ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners

All businesses are in the business of maximizing profits. If they can be more profitable with fewer writers, of course they'll reduce staff. But if X content produces Y results, one should expect that 4X content will produce 4Y results. Profitable activities get invested in. Cost centers get optimized.

ChatGPT lowers the bar for content creation, which actually raises the bar for producing content that will stand out. If you're just copying/pasting content from ChatGPT, you'll have a lot more content, but it won't stand out. It's content for the sake of content, as opposed to content that's meant to engage and persuade a person to spend money on your products.

This is especially true with LLMs. They can't come up with truly creative content. LLMs, by design, return the most average content imaginable. This has tremendous value in the hands of a skilled writer/editor.

Remember: The purpose of marketing is to make your brand and your products stand out from the crowd. You're not going to achieve that by producing what is, by definition, the most average content possible.

ChatGPT makes me a better writer. That's all there is to it.

Businesses that don't believe content can sell shouldn't have any writers at all. Those that do should invest in AI-competent writers more than ever.

I maintain that AI is only a threat to me as a writer if either (a) I'm a hack who produces low-value content, or (b) my employer is stupid. I'd rather not work for stupid, anyway.

Let's say it costs $100 for a piece of content, like a blog post. (I'm not suggesting that's the right price, I just like easy math.)

And let's say your return is $200 in sales, leaving you a profit of $100.

If I could double my money like that with every article, I would gladly pay $10,000 for 100 articles if the return is then $20,000. That's a money-printing machine.

Now let's say the return isn't $200 per article, but $105, for a profit of just $5. I wouldn't pay a single penny for it, because I have better ways to invest my money.

This applies to anything in business. Whether it's content, technology, inventory, people, real estate... whatever. If the return is great enough, smart business owners will want more of it.

It has nothing to do with how much time it took or how many people were employed.

It has everything to do with how much it cost versus what the expected return would be.

That's all business is. Turning $1 into $2.

Show me a process that does that, and I'll invest every dime I've got.

Now, let's go back to the original example: $100/article for $200 return. If ChatGPT allows my writer to produce 10X as much content at the same cost (which I doubt... it's a bicycle, not a jet plane, but I digress) without any loss of quality, I would anticipate my returns to be $2,000 for every $100 invested. That would be incredible. I wouldn't just invest every dime I have but I'd max out every dollar I could borrow as well.

BUT: That assumes each piece of content can be just as (or more) effective as those that came before. There's a limit to how much anyone's audience really wants to hear from them.

The answer to this is to invest in finding new audiences. New niches that would want your products. High-quality expert content is a fabulous way of attracting communities of like-minded people. So when you get to the saturation point with one community, there's an opportunity to find another, and then another, and then another, and so on and so forth.

It all hinges on whether the content is actually doing the work it's supposed to be doing. Things that make money get invested in. Things that cost money get optimized or eliminated.

If I was a writer and I lost my job to ChatGPT, I would take a long hard look in the mirror and ask myself why my employer didn't see my value anymore. Was I just producing content for the sake of content? Was my content profitable for them? Was the quality of my writing so mediocre that a machine did it just as well, if not better? If my work generated profits, why would my employer cut me out? Why wouldn't they want even bigger profits? Aren't they in the business of making money?

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Now, I responded to your comment on the assumption that you meant there isn't demand on behalf of businesses for 10X more content. But you may also be saying there isn't enough demand to consume that much content.

In that case, I would argue there's always an appetite for great content. Our expectations just grow as the quantity of available content grows. I don't know about you, but I'm constantly on the hunt for something great to read or watch, and most of the time, all I find is mediocre. I might read one thing a day that really makes me think. If 10X more content means 10X more think-worthy content, stuff that engages me, then I certainly have an appetite for that.

What I do not have appetite for is 100 articles saying the same thing in slightly different ways. If that's the kind of content you're going to produce with the help of AI, then I agree, there's no market for that.

In addition, I think we’re living in a huge bubble and are sort of entitled enough to think that Internet = human knowledge. So many jobs and skills are simply not transferable even using human language (and even if they hire an army if “trainers”). This is one of the core problems with the current incarnation of “AI” - tacit knowledge has always been the stumbling block, even back in the expert systems days when everyone was thinking what we’re thinking will happen today.

So until the machines can somehow gain consciousness, autonomous and nimble movement, the will to live and all of the deep levels of the human mind that are outside language, I think we’ll be pretty safe :-) And for now, on all of these parameters they aren’t even close to a cat.

* Past performance is not indicative of future results.

But I'm basing my opinion on history as well. The focus will be on reducing costs, which means eliminating as many workers as possible.

On top of that, the biggest unaddressed problem that everyone seems to pounce over is tacit knowledge - it cannot simply be transferred even between humans, using words, gestures or any other media. It can only be gained through the human experience, by doing stuff. It’s the same old problem from the expert systems days. So we cannot hope to replace them with AI, at least not until AI somehow becomes self-aware and gains all of the non-surface depths of the human mind, and lives through the same experience.

If your argument is that there won't be anyone to spend money, so even the jobs that AI can't replace won't be safe, then okay.