Right now, everyone is worried about AI. White collar workers around the world are scrambling, desperately trying to figure out what to do. I understand the general sentiment, and want to look at the situation rationally. Like every new technology, AI is set to make a lot of changes to the global economic landscape. It’s going to become a lot easier to write. A lot of white collar workers simply won’t be needed anymore. But what about for bloggers? Does AI spell the end of our business? I don’t think so, and neither do a lot of other bloggers, from what I can see on Reddit. So, I wanted to take the time to analyze the facts surrounding AI along with its likely effects, while discussing how to write articles that it can’t copy or compete with.
The threat from AI is real
There’s no point in pretending it isn’t. There’s also no point in being a purist and trying to claim that humans secretly prefer a human touch and will always be able to tell the difference between AI and our writing. We won’t, and AI writing is already starting to get past us. The cost of producing AI writing is high enough now that writers around the world still have a job. But articles are already being pumped out much faster than in the past. AI is taking over the writing industry as a helpful and there isn’t much people can do about it besides adapt and adjust. If the technology improves, we could see an environment in which far fewer people are being used to create writing. In such an environment, our goal is to figure out how to avoid being one of the excess people being laid off or left behind.
AI still needs an operator
Sure, AI can write some decent articles, but someone needs to prompt it. This means that there’s still a writer. That writer might produce more articles and control a larger share of the internet than before, but he or she still exists. This means that for now, writing is no danger of going away. Which brings me to my third point.
If the writing doesn’t benefit anyone, it won’t be created
After a certain point, you don’t need to worry about AI slop filling the internet. This is because not all AI slop is going to be lucrative. If it’s not lucrative, then it’s going to stop. At a certain point, people are going to get bored of or start blocking AI slop. Less people will be making it, and eventually the rate of output relative to the number of paying online customers will decrease. You can beat AI slop provided you remain consistent and fiscally responsible. All it did was make writing easier, and not that much easier. The remote work revolution probably did more to make writing competitive than the invention of AI did.
The real threat comes from entertaining/advice giving AI
We could see AI characters that are capable of giving people advice. People might become addicted to these characters because they are lonely. If you live in a poorer country or want to become location independent, you can probably still count on online writing over the next few years. You just need to be in it for the long haul.
Product review robots might exist in the distant future
This is why I recommend starting a broadly targeted blog and then adding product reviews later on. The more time passes, the better AI gets. If a robot is able to review products, then people are likely going to build and sell that robot. Product review robots will be a great way to render the affiliate marketing space more capital-intensive and raise the barrier for entry. It will also mean there’s one less way out there for poor people to get rich. Watch out of smart robots in the future. Those are a bigger danger than ChatGPT.
You beat AI with authentic experience
There is no evidence that AI is thinking. Right now, AI regurgitates words in order, programs, and plays skill games at a very high level. It’s very good and can certainly beat humans in these pursuits, but it still makes a lot of mistakes. When AI is able to spell everything properly and form coherent sentences, we often find that it occasionally spews out nonsense. It’s not thinking. We also know for a fact that AI is not alive. Right now, AI is only just beginning to see things. But it still can’t integrate knowledge and experiences. You can as a human being. This is why I said you should be worried about product review bots in the distant future. I think AI companies will want to use AI to build humanoid robots that live lives fairly similar to ours. In the meantime, however, your authentic experiences of life cannot be copied. People can’t copy your memories or your thoughts, and a robot certainly can’t either. If you’re looking to beat AI in this new world of content creation, you need to engage in unpredictable, non-repetitive activities. This means experiencing life authentically and sharing it. AI has raised the bar when it comes to content creation, we just don’t know it yet. Just wait until those making slop realize nobody’s reading. Then, it’ll be an open field.
AI is scary. It’s going to take and displace a lot of jobs, and people around the world will briefly find it a lot harder to get ahead. That being said, it’s unlikely that AI will reduce the number of writers to zero. It is after all trained on human writing and human-collected data. Eventually websites like Google will figure that out. People are already switching to websites like Bing and TikTok when it comes to doing searches, as problematic as that may be when it comes to the dissemination of accurate information. If you want to be a writer, you can still do it. Just be aware of the tech, be aware of the globalized marketplace in which we live, and make sure to create unique content and offer your own unique form of expertise. You just need to live, learn, and practice your crafts. Publish a lot of content as soon as you can. It won’t get any easier. But don’t worry too much about AI. You can always integrate into the business model.
Thanks for paying attention.
