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It’s a wild time to be a writer — or just alive, for that matter. In the midst of the artificial intelligence boom, copywriters are making contingency plans for the day machines hand them pink slips. Journalists are increasingly flocking to more stable careers. Even software engineers have told me they’re expected to produce what was previously done by entire teams. I feel for the university students who have no idea what the job market will look like when they graduate.

If LinkedIn is a gauge for how writers feel about the future of the industry in the AI era, perhaps this job posting is telling: The San Francisco Standard is advertising a politics editor opening with a salary up to $170k/year. Only five people have clicked the “apply” button since it was posted a week ago. In contrast, AI startup postings hit “over 100 people have clicked apply” status in hours, or even minutes.

Professional discourse is pulsing with the phrase: “AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI will.” While that may be right, I prefer to daydream about a parallel universe where I was born in the sixties and started writing before computers posed as journalists.

I am not that averse to AI. I am one of the 800 million people who use ChatGPT. But I can’t say I love the direction it’s nudging the human race (with a few exceptions). That said, does anyone other than stock traders and tech CEOs actually love the AI boom?

Bubble or not, AI is here to stay — but to what degree is the question.

Exposing the AI writers

Stab Magazine recently published a great piece in which they highlighted how the surf industry is melting into a soul-less, homogenous personality with ChatGPT as its spokesperson. They pointed out how brands and media are blatantly using AI to spit out copy, and not doing a very good job at hiding it.

Even more worrisome, a Canadian media outlet recently uncovered a conspiracy where a fake author based in Nigeria — or perhaps a syndicate of AI-wielding con artists — had been successfully bypassing editorial filters and getting AI-generated articles with fictitious sources published on prominent sites like The Guardian.

And, if that wasn’t bad enough, new research has shown that we — even those who don’t use AI — are starting to talk more like ChatGPT. We are all starting to sound…the same.

Everyone is using AI

One of the comments on the Stab article made me laugh.

A reader wrote:

“Confessing to being an AI slop user/purveyor then decrying others doing the same thing is a fucking weird flex.”

The author in the story acknowledges in the first sentence that he uses ChatGPT for editing and ideas. The commenter seems to think that good journalists and writers dismiss AI tools, which is not the case. AI is quite handy for writers — if used wisely.

For example, ChatGPT is far better than Google Docs at spell check. It understands context. If you forget to add a zero to a numerical figure, or misspell your subject’s name, ChatGPT will politely point out: “Ummm, excuse me, are you sure about that number? It doesn’t really make sense. And you spelt this guy’s name X, but I am pretty sure you meant Y.”

*Checks notes* Fuck, ChatGPT is right.

It can do countless other useful tasks. Having trouble finding a synonym? A better transition between two paragraphs? Trim a title for SEO character limits without losing meaning? Chat (that’s what Gen Z calls it) has plenty of ideas.

But beware: AI has a propensity for being confidently wrong. I’ve asked it to help me with my research — say an athlete’s results at a specific location over a period of time, that would usually require scouring several web pages — and ChatGPT will give me a bogus answer. I know enough to recognize the mistake, and when I point it out to my chat bot buddy, it usually responds with something like, “Oops, you’re right. Let me try that again!”

In its current form, AI is a helpful tool for writers. But over-reliance is problematic. If you ask AI to do too much, like writing an article or product description from scratch, you risk sounding just like every other person on the internet. It still needs a babysitter.

What can’t AI do for writers?

AI is perfectly capable of aggregating stories from other news outlets to make a logical, informative article. But AI can’t seek out unreported information like a human can. (Though it will definitely try to invent it.) It still takes human creativity to come up with a story concept, identify who can tell that story, actually talk to those people, and curate it into something digestible.

AI can’t compete with lived human experience because an experience is as unique as a snowflake. If you tell a story from your perspective, no one else in the world, including computers, can replicate it. And from what I’ve seen, good writers with a distinct voice, flow, and tone are still far more entertaining to read than large language models.

Though, with billions of dollars flowing into its development, AI will improve. Perhaps the day that it can replicate a quality writer is not too far off. What happens then?

What do you want to read?

Two years ago Sports Illustrated got caught posting AI-generated stories written by AI authors with AI headshots and AI bios. When exposed, they hastily removed all the phony authors from their site, blaming it on a third party.

Sports Illustrated is far from the award-winning magazine it once was, but even so, their actions were telling: the perception that AI is writing their articles was harmful to their business. They knew that’s not what the consumer wants.

And that’s, in a nutshell, what the future of writing and publications could come down to. Readers will get what they want to consume, whether they know it or not.

If you are drawn towards, and engage with, stories written by AI, it will create incentive to serve you more. If you value articles reported and fact-checked by humans, a market for such content will continue to exist. Of course, this assumes that readers will be able to discern the difference. For the average reader, it’s already becoming hard to distinguish, and it will only get harder.

The argument is summed up well in the Nigerian AI conspiracy story I referenced.

The interviewer says:

“I worry that operations whose sense of journalism is maybe not as acute as ours…are starting to feel that if, well, readers don’t care, maybe [AI] becomes an opportunity to make things a lot easier.”

The journalist who broke the story responds:

“That would be a way to kill what remains of the journalism industry…And I think, economically, it doesn’t make any sense. It might in the short term, but as search gets degraded, as this fake stuff gets proliferated across the internet, there is going to be real value in being able to go to a place and know the stuff there is true and human. I hope, and trust, it will be something readers find valuable.”

I too hope we have agency in the future relationship between writers and AI. But I fear it’s more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve when the wealthiest, most power people in the world are force-feeding the technology down our throats.

Reclaim the em dash

AI isn’t going away, but society will undoubtedly be better off if human writing creativity and factual reporting survive. More so, I hope that unique writing — whether a journalist or a copywriter — rewards those who dare to break away from the uniformity of AI. I hope human-written poetry, novels, stories, and articles don’t all become remnants of a past that future humans refer to as “the age of literature.” I refuse to let the em dash (—) be forever hijacked by computers that hog resources in the developing world (the em dash has become a telltale sign of ChatGPT’s style).

Maybe Gen Alpha — raised with AI — will have me sleeping on the streets someday. But until then, I’ll defiantly continue writing with em dashes because I’ve been using them for over a decade and have receipts to prove it. I’ll keep reading human-created journalism and poetry and novels and blogs and newsletters, until they no longer exist, or emerge unscathed from the AI boom.

I suppose there are a few ways this could play out:

1. The AI hype is all it appears to be and it will drastically change how we live, write, work, and read.
2. The bubble bursts and most of the AI companies go under (or are bailed out lol). AI continues to be a part of our lives, but is not as impactful as it currently appears it could be.
3. Something in between.

I’m setting an alert for 2035 to see how well this ages.