AI am I. Am I AI?
A few thoughts on the biggest topic
Hello Feisty Friends,
Last newsletter I caught you up on some of my activities during my Long Hiatus. Possibly the most significant professional development, not just for me but all my fellow creatives, has been the dramatic reveal of AI, Chat GPT in particular. Since then, all of my conversations with writer friends have seemed to eventually wind their way to AI and its implications (followed by pensive silence, and some vows of career change). Until then, AI had been something that I guess we knew existed, but still seemed a little Jetsons era, a speculative far-in-the-future possibility, someone else’s problem, but CERTAINLY outside of the realm of creatives where our MINDwork is too precious and unique to copy.
Then it turns out that Chat GPT can draft a blog post that’s about as good as a first year writing student, or my first draft on a bad day. Or come up with a set of ten ideas where three are the same as mine, two are better, two are worse, and before I could even pick up my pen.
I called the Chat GPT release a dramatic reveal because while we know the term AI, I didn’t know it was working on my career field. And that it would improve even over the course of six months. Since then I’ve had a client draft a blog post that I normally write using AI (would the AI know that the referent is unclear in this sentence and that it should be fixed before sending?), I’ve had interview requests for comment on what I plan to do now that AI is coming for my job, and I’ve done more of my own experimenting with the tool and a lot more reading about AI. I’ve even started a notes file on my phone of prompts gathered from those articles that seem like smart starting points for my next searches. Wait, did I just gather intelligence and store it? Am I AI?
For your interest, here are a couple of the prompts:
I want to learn about [insert topic]. Identify and share the most important 20% of learnings from this topic that would help me understand 80% of it.
Summarize the book [book name] by the author [author name] and give me a list of the most important learnings and insights.
No wonder people say prompt engineer is going to be a future job. Much better than my instinct to type in “tell me about X”.
But back to the human writer’s dilemma. That early moment with my client prompted what I’m sure will be the first of many conversations on AI, and really made me realize that it’s not something I can just dodge. What was I going to do, chastise the client? Tell him he needs to check his loyalty to humankind? Instead I gently steered him back with a reminder that we can write posts, but let’s keep the topics in line with the editorial calendar. And why not send them to me for an edit and punch up or else they will be like every other post out there? He mentioned that as a non-writer, the AI helped him to organize his thoughts, and now he uses the tool to send me the elements for a first draft of project such as an important email. Hard to argue with that.
Problem solved, for now, but in the long-term I can see that I may not be able to honestly charge the same amount for a punch-up as I would for composing a post from scratch. And an AI four years from now, or even one year from now, may not even need the same level of punch up, especially if it’s specially trained to write blog posts and prompts are engineered to bring out its best. So it’s still a question as to how it will impact our world. The last AI tool that had an impact on my world was to my advantage: AI transcription. Previously the bane of my existence, I have not transcribed a minute of my own interviewing for years now. If someone tried to chastise me for putting human transcribers out of work, I’d look at them funny.
These are just a couple of issues that I find myself thinking about in the new AI era, as I continue to think about how I will pivot into the future. I’m generally a positive person, so I’m not ready to throw my hands up and quit, but I’m also a realist, so I’m not about to pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead I’m trying to think of how I can use it to improve my life without devastating it too much. Since that is what we humans do.
PS - Speaking of human writers, my next six-week Feisty Freelancer training course launches mid-September. Email me at feistyfreelancer@gmail.com to get on the waiting list when registration opens.