Can Writers Continue to Take an Anti-AI Stance in 2024?
The answer isn’t easy
The writing industry is always evolving. What many professional writers may not have seen coming in 2023 was the extraordinarily quick rise of AI to create written content. For many of us, it felt like it happened overnight. One day, we were going about our business, creating content for clients, and the next day we were getting emails saying that the company was switching to AI for their content needs. Freelance writers were no longer needed.
I know that I was blindsided by this dramatic change in the way that businesses are now acquiring written content. My average monthly amount of writing assignments was cut in half. At first, I felt that this was only going to be a passing phase. As quickly as companies switched to creating written content with AI, there were horror stories being revealed, from using fake sources and statistics to blatant plagiarism from the material the AI was trained on. And I probably don’t need to mention how many grammatical errors and stilted, robotic phrases that needed to be removed before the content could be considered publishable.
Worry was only temporary — until it wasn’t. Instead of companies realizing that the content they were generated was subpar, they doubled down. Refusing to hire back writers at writer’s rates, they now offered writers…