Excuse Me, Your AI is Showing
Generative AI isn’t the quick content fix that many people thought it would be
As a freelance content writer, I was not doing well at the end of 2022 and throughout most of the first half of 2023. I lost about 75% of my work from long-standing clients. Most said they were restructuring their approach to content. The clients that didn’t disappear had less work for me. “We’re keeping content mostly in-house,” was the prevailing reason or “We’re revising our content strategy. We’ll get back to you next year.”
“If this is about AI, you can tell me,” I said, picturing robots perched at laptops, writing all the things.
No one said they were replacing me with generative AI tools like ChatGPT. They told me they were experimenting with these tools, that they weren’t particularly impressed, and that the marketing department was using them, versus the content department. But the AI-generated writing was on the wall. It seemed clear that I was at least temporarily being replaced by The Machines.
“They’ll be back,” I thought, glumly and without much hope. By then, I’d been experimenting with AI writing tools for nearly a year. I was less than impressed with the homogenous crap they churned out. But the content was good enough to pass as human. It was bottomless and it was…
