How To Stay Relevant During the AI Writing Revolution

AI is Here To Help, Not Replace You

Everyone needs to chill the hell out.

Ever since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, people have been losing their shit.

The topic of discussion on social media — “will AI writing assistants make writers extinct?”

I’m a machine learning engineer; My day-to-day work outside of writing here involves building and explaining implementations behind various AI applications and tools.

I can tell you categorically —

“AI is not going to ruin your writing career.”

At least, it's not supposed to…

These tools have been built to help you, not replace you; human writers are still relevant — Did you hear that? You still matter.

Their introduction may alter how you do things, but the overarching goal is to give your content marketing strategy a boost.

Rather than developing a sinister attitude towards them, start to understand how they work and how you may or may not leverage them to benefit your writing career.

What are AI writing assistants?

AI writing assistants are what they say on the tin…

Writing assistants that generate content using artificial intelligence.

The truth is you’ve probably been using them for a while — I mean, I hope you use tools like Grammarly…

If you haven’t noticed, it’s likely due to their function; the AI assistants we’ve been used to are built to tackle the more tedious parts of writing (i.e., editing, spelling, grammar, etc.).

Introducing massive AI language models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT to the world has changed the landscape…

These models have made it possible for many AI writing assistants to do a little more than just “boring tasks,” such as creating a blog post.

This is exciting and scary.

The great allure of machines learning to do repetitive human activities is they are cheap, always available, and never complain — it’s the reason people think they are out of a career.

These language models are programmed to learn and develop their abilities without requiring a precise set of rules to perform.

But…

And it’s a BIG BUT…

They aren’t capable of writing as well as a human, which means they are most certainly not a replacement for human editors.

You can keep your job.

The shortfalls of AI writing assistants

Artificial intelligence is not at a place where it can compete with human intelligence at some tasks, like writing.

AI models are based on statistics and probabilities…

Humans are a little too complex for that to be enough to replace them in creative writing — at least for now.

A lot of the confusion surrounding the capabilities of AI in the field of writing simply has to do with the fact that businesses have to make money, and some like to achieve this by over-promising what their products can do.

So let’s be clear on what they can’t do…

They can’t form their own ideas.

AI models are educated by learning a function to map inputs to outputs.

The function it learns is then used to generalize to inputs it hasn’t seen before.

Basically…

They can ONLY output something based on what it's seen before.

AI writing assistants work by reformatting information it finds on the internet and regurgitating it as an output.

If you’re looking for new revelations, original content, or new ideas, you’re not going to get it from an AI — they aren’t innovative enough.

They aren’t even innovative enough to serve as researchers.

If a whole leap of garbage is written in an article, which isn’t uncommon on the internet, the AI won’t check to see if it’s garbage.

It’s a writing assistant after all, not a researcher.

They need your help.

Always remember, “AI models [in the case of supervised learning] learn a function to map inputs to output.”

Let that statement ring in your head as often as possible.

It’s important because it tells you that the output the model gives you is based on the input you give it.

You literally have to hold the AI tool's hand to get the stuff you want out of it — the better the quality it gets as input, the better the quality it gives as output.

For example, if you want one of these machines to write about your outfit, you’d have to tell it the specifics — “write about the materials of the clothes I’m wearing.” Without this explicit detail, there are a whole leap of angles the AI assistant can go down (i.e., the size, the color, whether it's fashionable, etc.).

There’s still an important aspect of human stuff involved with the interaction. Think of it like a calculator — it doesn’t know what problems to solve unless you tell it.

The AI writing assistance would need a good level of direction for it to get close enough to your intended message.

They aren’t humans

The weakest point about these writing assistants is they’re not human.

They may be able to give some exciting outputs, but the chances they’d be as developed, well thought-out, and structured stories is low.

Readers pick up on these things.

They wanna feel like they can hear the author's voice while they work through a piece of content.

This requires empathy and real-life experience — two assets our AI writing assistants don’t have.

The proper role of AI writing assistants

If it’s not going to take your job, what makes this technology so exciting?

Simple…

The productivity benefits it offers.

These tools are supposed to help you focus on what you do best — writing good content.

As a writer, you’d know trying to produce a whole leap of fresh content is tough. AI assistants come in to mitigate this problem. Their job is to take care of producing lots of content, while you focus on making it good. Balancing the strength of AI writing tools and your writing ability is where the sweet spot is.

“But I thought you said they aren’t innovative?”

If you’re only trying to boost SEO, you don’t need to make groundbreaking discoveries. You do have to create a lot of content so the keywords for your website rank in search results — the perfect job for AI writing assistants.

Is it necessary for you to use these tools?

Well, it depends.

You’ve got to consider whether your content strategy is about ranking in search engines or establishing yourself as an expert.

AI writers don’t have the same level of expertise on a topic as you; It’s probably better you stick to writing articles yourself if you’re already an expert on a topic and you’re sharing from experiences — people will stay pay for expertise.

Final Thoughts

AI assistants are likely to alter the way many businesses approach their content strategy, but that’s not the end-all-be-all for writers.

While it will give them access to increased content production, a human is still required to make the content good.

Their role in content creation is to help you focus on the things you do best. Its introduction is to help you be more efficient with the help of AI.

But there’s still a major case to be had on whether you should use AI tools if you’ve already got significant life experience. This is unique to you, and no AI can replicate that.

Thanks for reading.

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