“Please Humanize This Copy”

Soon after the public release of ChatGPT, I lost a lucrative copywriting job to artificial intelligence. At best, this incident represents a questionable moral decision on the part of my client. At worst, it is a harbinger of the coming mass replacement of creative workers.

A little background: I am a full-time freelance writer. Though it often surprises people, this is not a hobby or a side hustle. I’ve supported myself exclusively with writing for six years. Until recently, one of my primary clients was a small marketing firm based in Vermont, for whom I wrote three or four articles every month. 

Then in April, after more than two years with the marketing firm, the work dried up. This is not entirely uncommon as a freelancer so I wasn’t especially worried until the content coordinator inadvertently tagged me on an AI-generated article, which she sent to our editor with the directive “Please humanize this copy”. 

When I reached out to the content coordinator, she informed me that the firm was cutting costs and hoped that resorting to AI was only a temporary solution. Without recourse, I began searching for work elsewhere.

As a freelancer, clients come and go. I will survive without this income and find equivalent work in due time. What concerns me is the implication that creative work is expendable. If writers, graphic designers, musicians, and videographers are easily replaced with AI, which positions are next on the chopping block?

Fifty years ago, automation came for factory jobs, supplanting well-paid, union workers with assembly lines and decimating whole communities in the process. Now, it appears, creatives are next. This is about more than solidarity among writers, freelancers, or creative workers. It is vital that we set a precedent of solidarity among human workers in the face of automation. How long will it be until AI can accurately diagnose a patient or provide competent legal counsel?

I don’t profess to have an intimate understanding of artificial intelligence. I am a writer, not a programmer. However, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate subcommittee last month, he urged lawmakers to regulate his nascent industry. 

In his own words: “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”

How many industries can you think of that invite federal oversight out of an existential fear that their product could damage democratic institutions, fuel disinformation, and disrupt society as we know it?

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I worry that I am the canary in the coal mine. Perhaps, my replacement was an isolated incident and maybe concerns about AI are overblown—but I doubt it. In the face of this potentially-cataclysmic societal shift, it is imperative that we consider the long-term ramifications of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers must draft comprehensive regulations and, above all, we must exercise solidarity among workers, between industries, and across humanity as a whole.