Are ChatGPT and other AI tools a threat to writers, designers and editors?

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT and various other AI tools. Suddenly everyone is a thought leader in AI, and every company allocates the majority of its budget to develop its capabilities using AI. NVIDIA has suddenly grown by leaps and bounds due to the need for infrastructure to power AI.

ChatGPT relies on the content present throughout the internet until 2021. However, it can catch up with the latest changes, trends, and news by using a search engine. This helps us conclude that evergreen content (content that doesn’t keep constantly changing every year) is like gold for AI tools.

Before we start, let’s classify content and writing.

While content generally refers to text, it can also refer to multimedia — image, audio, or video. The output of any file is like a recipe made up of these ingredients, which is what our eyes and ears can process. The days of SMS were the era of text. Images/gifs, short videos, and podcasts have become popular. Because of its multimedia capabilities, WhatsApp has become a primary communication medium that has replaced SMS.

Content creators now refer to people who create content for their followers on social media. Videos have almost become synonymous with content creators, thanks to YouTube and Instagram. The average attention span of people has come down, which means every influencer, brand, or person is vying for attention on social media. Today’s world needs instant gratification, and the UX of social media apps is such that everyone will keep scrolling on and on!

Classifying writers:

1. Content writers primarily write for social media, blogs, and graphic designs.
2. Copywriters write for marketing collateral, ads, and websites.
3. Technical writers write documentation and UI/UX copy for products.
4. UX writers primarily focus on UI/UX copy for products.
5. Scriptwriters create scripts for videos and movies.

Content writers and copywriters help market various products and services to obtain new customers and clients, maintain the buzz, and create awareness.

Technical writers and UX writers aim to help retain existing customers and clients. They help improve adoption.

Scriptwriters focus on storytelling to create scripts for marketing videos, explainer videos, short films or feature films.

Content Writers are a subset of Content Marketers. Sometimes the functions of Content Writers, Copywriters and Content Marketers overlap.

UX writers are a subset of Technical Writers.

Designers either do graphic design or product design.

Editors create and edit images and videos.

Now let’s come to AI and understand what today’s AI can achieve.

Today’s AI can generate any form of content — text, image, audio and video! Open AI’s GPT-4o powers text generation in ChatGPT, whereas a modified version of GPT-3 powers its image generation tool DALL·E 3. DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from input text. This model is trained on a dataset of text-image pairs.

Geneartive AI usually uses the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) framework, which is based on deep learning and neural networks.

GAN models can help create deep fake videos that manipulate real people, which goes against AI's ethical and legal use. This generated content can get people into trouble if nobody checks it. For example, there was an instance of a lawyer getting dismissed for a cooked-up case being quoted in the AI text.

AI is a threat if misused, and AI can’t act as an unsupervised replacement. AI tools are meant to increase efficiency, cut down on mundane work, and improve productivity.