days more than 90% of the flying time on any commercial flight is conducted entirely by an autopilot while the captain and first officer supervise the route, liaise with ATC, and monitor systems.
Developments in avionics even rendered the work of dedicated flight engineers largely obsolete. There has been speculation for years that ATC itself will be next. Perhaps pilots after that.
The role of professional pilots has therefore been confined to executing only the starting and finishing touches — takeoff and landing — involved in piloting an aircraft. The rest of their input is effectively as an expert overseer of systems.
If an engine catches fire — they know what to do. We still need them to be sitting in the cockpit in order to zoom from A to B. But even us mere passengers have long accepted the fact that they’re not the ones actually making most of those graceful banks. A computer is executing that.
Which leads me to ask:
Could this be the fate that waits around the corner for professional writers?
And if it does, should we accept lower compensation in exchange for less creative output?
Tomorrow’s writers will need to be quasi SMEs to make a living. But will they be paid appropriately?
I’ve talked previously about the differences between writers and SMEs.
While I’ve written about some pretty complicated things in my day — cost-saving automation layers in cloud workloads and developments in machine learning for two — I’ve noticed an increased demand for bone fide SMEs over the years too.
The catch? Many clients seem prepared to pay more for expertise. Except when it comes to writers.
While my current client workload is more strategy-focused than writing-oriented (although I’m still doing a good amount of writing), I remain concerned by the rise in clients I’m seeing who want writers to work on near subject matter expert (SME) level projects for … comparative peanuts.
Another inbound lead this week (this time arriving via referral) led marketing for a complicated cybersecurity solution being sold to telcos — in an expensive country. His request: a two page brochure outlining a very specific aspect of the company’s solution. Which sounded fine. Until he disclosed his budgetary limit: roughly $100.
For tomorrow’s writers to have a fighting chance at making a viable living in this increasingly competitive market, we’re going to have to become quasi SMEs rather than the overseers of the work of bots. But that’s only half of the equation. We’re also going to need to work with a market that’s prepared to value the time and expertise we’ve developed sufficiently.
We have to be several steps ahead of automation in terms of our knowledge. And to do something that the bots of tomorrow won’t be able to. Niche-ing ever further down is going to become an even more important prerequisite for success as the gig economy continues to mushroom and widen and more freelance writers in more countries continue to fight over roughly the same pool of clients.
I hate to be such a fatalist, but I’m not convinced that even that’s going to be enough.
I suspect, rather, that every full time content marketing writer is going to have to command several ancillary skills beyond writing. Strategy and SEO would be good places to start.
Until the robots catch up with that, at least.
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What’s your prediction for how AI writing bots are going to affect the future of freelance writing? Please feel free to share your thoughts below!
