The more sophisticated Generative AI becomes, the more writers have to stake their claim in the writing world.
In a recent survey run by Gartner on employee anxiety that AI will replace their job, Marketing/PR came in at the top with 42% of respondents in those roles worrying about AI doing their job for them. This concern is certainly well-grounded with the advancements in publicly available AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. On the one hand, GenAI has been a great help in research, idea generation, debugging code, editing current writing, and more, but on the other, many in the writing and programming disciplines have been worried about AI starting to replace them. While it’s not ideal, the best strategy for writers is to adapt: realize that AI is going to get more and more sophisticated, hold on to what we can unarguably do better, and learn how to prove ourselves as authentic writers.
As writers, we’re going to be better than AI. Maybe not in everything and not for long, but our biggest advantage over AI is that we come up with new ideas. ChatGPT’s last knowledge update was in January of 2022, so it can’t write anything on any topics newer than that. While Machine Learning can make predictions and recommendations, it can only do so after analyzing a data set and using information that it has access to. (every statement I make about AI capabilities should have an implied disclaimer stating “for now”) We can expand on new ideas, focus on thought leadership, write detailed comparisons between, say, our company and a competitor, press releases, award announcements, and more. Not all articles will be this thought-provoking, as sometimes you need to write an SEO-optimized article on, say, the difference between AI and ML. But as writers, unique content is where we can shine.
The obvious solution might be to take written content and run it through ChatGPT and ask if it’s AI-generated content. Well, I tried that! I took a paragraph on Robotics from my last article and asked ChatGPT if it was AI-generated. It replied, “Based on the content and context of the passage you've shared, it's certainly within the realm of possibility for it to have been generated by an AI like me.” I took the same passage and put it through Undetectable AI, and it decided that my content appeared mostly human. This is likely because I have a pretty unique style of writing, plus lots of years of practice.
But realistically, no one is going to run the articles they read through a detector, and as shown, different AIs come back with different answers for the same paragraph (but we can take ChatGPT’s decision with a grain of salt as it didn’t make an absolute statement). One of the best ways to ensure that our articles are taken at face value is to do the work for your readers.
There are a few ways that you can prove you’re a human writer, some more reliable than others. A really easy place to start is having a portfolio of your own articles that you can link to. If someone reads your articles back to back, it’ll be easy to tell that they’re written by the same person. One way a company can support this is by giving each author an “about” page with a little bio, a link to their LinkedIn profile, and links to all the other articles they’ve written. There are even companies like Authory that provide a service to issue you a human-certified badge. All of these techniques can go a long way towards proving you’re a real, live, human author, but our best asset is still the ability to write unique, thought leadership content.
