ChatGPT is a copywriter’s best friend, not our replacement.
AI will not replace our jobs. It’s those who use AI that will replace those who do not.
I’ve seen posts across LinkedIn, advertising forums, discussed in podcasts, rambled on in company newsletters, and fear-mongered on Fishbowl about how AI like ChatGPT will put copywriters and other advertising execs out of jobs. From personal experience and historical observation, they’re not the new human, they’re the new assistant. And with that, we will still have human assistants too, so don’t worry.
I’m always entertained at the apocalyptic reactions people have to the “new thing that will change everything” things. As a child, it was the internet. As a teenager, it was the cellphone and Google and video games. My parents grew up in the “TV will rot your brain” era. Currently we’re witnessing the new so-assumed “downfall of humanity that will dawn upon us like waves of Poseidon’s wrath” or whatever, in the form of generative AI.
The only thing those people have to fear is themselves. So long as they continue to reject it and complain, they will be the first ones out of a gig. Not because of AI, but because they refuse to embrace change. Anyone embracing it will quickly take their place.
I recently had the chance to meet a lawyer with an extensive history working in the field of robotics, computing, and ethics. In an incredibly insightful discussion, he described perfectly what such automation will actually do for us:
“When I started out in the legal profession, the junior staff had the most tedious jobs imaginable; when a document got amended, the job of trainees was to take a ruler and a red pen and underline all the new text that had been introduced into the document — and you would do this for days on end; unbelievably tedious work, and you’re thinking ‘I needed a degree to do this?’
That job has been taken over by machines for many years now, and I don’t know of anybody who is unhappy about that because there are assumed ‘fewer jobs for trainee lawyers,’ there are not, it’s now that trainee lawyers get to do some training at being lawyers, instead of being trained for a job that ought to be done by a computer.
Such a task surely has virtually no added skill value, and in fact such a mundane but important procedure could be thrown off by an exhausted human making a simple error that would likely not be made by a computer.
It’s a personal assistant
I like to call ChatGPT my personal R2-D2. Currently, I’m using it to assist me in my own workload. I treat it like having an intern; I write up complex, detailed briefs for it to work from, provide some of my own work and examples, and ask it to help generate new text which I can draw from, to cut down on the menial GIGO text that is just not needed. For example, when you have a new discount that has to be posted on social media three times a week on six different platforms, you can:
- Spend an entire hour rewriting the same exact thing using almost the exact same words in different orders, exhausting thesauruses before triple checking character count and “read-more” avoidance…
- Ask an intern or junior employee to do it for you, and waste their time away from learning more important tasks…
- Spend five minutes writing a detailed brief you would give to the same intern, add a few examples, and feed it to AI, then spend five minutes reviewing and double-checking everything is what you want.
Our tasks have evolved and our time needed is slashed
The advertising industry is overworked. Even in France, where labor laws and CBAs require working hours to be confined to 35-hour workweeks, the ad industry is notoriously still working 60 to 80-hours a week in many agencies. Companies cut costs by hiring the fewest possible people and giving them twice as much work. AI like ChatGPT will not put us out of jobs, but from my current experience, it allows me to go home at 6 pm instead of 7:30 pm at times. It allows me to pick up more projects, help with bigger tasks, and present a wealth of campaign strategies that, just a few months ago, were being bogged down by writing hashtags instead of selecting them.
Content writers and community managers will not be replaced by this, they will simply oversee vast amounts of it, the same way print producers who once mixed colors for print ads now do so digitally in photoshop, and how assembly line workers who once bolted products together by hand now oversee the machines doing it instead. And in the case of automation in factories, remember how automation did not kill the factory worker career… outsourcing all production to third-world countries with no human rights killed the factory worker career.
As companies like automotive giant Stellantis move their entire marketing needs to politically unstable and impoverished Central American nations for a fraction of the cost and no pesky workplace unions, putting their US agencies out of business, AI is not what you should be afraid of.
Embrace it
The fact is, our jobs will not be replaced entirely by AI, they will evolve around it. Our tasks and skills will become more advanced, more complex, and more interesting. Is it possible some jobs at the very bottom may be challenged? Sure, as with every major change, some people may be affected negatively, though I find it impossible to believe this will happen on a recession-level scale.
At the end of the day, anyone reading this who just doesn’t agree, who just doesn’t like the thought of AI in our workplace, who is scared of it… pause, take a few moments to think about it, think real hard, and realize it’s not going anywhere. It’s here and it’s here to stay and grow. You cannot destroy it, but it can absolutely replace you if you try to avoid it in efforts to imagine that you alone will somehow halt its progress.
Once you realize it’s going to become a part of our workload, go on Open AI’s website and start learning how it works. The longer you wait around and fight it, the more people around you will grow at using it, and showing up too late to the party usually means all the best treats are gone and you’re stuck picking up scraps.
