AI ate our novels: how writing without our robot overlords became an artisanal skill

The other day I was talking to my sister — a copywriter at a well known company. She writes for a living, and I’m told (by her and her paycheck) that she’s one of the best in the world at doing it.

I was like “Yo sis, you ever use Chat GPT at your job?” (this is how I actually talk)

And she was like, “No, I don’t need it. I can write without it. I do use it when I have obscure questions about how to file my taxes though.”

And that made sense to me. Because she’s got this whole vibe, and it comes out in how she writes. Very mildly snarky but still endearing, sitting right between millennial and gen z.

For the time being, her voice is worth a lot of money, and hard to replicate.

Chat GPT paints the future by replicating the past

While natural language processing (NLP) models like Chat GPT are incredible at generating spontaneous text that surpasses the skills of most of the population, they pull on past information, so the voice that they generate is never truly unique. It’s just like, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. But this and that are borrowed from preexisting sources.