Replacing creative workers with AI is a recipe for mediocrity

Disclaimer: I wrote the following text from a highly personalized freelance copywriter perspective. It may not be suitable for other freelancers or creative employees. Feel free to add your perspective though! :)

Ever since ChatGPT rose to fame at the end of 2022, countless articles have been written about how AI will replace us. Since then, multiple alternatives have been launched. Texts, Images and even code, music and voices: Is there anything AI can't do?

AI's impact on freelance jobs has unfortunately been obvious. In the months since launch, studies saw a decline in monthly freelance jobs. The decline in freelance earnings has been even steeper.

Oh no no no, McDonald's ain't it

As a freelance writer, I've been asked many times what I think about AI text generators like ChatGPT and if I'm afraid of it.

I'm not. I compare Text AIs with machine-manufactured goods. Yes, AI can produce passable, standardized results, just like a machine producing the same thing over and over again.

But in the end, we will always prefer handmade things over machine-produced things.

That's why we always prefer to go to real restaurants instead of McDonalds.

That's why handmade presents always bring more joy than store-bought alternatives.

That's why real, handmade jewelry is so much more expensive and exclusive, despite there being an abundance of cheap knock-offs.

That's why the bread from the small bakery down the street tastes much better than the cheap supermarket ones.

Machine-generated content is very similar. It will spit the same text out every time. Not just for you though, every company that uses the text AI for the same inquiry will get the same result.

So, if you are eyeing replacing your creative employees in your company with AI, let me ask you this then: What differentiates you from your competitors? What makes you stand out? What's your unique selling point? You are not the only company using AI for your content. You will be like everyone else using it. You won't stand out. Relying solely on AI is a recipe for mediocrity.

Writing the same cr*p as everyone else

Meanwhile, there is another problem that is already well-documented. AI is self-referencing. It's not able to differentiate between right and wrong facts – it will just write what everyone else is writing. And what it writes can be factually wrong. In fact, a few weeks ago, an adjunct researcher at Georgetown SCS noticed that some of their students have been citing blogs that sounded correct – but weren't factually correct. It turned out that the sources themselves have been using AI.

Not long into the fall 2023 semester, students began to cite blogs and vendor materials that made sense but were partly or entirely incorrect.?This problem traces back to LLMs providing "hallucinations." In some cases, vendor content creators incorporate these untrue materials directly into their published content without vetting or correcting them.

In the worst case, AI will produce content that actually endangers the life of your customer, because it is reproducing other AI texts. Frankly, this tells a lot about how you see and treat your customers.

Almost every company has some BS cr*p about how satisfying customer needs is always the focus of their business operations. But how can you say that if you don't value the content (real!) people create? If you value AI content more than human-created content? The content is probably the most important aspect on your site. Why are you skimping on it?

A small fish in a big pond

Remember the handmade vs. machine-made analogy above? While it applies to physical goods, it also has its limitations. Because you are not competing with the Walmarts, the Targets, the ALDIs, aka the big players in your field. On the internet, you are competing with the best of the best in your field!

And the truth is: The best of the best publish great hand-crafted pieces. Their content will always perform better than machine-produced, standardized content. And the best of the best may be situated at the other end of the country. At worst, the first 10 or 20 results in Google are all handcrafted content pieces, banning you to a deadly second or even third or fourth site.

Efficiency is key

Certainly, ChatGPT and other LLMs have their uses. And I would lie if I wrote here that I didn't use them for some of my texts before. LLMs are ideal to get a first grasp and an understanding of a topic. But again: LLMs don't know anything. They just summarise what other (real!) people (and AIs) have written out there. It won't tell you where it found the data - but that's something that good content should always do: Citing and linking to sources - the internet is built on interlinking!

And that's one reason why LLMs won't replace creative workers: They can't fact-check. The more specialized the industry in which your company operates, the more important fact-checking becomes.

Yet, people in charge often see them as an all-in-one device that will solve all our problems and save the company thousands of dollars every month. Half a century ago, we thought automation would replace us all. And yet, the manufacturing industry still employs millions of workers around the globe. Because machines need human oversight. It will be the same with LLMs.

Besides the fact-checking and rewriting, someone still needs to upload the texts to your CRM, to your website, to your app, to your print material. No version of ChatGPT can solve that as of yet.

Yes, ChatGPT and its competitors will become better. They may even become sentient. But they will never replace the human element.

"What's your brand again?"

Although my background is in writing, I also getting more and more into the design space. And of course, I tried Linkedin's "create header" function, just to see what it is capable of. And let me tell you: The results were bad.

Granted, how do you picture "mediocrity"? (I mean... I could have chosen some boomer politicians for the header, but this text is neither a clown presentation nor a horror story.)

Jokes aside: The results were replaceable, boring, and in some cases contrary to the intention of this text. So I had to design the header myself. And guess what: I did it in my personal brand colors: orange and dark blue, because I want to stand out. And while I'm still miles away from calling myself a professional designer, I enjoy designing.

If your company wants to stand out, it needs a visual brand. It needs colors, it needs fonts, it needs its own symbols, messages and USPs. No text-to-image model will ever produce what a good designer is able to create. Sure, it creates images faster. But fast doesn't equal good. Right now, AI images have too many visual errors in them to consider using them in a professional setting. Do you want to use images with visual errors? No, you don't.

Conclusion: AI lays the foundations. Creators build upon it.

So, is there any hope with AI? Yes. It will lay the foundation of our work, and only the foundation. It will make us work more efficiently by providing us with a canvas that we can work on. But we still need to make sure that the foundation itself is built correctly. Only then we can start building upon it.

It will not make slow and inefficient processes faster though. That's the job of the people in charge. Complicated software and tools, old hardware, lots of unnecessary meetings and slow processes are what cost your company money.

I don't fear AI. And while this article may sound overly critical, I actually embrace this trend. There are many great use cases for AI tools, in your company surely as well.

But using them is the responsibility of your creative workers. If you fire these: Who will build your house?

Again, this is my personal view, coming from my experience as a tech-enthusiastic copywriter and designer in spe. I'm currently freelancing (April 2024) and open to new opportunities. Contact me via my LinkedIn profile! :)

PS: Before I pressed "Publish" on this text, I used Grammarly's AI to check the spelling and it found some minor spelling mistakes. But it also gave quite a few false positives. Which underlines my points above.