Words used to come to me naturally. As a copywriter, I would mull over a sentence for a bit, thinking how it would flow and will it engage the audience. The mention of using ChatGPT by friends and colleagues would irk me, and if you were my friend two (2) years ago, you would have to hear a good long rant about how it’s taking away jobs and ripping what we know to be human authenticity and replacing it with near-perfect replies.
Using AI meant my written work was not good enough and can never be as composed, thoughtful and calculated. But then, how could it be as I was competing with a machine? AI could get that copy done faster, read through multiple documents to come up with a solution and even condense all that work for articles I was tasked to write, reducing the lead time from 5 days to 2 days, depending on the amount of work.
Due to social pressure and the evolving competitive workspace, I ended my feud with AI and started using it to work on my everyday work, dilemmas and even personal questions. Why, some may ask and it was to move faster, think better and be more strategic.
Consulting a web-based platform everyday got me thinking, am I completely useless without AI? Could I drum up a paragraph without AI?
I know this to be untrue as before I used AI, I actually spent a long time churning out ideas and sifting through them as they weren’t good enough to meet organizational expectations. Now, I use it to save time and strategize as much as possible.
If so, was I still a writer? Could I call myself one if I was not practicing writing anymore?
Naturally, as writers, we tend to mull it over and brood in our heads. I was not special so I did so for awhile, had conversations with AI and with my peers. As much as AI is absolutely useful and might solve our day-to-day problems, I realized that AI can never replicate your voice, your brand and what’s really in your heart.
That dream you had to start a bakery? Sure, it can come up with a plan, be trained to think of all you need to run one but can it predict human behavior and what customers are looking for?
That content creation plan you promised to send to a brand? Sure you can use AI to help plan, draft, develop, execute and monitor. But does it know the trends of what everyone is watching based on their environment and demographics? Does it know the existing challenges everyone faces?
That statistics report you were working on? Sure AI can help to pull it but as the end-user, you still have to do the research, initiate, understand what stakeholders need, execute, finalize and analyze how it could improve in the future.
AI is a tool to complement our work, it is equipped to help our everyday life, it will replace jobs, it will make people upset and people happy. However, at the end of the day, AI cannot replace your acquired experience and knowledge, as well as the human emotions that come with sadness, disappointment, failure, conflict and tension.
Human skills according to the Harvard Business Review, are difficult to replicate as they involve the ability to build relationships, interpret emotions, make good judgement, you name it.
The reason we, human beings are where they are today is because if the mistakes we made, risks we took and all the brainwork we did without GPT.
When you strip AI away, we are left to deal with how we really feel, want to actually do and how we move. It’s up to us to pull the AI trigger so we can make whatever we do, bang.
petiteshark 