Will ChatGPT kill off content writers?

That seems to be the question going round at the moment, with ChatGPT experts (yes, seriously) saying how you don’t need content writers anymore, copywriters are pointless and you don’t need to spend any time crafting content. ChatGPT will do it all for you.

Okay...

This is something I discussed with our Content Team Leader John Murray this week. He hates ChatGPT and thinks it should just go away, but then he would think that. He's a man of words. However, he had some great reasons.

You see, at Engage Web , we have a large network of freelance content writers. We’re constantly recruiting new writers all the time (through unbranded websites, so don’t @ me for content work). The thing is, since the launch of ChatGPT, applications for new writers have sky rocketed. We’ve actually seen an increase of around 400-500% in applications.

Surely there can’t be five times as many people now who want to write content?

Typically when someone applies to become one of our writers, they receive the automated response with the test brief for them to produce a sample article, and that’s the last we hear from them. They can’t be bothered. Instant deselection.

Sometimes they respond and demand work from us, and that their time is precious so they won’t ever do work for free – as though we’re somehow going to use thousands of articles all written to the exact same brief. We’re not using them. We need to know they can follow a brief. Instant deselection.

Many of them respond with content that doesn’t match the brief, and just waffles on about something they wanted to write about. Instant deselection.

Some send us content they’ve found online, and they’ve copied and pasted it from a website. Obviously we use a plagiarism checker and can detect this. They didn’t write it. Instant deselection.

Some are just terrible. Badly written, filled with spelling mistakes, bad grammar and awful structure. They can’t write, but believe they can. Instant deselection.

There are very few that meet the brief and pass our quality control. They get accepted.

Now, since ChatGPT, we’re not only getting a lot more applications but we’re also getting a lot more submissions from people who have completed the brief. That’s unusual. Do you smell a rat?

Obviously ChatGPT has played a hand, but how can we tell? How can we identify if someone who wants writing work, as a writer, is just feeding our brief into ChatGPT under the impression we’re going to pay them as a writer?

There are some signs… signs that if we can spot, Google can spot. Remember – AI content is against Google’s Terms of Service. If you use it, you could face Google’s wrath. The signs are:

• The grammar is perfect. Not just good, perfect. Very few writers are that polished, ever.
• The spelling is absolutely spot on. Even the best writers, even our in-house editors, will make a typo or a misplaced comma – not these submissions. They’re flawless.
• They use the same sentence structure and paragraph openings. We genuinely had four in a row, from completely different people, where all four featured the exact same beginning the final paragraph. Come on now… that’s too obvious!
• They all fail an AI detection test. Yes, there is such a thing. They tell if a piece of content is likely to be AI, and give you a percentage. One from a human writer shows as 100% human, whereas one from ChatGPT flags as circa 15% likely to be human.
• They say NOTHING. While the language is correct, the grammar perfect and the spelling on point, they don’t actually give any facts, any figures or anything of worth. They use passive language, much like politicians do when they say “mistakes have been made” as opposed to “I made a mistake”

There are more, but myself and John will be going through them in detail inside EngageWeb.Club later this month. We’ll be showing just how ChatGPT could be used effectively within your content, and how you can avoid all of the obvious mistakes I’ve highlighted here… mistakes that would see your website suffer if you end up pasting its content directly into your website’s pages or blogs.

Will it replace copywriters? No, it’ll make them more important as they’ll help your content stand out from the bland, passive (yet grammatically perfect) content everyone else is producing using ChatGPT.

What are your thoughts?

Oh yes – picture for attention because, you know, robots.