Three people on my LinkedIn list who were until last week employed as content writers are now sharing their embittered views about AI and how it has essentially made them redundant much faster than expected. Eloquent, polite and blagging AI software has replaced them. If you’ve give ChatGPT a spin and asked it for references to any topic you would know that all the links and references it spits out are essentially useless and need to be checked. The content is grammatically correct but the facts are bent or outright fiction.
One person expresses regret for not having gone into a vocational job and reflecting on how it is now almost impossible to find the funds to retrain.
Perhaps companies replacing whole teams of writers will come to their senses that they are accountable for the inaccuracies of what the software spits out and that they publish under their name. Either way we have entered a new era of processing information we read online as humans, an extension to the fake news era if you like. We need to review what we read with care and check whether the facts are indeed as presented. We also need to figure out whether we too will be written off and made redundant and what to do about that.
