By Thomas Germain
Compiled by: MetaverseHub
If you’re worried about how artificial intelligence will impact your job, the world of copywriters may offer a glimpse into the future.
01. Writers in the AI Era
Writer Benjamin Miller (not his real name) was having a blast in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, writing blogs and articles for a tech company promoting its data products on everything from real estate to used cars.
“It’s a very fascinating job where I have the opportunity to use my creativity and collaborate with experts in various fields,” Miller said.
But one day, Miller's manager told him about a new project.
“They want to use artificial intelligence to reduce costs.”
A month later, the company introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager enters the title of the article into an online form, the AI model generates an outline based on the title, and Miller receives a notification on his computer.
The article that the team originally needed to conceive on their own is now written around the outline generated by AI, and Miller only needs to make final revisions before the article is published.
However, Miller had only been adapting for a few months when he received the news of "advanced automation".
ChatGPT will now be solely responsible for writing these articles, and most of his team has been laid off. The few who remain have a less creative task: editing ChatGPT's substandard texts to make them read more like they were written by a human.
By 2024, the company had laid off the rest of Miller’s team, leaving him alone.
“Suddenly, I was doing everyone’s job,” Miller said. “Every day, I was opening files written by the AI, fixing the robot’s ‘formulaic’ mistakes, and doing what used to take dozens of people.”
“It was mostly about removing redundancies, making the text less awkward, and removing weird formal or overly enthusiastic language. I had to do more editing than the average copywriter, but it was always the same kind of editing. The real problem was that it was so repetitive and boring—gradually, I started to feel like a robot.”
Miller’s experience reflects a broader shift.
Across a wide range of industries, AI is taking on jobs that were once exclusively performed by humans. AI often costs less than humans, but early adopters quickly discovered that AI doesn’t always perform to the same level.
Now, workers like Miller are being asked to work with the AI that’s taking their jobs, to give the algorithms a little humanity so that AI can seem more human.
If AI becomes significantly more efficient, this will be a temporary solution. If not, Miller's story could become a preview for other industries.
Will artificial intelligence take your job? It’s hard to say. We’re at an uneasy crossroads, with some experts warning that superintelligent robots will soon take over most jobs, while others believe the technology may never even get there.
More views believe that we are moving towards a future where artificial intelligence and humans collaborate rather than compete.
But on a smaller scale, some workers are already facing distressing consequences. If there’s one thing that large-scale language models powered by generative AI can do, it’s stringing words and paragraphs together, and that’s putting some writers on the front lines of the crisis.
Fear of losing jobs to AI-driven writing tools was also one of the main reasons for last year's screenwriters' strike in the United States.
Other creative industries face similar concerns about the future with the arrival of artificial intelligence tools that can generate images, audio and video from scratch.
Copywriters, who write marketing materials and other content for businesses, are already feeling the effects.
In some corners of the copywriting industry, artificial intelligence may be a boon — it can be a helpful tool that speeds up work and improves creativity. But other copywriters, especially those early in their careers, say it’s making it harder for them to find work.
But some have also noticed that a new type of low-paying job is emerging: correcting AI robots’ botched writing.
02. AI’s dual empowerment
Catrina Cowart is a copywriter in Lexington, Kentucky, who has worked as an AI text editor.
“We’re adding the ‘human touch,’ but that often requires deep developmental editing of a piece,” Cowart said. “There’s always the need to remove fancy words like ‘therefore’ and ‘however,’ which don’t lend themselves to casual writing.”
“Also, the entire content has to be fact-checked because AI will just make it up, and that takes a long time.”
“The human touch from AI often takes longer than writing an article from scratch, but is less rewarding,” Cowart added.
“On job search platforms, the top payout is usually 10 cents per word — but that’s copywriting and writing, and revising AI copy is considered editing, so you’re usually only getting 1 to 5 cents per word. It’s tedious, tedious work for next to nothing.”
There are similar examples in other industries, where low-paid humans are always quietly supporting the operation of machines, from helping automatic ordering systems to annotating images for training AI vision systems.
However, for writers, whether the arrival of artificial intelligence is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how people treat it and the extent of their career development.
Some writers say using these tools during the creative process can even enhance their work.
For example, the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), an organization that provides training and resources to freelance writers, offers a variety of AI courses to its members.
Rebecca Matter, president of AWAI, said: “The AI course is currently the most popular course at the institution. For people who make a living as copywriters, the risk is not that AI takes their job, but that they have to adapt. This may be uncomfortable, but I think it is a huge opportunity.”
Matter also said that for most writers she knows, the transition to the world of AI has been smooth. In fact, AI has become an inherent part of the copywriting process, and many writers now add a personal "AI policy" to their professional websites to explain how they use the technology.
Rebecca Dugas, a copywriter with nine years of experience, said AI is a "godsend" that allows her to produce the same high-quality work in a fraction of the time.
“I use AI whenever the client is willing to help. Whether it’s brainstorming, market research, or rewriting a paragraph when I have a splitting headache, AI is my invaluable co-creative partner.”
As AI improves, Dugas expects some businesses will turn to ChatGPT and other tools for their writing needs rather than hiring humans.
But Dugas added: “But I think we should realize that if users don’t understand copywriting, they certainly can’t judge the effects of artificial intelligence.”
“There will always be high-paying jobs for talented, qualified copywriters, but copywriters at the lower end of their careers may not be so lucky. Today, many in this position find themselves in a series of contradictions.”
03. Collaborative development
A large number of copywriting jobs come from webmasters who want to increase traffic to their sites through Google. However, Google made a series of major announcements last year to remove "unhelpful" content from search results. This has led to concerns that the tech giant may penalize websites that host AI-generated content.
But Google insists that there is nothing wrong with AI-written content if it’s high quality, but those assurances haven’t dispelled concerns.
As a result, it has become common practice in some areas of copywriting to run text through AI detection software. In the past year, a large number of writers even said that they lost their jobs due to false positives from AI detection.
According to Cowart, many freelance writing platforms that have installed AI detection software are also hiring people to edit the content produced by the chatbots.
This means that, in some corner of copywriting, almost all of the work revolves around avoiding the appearance of AI.
“They’re selling AI content and paying you to correct it, and at the same time they’re sending you emails telling you how to write like a human so you don’t set off their AI detectors,” Cowart said. “It’s so insulting.”
“To make matters worse, these detectors are regularly updated to keep up with the latest changes from AI chatbot companies, which means the rules for what might be flagged as AI are constantly changing.”
Miller’s work on “AI corrections” ended abruptly when a massive earthquake struck New York City on April 5, 2024, and he was fired that same day.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Miller found a new, ironic job.
He found a job at a technology company called Undetectable AI, which makes software that makes AI writing harder to recognize. In other words, Miller is helping a company that uses AI do the same job he was forced to do after it took his job away from him.
Bars Juhasz, chief technology officer at Undetectable AI, said tools like the ones his company makes will definitely have some negative impact on the labor market, but he is optimistic about the future of work.
Juhasz added: “I think we’re going to see a lot of jobs being replaced and freelancers are going to be hit the hardest. I feel for them.”
“Still, these people who are paid to humanize AI are the perfect opportunists. It’s not a great job, sure, but they’ve effectively found a new niche at a moment when we’re redefining productivity. People who can learn to work with technology will thrive.”
