Let’s Make Writing Sh*t Again: Why AI might be bad for your business

Don't let ChatGPT knock your confidence in your own voice. YOU will always be what your audience wants (but AI can definitely help with the grunt work)

AI may be humankind’s last great invention. For some, this possibility evokes great excitement about an AI-assisted, or even governed, future. For others it ignites existential dread. As with any development that will change the world and our place in it for good, emotions run high in each camp. Will AI replace humans? enslave us? be the spiritual teacher we need to heal the world? enable us to live lives of leisure, unencumbered by the drudgery of day to day living?

Whether we are headed towards spiritual evolvement or an Orwellian end, noone knows. Humans don’t have a great track record for using their tools for the greater good, but one hopes that we will have invented an independently intelligent AI (AGI) before we accomplish the epic Darwinian fail and oust ourselves for good.

Personally, I am watching with fascination as we hurtle into the unknown without a clue as to what we are doing. There is, however, an insidious trend that is troubling me as I watch more and more content creators publishing unedited, or barely edited, AI-generated writing that is meant to mimic human speech.

Me, slogging it out for 5+ hours on this article

ChatGPT  - Superhero to Small Businesses

 the world of AI is a giant surveillance system not too far away from the telescreens and the Thought Police of Orwell’s 1984

If you are a small or micro business owner as I am, the chances are that writing copy and dutifully typing out all the details of your next event will not set your world on fire. I am also guessing that you started your business because you love what you do and you are passionate about sharing it. Right?

No one starts a business so that they can sit at a desk working through mundane tasks that suck your time and your creative energy. Cue ChatGPT, your friendly assistant! We are delighted!!! Suddenly we have a marketing manager, brand manager, business strategist, copy writer and, perhaps most needed of all, a friendly colleague with whom to bounce ideas around.

ChatGPT is the ideal coworker – affable, intelligent, humble and wise beyond our wildest dreams (and don’t we like having a servant?!). And it’s completely FREE… or is it? The fact that the world of AI is a giant surveillance system not too far away from the telescreens and the Thought Police of Orwell’s 1984 is one to consider here. Actually, we're having so much fun, let’s not ruin the party by thinking that one through (emojis). Next topic.

Irreplaceable You - Your Audience Loves You, Not Robots

 What our recent infatuation with AI brings to the digital circus is the debut of an artificial you – one who will hold people’s attention while you get on with your life 

When it comes to back-end of business, ChatGPT and its contemporaries are tools unrivalled in their capacity to alleviate workload, freeing up small business owners to focus on their passion. There is a BUT coming. Here it is – BUT, in today’s world of story-based marketing, content-driven engagement and consumers who increasingly inhabit the online world and who are hungry to be entertained there, your brand as a micro-business is you. Only you. No one else will do.  

This is the price we pay for “free” platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. We get to raise brand awareness for the small fee of ourselves. The more of yourself you share, the more engagement you get. The product is you. Nothing new there. What our recent infatuation with AI brings to the digital circus is the debut of an artificial you – one who will hold our attention while you get on with your life. Only there’s a hitch.

Using ChatGPT to write your social media posts doesn’t work, and I will tell you why it will never write your content better than you

Welcome to Uncanny Valley - the uneasy world of the digital doppelganger

When you create “relatable”, story-based, chummy content written by a robot and then publish it unedited, you are wasting your time and likely driving potential clients away.

ChatGPT is a tool. Like all devices, it is neither good nor bad. Using it is neither right nor wrong. It has no inherent value or meaning other than those which we attribute to it. However, when you create “relatable”, story-based, chummy content written by a robot and then publish it unedited, you are wasting your time and likely driving potential clients away. Why? Because your audience can tell it’s a synthetic lookalike. There are no shortcuts to authentic connection.

ChatGPT can provide the initial ideas and the structure. You can train it to know how to best produce your voice and tone. It can create your first draft if you really need it to (but careful, as that probably wasn’t what you really wanted to say). You can tweak it endlessly but it still has to sound like a human, otherwise humans won’t buy it or worse, they will be repelled by it because it lacks presence.

The human animal is fine-tuned to the human experience, so much so that we can detect a fraction of movement in another human face and accurately infer meaning from the change. We are alert to each-others’ body language to such a high degree that we can instantly read when someone else is “off”. Very quickly, with its ubiquity, we are becoming attuned to botspeak and soon we will all be able to tell instantly whether content is robot-generated or genuine.

Humans do not take kindly to impostors. Think of all the times you have been called by a sales robot who has eaten up irreplaceable seconds of your time by getting you to drop what you were doing and answer the phone. You have been duped and not even by another human – the time and effort invested is not even commensurate to your interlocutor’s as they do not, technically, exist.

The big steal - don't expect me to show up if you don't

 Language literally shapes our world and, the less we have of it, the fewer thoughts there are available to us.

When I realise that I am reading content that has been bot-created and is posing as that of the person posting it, I have a physical reaction similar to the one I might have if my pocket had been picked. My stomach lurches and I recoil. Someone is taking something from me (my time and energy) for which there has not been a fair exchange. If you can’t be bothered to write your own newsletter my friend, I cannot be bothered to read it. Or your blog, or your post. When you arrest my attention with your catchy hook, you had better show up, otherwise you have stood me up and I will feel foolish and angry as I stand there alone in the empty space where your soul should be.

If you need to write with AI – you’re a mum of young kids, neurodivergent, unwell, on meds, menopausal, having a rough week - it doesn’t take long as the content creator to learn when writing sounds like botspeak and to sprinkle a little humanness on top. Give it some flaws, some foibles, some no-filter moments.

Think of this as a compliment not a burden – I, your customer, want to know who you are and what you think. I also care that you remain sovereign of your own mind. That we all do. AI will hijack your thought process and in our AI honeymoon sweetie-pie delirium we let it, because it’s easier, happily forgetting that in this process we are denuding ourselves of the faculty of reason. Language literally shapes our world and, the less we have of it, the fewer thoughts there are available to us.

Reclaiming your sovereignty - let's secure the borders

Perhaps a comfortable, impotent human race is what slavery will look like in an AI-dominated world 

If you’ve been using AI for your writing for a while, try writing something unassisted. It will be harder than pre-ChatGPT days, because your thinking muscle has atrophied. More eerily, it may even sound robotic because your unique syntactical style is slowly being replaced by generic computer-generated language. It will only get harder to reclaim your voice as your grey matter adapts to the new requirements of it. I only know this because I have done it. Read one of my recent blog posts written during my initial ChatGPT intoxication and you’ll see what I mean.

Big Brother is not exactly what I fear for our not-too-distant future; what spooks me is the vision of a world where humans are de-skilled to the degree where we are no longer the authors of our lives. Perhaps a comfortable, impotent human race is what slavery will look like in an AI-dominated world         .

AI is a splendid, wonderful, genius creation. Its sophistication signals an unequalled triumph in the evolution of ideas and technology and is testament to humankind’s mind-boggling intellect and creative impulse. It could be the most exciting adventure in history. Just don’t let it colonise your mind. It’s worth going through the difficulty of articulating an original thought, just to find out what it is you even think.

What ChatGPT thought of this article

Note to reader: It took me five hours to write this. I asked ChatGPT what it thought of my writing and, annoyingly, it had some good suggestions about how I could improve it. I did the edits and ChatGPT approved, then, unprompted, gave me its own smug, peppy version. I admit that I read a bit of it and had to stop because it was knocking my confidence in my own writing. I still haven't read past the first paragraph.

If you want to read the AI version of this article, click HERE and see if Uncanny Valley is the place for you.

About the author

Morven Hamilton is a yoga trainer and mentor based in the South West of England. She lives by the beach with her partner, daughter and dog and she harbours aspirations to write.