There’s no getting around it—AI is here, and it’s not going away. 

Gone are the days when you had to compose an email, a cover letter, or a newsletter from scratch. Just get a ChatGPT account, give it a prompt, and boom—it produces whatever you need. 

If you’re a teacher, that means you have to make sure your students are actually writing their papers. And, if you have any extra brain space, try to teach them that doing their own writing is actually worth doing! If you’re actively job searching, well, not having to fully compose every single cover letter you send out is actually pretty nice. 

And if you’re a writer? It’s a full-blown existential crisis for your entire industry. 

If you’re a novelist, you’re taking an extra close look at the small print on your contract to make sure no one is allowed to use your work to train a robot. But if you’re a freelance copywriter or content writer, the way you make your livelihood is changing, fast. 

The Rumors Aren’t True 

There’s a lot of hype around ChatGPT, and while a lot of it is pretty neat, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be just yet. 

Take a look at that cover letter your AI of choice wrote for you. Is it something you could copy and paste as is and send to a recruiter? Probably not. You’ll likely need to make sure it understands how to plug in your relevant experience in a way that makes sense to a reader. There are probably lots of clunky sentences, too, and you’ll need to edit it so it doesn’t read so much like an AI robot. In fact, ChatGPT’s strange tone has become so notorious that it’s pretty easy to spot. That’s how so many of those teenagers get caught cheating! 

No matter what it might become later, right now programs like ChatGPT are just predictive text. Like when you type the beginning of a sentence into your phone, and you’re able to click suggested words to finish your text. 

But while there are companies who need—and respect—the kind of elegant, professional writing that only humans are writing these days, there are also plenty of other people who are using AI anyway, despite its clunkiness. So where does that leave you? 

Human Supervision

The first answer is that right now, a human being still needs to go over anything written by AI to polish it up for publication. And, because they’re just predictive text, there are lots of companies looking for people to “train” AI. 

But it’s unclear whether those jobs are worth taking. So many of them appear in the same places you’d see an ad for a too good to be true job where you can make “five thousand dollars a day working from home.” And really, why would you want to help someone take a job away from a writer? 

It’s hard to tell right now whether or not working with AI will be an ethical way for writers to make a living or, more importantly, an ethical way for companies to make their content. 

So for now maybe skip the “train our AI” gigs, but don’t feel as if you’re not allowed to play around with ChatGPT if you want to. If nothing else, seeing what it produces should allay your fears that no human being will be paid for writing ever again starting in 2024. 

Know Your Worth

Sure, maybe a lot of the companies using AI now are sketchy, but not all of them. A few years ago, some of those employers might have employed a human where now they’re using a program. And technology moves fast. So who’s to say how long it will take for ChatGPT to be good enough to be ubiquitous? Is it really true that big tech companies aren’t already stealing all our emails, drafts, and social media posts to teach their programs to be better writers? 

Before you panic and smash your laptop for stealing your life, think about what else happened after the advent of ChatGPT—the Writers Guild of America strike, the outrage of authors who found out their books had been stolen to train AI, the schools that swiftly made rules forbidding students from plugging their assignments into a bot. 

People care about the written word. And while tech companies have done so much to devalue the labor of writers like you, they’ve also enabled writers and workers of all stripes to connect with each other. Maybe improved AI will lead to more types of workers forming unions. Maybe it won’t. 

But just as there will always be people who want to write, there will always be people who know the value of sharing ideas, information, and experiences via the written word. That’s simply part of the human experience. And ChatGPT isn’t going to change that.

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.