It’s a phrase in our collective consciousness; we’ve had blockbuster films depicting the end and Disney cartoons (Wall-E) showing the redundancy of humankind by its own hand, but the leaps and bounds Artificial Intelligence has made makes the end of our livelihoods seem scarily tangible. With the inception of open-source AI like ChatGPT entering into the public sphere, does this spell the end for traditional ways of working?

As copywriters, we tend to pride ourselves on our ability to deliver copy that is robust in its use of language and form, but artificial intelligence has since entered the chat. With its ability to produce huge swathes of written content in mere seconds, with perfect English, grammar and punctuation to boot, it’s understandable that it could be worrisome. Particularly in the fast paced marketing industry, where marketers have to contend with new information becoming old at the drop of a hat, is AI the answer to keep up with changing consumer trends and motivations? An overhaul of traditional working seems unlikely, not just because of the teething issues that AI faces, but more so because of the lack of the all-too-important, often-overlooked human element.

Rather than competing with AI, perhaps the key is assimilation. The University of Oxford predicted that 35% of UK jobs were at risk of automation in the next 20 years. If AI was created to make our lives easier, then it stands to reason that we should use it as the tool it was intended to be. As fast as our fingers can type, AI surpasses this with ease, so a combination of the human touch and the speed of AI, in theory, should generate rapid content at a high quality.

Since ChatGPT has become more widespread, content roles have increasingly called for the ability to use AI as a working tool to enhance content delivered. This could indicate a readiness to recognise the value of AI and human working in tandem, and an understanding that currently, AI is only as good as the input, and still requires the skill of knowledgeable humans to vet content output. Though recent research indicates that almost half of us cannot tell the difference between content produced by AI, a human or AI edited by a human, left unchecked it would soon become apparent to the consumer. Ever heard of a clever marketing campaign thought up by AI? Or a novel capturing the essence of unrequited love being written by ChatGPT? No, because ultimately humans get humans, and that seems to be the takeaway. Jobs aren’t being outsourced to AI, instead, they are being integrated into our working, in the same way we use Grammarly or the spell check tool on Microsoft Word. We aren’t expected to be perfect because perfection is disingenuous, and the consumer can see right through that.

It is likely then, that the fourth industrial revolution is not so much of an overthrow than an assimilation, as with the other industrial revolutions, in the end, humans will probably just make the machines submit to our will.

BIRAJ SHAH

JUNIOR COPYWRITER