ChatGPT was introduced in November, and that launch prompted a round of hand-wringing among marketing professionals.
Chief among those affected include copywriters, those who write the texts for ads. Someone on Reddit recently asked “Are you worried about AI?” and got more than 100 comments, many of them from doomsayers.
“ChatGPT can absolutely write authentically in any tone,” wrote one. “I’m sorry, but our heads are in the sand about this.”
Copywriters are far from the only professionals threatened by AI. Among them were programmers, legal industry jobs like paralegals and legal assistants and market research analysts, according to Insider.
Still, media jobs, including journalism and technical writing, were high on the list of jobs threatened by AI. Even graphic designer jobs could soon be taken over by AI.
Copywriting seems uniquely vulnerable to AI intrusion, though. One copywriter wrote in The Guardian that “it took ChatGPT 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that would take me hours to write.”
It could turn out while some copywriters will lose their jobs, because of AI, a copywriter’s job will shift because of AI to become more about editing than writing copy.
Already there are AI programs like Jasper that generate social media content and can translate that copy into 26 languages.
It could turn out that AI will evolve to become much better at churning out copy than humans.
Under that likely scenario, many copywriters will be out of work, but maybe the extraordinary ones will demonstrate how AI can enhance human creativity, but not replace it.