Will Gen AI put poor schlubs like me out of work? Maybe.

To succeed on the internet you don't need to be good, you just need to be good enough. Generative AI is good enough for many writing tasks.

Tie-dyed unicorn typing, generated by DALL-E.

I was recently asked to ghostwrite a blog post for one of my regular clients. Like a lot of my gracefully aging journalist colleagues, that's mostly what I do these days. Old reporters don't die, they just become "content strategists." Why? As my friend (and former journalist turned content strategist) CN puts it: "It's one third the work for twice the money." (Or maybe he said half the work and 3x the money? In any case, the difference is huge.)

Also: Journalism jobs these days are as rare as tie-dyed unicorns. I am soooo happy I am not starting out now. You'd have to be a masochist with a trust fund to go into my old profession.

Ghostwriting is fun and easy, most of the time. In the best circumstances, you have a 20- or 30-minute conversation with an executive, and then you try to capture his/her thoughts in a cogent, compelling, and conversational way. This is what's known in the biz as "thought leadership."

In the worst-case scenario, you have a conversation with someone who met the executive once in an elevator, and they give you a general idea of what they are probably thinking about subject X, which it's clear after a few minutes that they don't actually understand, and the ghostwriter has to fill in the rest. Then the marketing magpies swoop in and start tearing the meat from the carcass, and pretty soon there's nothing left but roadkill.

But aren't those direct deposits sweet? Yes. Yes, they are.

So, back to my point: I wrote a blog post for this client. It was about a new Generative AI application, based on the same large language models fueling ChatGPT and others. I can't say it was the Citizen Kane of blog posts -- it was serviceable, it did what it needed to, then it politely excused itself. A tidy 600 words, give or take a semicolon.

The people who make the Gen AI product said, "Hey, here's an idea: Wouldn't it be great if we let the AI write parts of this? Wouldn't that be superneat?"

Sure, why not? It was out of my hands in any case. So they did.

The final product was not terrible. It had all the right adjectives ("efficiency, profitability, velocity") in all the right places. The sentences were grammatically correct. It told a coherent story about the product with breathless enthusiasm (literally -- AI doesn't have lungs). One thought flowed logically into the next. It was fine.

In other words, it read just like a generic slightly-better-than-average press release composed by committee, not a blog post written by someone who walks, talks, eats, breathes, and farts.

But it also represents the future of my profession. A lot of what I do -- not all, but a significant percentage -- can be automated using Gen AI. Especially the things that are basic scut-work, like FAQ-style explanations of particular technologies or concepts. Lots of companies are producing this kind of material now, because Google snarfs it up like cocaine at a Kid Rock concert. And landing in the top 10 results for a search is like being born a Rothschild; all this love and attention starts flowing your way, even if you've done nothing to deserve it.

That's the first writing job AI will completely take over. It won't be the last. Press releases, blog posts, product catalogs, web site content -- all of that stuff currently produced by humans is in Gen AI's wheelhouse today. Machines already generate basic sports and business news for folks like AP and the Washington Post and CNET. That's also going to be an extinction-level event for many newbie journalists.

The truth is that AI is really good at doing simple jobs in a consistent, reliable, inexpensive, and thoroughly mediocre way. And for many companies, that will be just fine, because the cost savings will be tremendous.

Also: AI will never push back and say, "Why did you cut my favorite line?" or "That paragraph makes no sense there, it needs to be further down in the story," or ask for more money when the client demands a third rewrite. It's not programmed to be difficult, in other words. (Unlike certain writers who shall go unnamed.)

AI-generated text will become wildly popular really quickly, especially for business. I think we'll see an explosion of this over the next year, and it will be standard operating practice in two or three years. But I also predict there's going to be a backlash at some point.

The example I keep thinking of is offshoring. In the early 2000s the tech industry went big on shipping jobs overseas, especially call center jobs to places like the Philippines and Pakistan, where the hourly wages are a fraction of what they are in the states. Suddenly, every call to customer support involved at least one non-native speaker of English, and a lot of "What? I'm sorry I didn't understand that last bit. Could you repeat that? What?"

Companies loved it, but customers hated it. Having Iqbal answer phones in Islamabad may only cost pennies per minute, but it wasn't close to what it cost these orgs in damaged customer loyalty. So many of them moved support operations back to the states or other English-speaking countries. They differentiated themselves by going back to the way things used to be.

I predict the same will happen to AI-generated content. One day, three or five or seven years from now, some marketing genius will wake up one morning, realize that their company's messaging sounds virtually identical to everyone else's, and think: "Maybe we should hire a person to make this sound more, I don't know... human?"

And when that happens, I'll be here, ready for their call. [1]

[1] Unless they develop an AI engine that excels at snark, in which case I'll be living in a trailer in Guanajuato, eating beans from a can.