Will ChatGPT make writing obsolete?

Over the past few months I have seen a growing conversation around the use of Artificial Intelligence, in particular ChatGPT.

Wikipedia describes ChatGPT as an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. It is notable for enabling users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used.

When it comes to AI, I have mixed opinions. As much as it has benefits in certain areas there are also negative implications, some of which have already been seen.

I recently watched a video called ‘How to Improve your life with AI’. The video included things such as scripting for difficult telephone calls, recipe ideas for whatever ingredients you have at home, planning meals, summarising articles, finding quotes on certain topics or by certain people, question inspiration for meetings or interviews and writing prompts.

The general gist of the video was that ChatGPT can help us do things in a much quicker or easier way. We no longer need to type things into google, click on a website and hope that it will contain what we were searching for.

Let’s say you’re looking for a summary of The Great Gatsby. Instead of typing it to google and finding a summary on a website that someone had created by reading the book and manually summarising the main points, ChatGPT can generate a summary much quicker.

Plus, your input could be for a summary of the book or just a summary of the key themes. ChatGPT allows you to be specific in what you request which may not always be available online.

The people that wrote book summaries were incredibly valuable because they created something useful that benefitted people. However, there is now much less value in someone reading a book and making summary notes because it takes significantly longer than it does for AI. And so it’s not considered a good or productive use of time.

This also trickles down into other areas of generic content that are consumed solely for the information and not the person writing the words.

So, what does this mean for writers? Will ChatGPT become the basis of peoples work and if so, is there anything wrong with that?

I recently read an article that said AI was used to write an entire book. Another article I read was a guide on how to use AI to write articles or sections of a book. These articles were showing ways to expedite the writing process and get to the end result much quicker. However, I believe that quicker is only beneficial to a point.

I think Google is like a shopping mall where each website is an individual store whereas ChatGPT is like a department store, a one stop shop where you can find everything you need.

Once I got thinking about all the things that ChatGPT could be used for, I found myself typing the question ‘Will ChatGPT make writing obsolete?’ into google and turns out it’s something that many other people have already been considering.

A few weeks back Seth Godin shared that he had created an AI blog post generator for his blog. All his blog posts and podcast episodes have been inputted and so when you type a question the response you get is very Godin-esque to the point where you might not be able to tell the difference.

But the plugin also shows links to the posts where the AI genertaed article has come from.

For people that share writing online some of the things to consider are:

• Is anyone going to read my work if they can get something similar and potentially better from ChatGPT?
• Should I use ChatGPT to create my work?
• Do I have to be honest when sharing work that is AI generated whether partially or in full?

I think there is a lot that ChatGPT can be used for which would reduce the need to use search engines because people want access to information in a way that is quick and easy. But what’s interesting is that ChatGPT gives us less choice

There are a lot of tasks or even entire job roles that AI will completely wipe out because it’s quicker, cheaper and in some aspects more reliable than a human being. And in the next few months and years we will begin to see the affects of this through job loss or just a shift in what job roles require.

One of my most beloved examples of technology advancing is a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where one day Charlies father goes to work and finds that his job has been replaced by a machine. His job was screwing the lids onto tubes of toothpaste but now there was a machine that could do it much quicker so he was no longer needed.

We’ve seen this happen on a large scale for various different industries in the agricultural and industrial revolution. More recently we’ve seen shop assistants being partially or fully replaced by self-checkout. Technology finds a way to do things quicker, more efficiently and cheaper than having them done by a person.

The interesting thing is that writing was always looked on as a creative thing and there was always this understanding that creativity can’t truly be automated or mimicked by a machine. However, I think it is important to note that AI is using what has been done by humans to create something new, rather than coming up with it’s own ideas. But I guess thats what a lot of creatives do anyway.

Some would argue that AI will free people us up to do other things but often those other things will just involve checking the work of the machine, maintaining the machine or working on what the machine can do next. People will still have to work.

Further to this, writing in a lot of ways was already on the decline with less people reading blogs and people favouring audio or visual content over written words. And now AI is helping to create a world where you don’t actually need people to write things so it will be interesting to see how this progresses and if it will spill over into audio content.

For example, creating a podcast or just some form of audio content by inputting all your past podcast episodes into a programme and then requesting it to discuss certain topics.

To conclude my opening question, I don’t think ChatGPT will make writing obsolete in the same way that the type writer or computer hasn’t stopped people writing with pen and paper and digital music hasn’t stopped CDs and records.

I think we’ll see major shifts in the kind of writing that requires a human being and that there will be more roles that focus on reviewing and revising AI generated content to ensure it’s suitable.