Feeding the Machine

Mid-Level copywriting is running on fumes right now. By mid-level, I mean most website copy, most advertising features, most brochures and almost everything else mass-mailed, emailed or otherwise slipped into your life's letter box with the ease of a warm dog turd in a polythene sack.

It's at death's door because it has very little to distinguish it from the automatic jottings of large language model AIs like ChatGPT. AIs that scrape their dog shit copy from the information sidewalks and pavements of the web. It reads the same as AI with fewer lies and less unconscious plagiarism but it's the same sunshine gaslight and mellifluous hackery that approximately all the world's commercial websites use to bludgeon Google into loving them.

The SEO obsession with feeding machine algorithms has come full-circle. Now the world has turned on to AI-generated copy it will be algorithms writing for algorithms all the way. I'm happy to let them duke it out for the foreseeable future.

And that's as it should be. I feel as if I'm creatively wasting away at the moment. I always felt that about SEO writing; pouring content into search engines is nothing like an art or an act of creation. The copy does not feel like it has built a world, synthesised a truth or insinuated itself into your senses like a comfortable chair can. No matter how finely crafted the creation is, it is only a hand-crafted veneer that is almost identical to the thin layer of borrowed credibility that the AI bot can write. The bot has its particular giveaway tells, but so do many copywriters.

It's a cliche, but this isn't the future we were promised in more hopeful times. Of course machines make our lives simpler - ChatGPT included - but those lives were also meant to be filled with leisure. What has transpired instead is the devaluation of labour and the appropriation of our creative effort to make good on the technology companies' otherwise inflated stock price.

What is more, our spiritual and social welfare has been diminished. It's an insult to human intelligence that we're all trying to fit our outputs to machine inputs - shouldn't it be the other way around?

It started with the idea that writing was such a vocation that nobody needed to pay writers too much because we were ten a penny and keen to see our names in print. Even vanity publishing, as it used to be known, had the aura of honesty about it. You paid to play, but the contractual terms were usually plain to see.

'Content is King' then trod that attitude in with an exponential growth of low-grade opportunity for mid-level hacks like me. Now you paid with your effort, so that tech monoliths could monetise all that stuff. It soon came to be that all writing was devalued, its worth diluted in the torrent of 'content' (anybody who has a modicum of respect for meaningful communication should hate that word).

Fast forward a few thousand TL:DRs and humans have become sub-systems of technology, pouring 'content' into machines so that algorithms can mash it up and spit out perfectly reasonable, soulless Xerox copies. Nothing matters much anymore because nobody stops to consider anything for more than 15 seconds. As usual it's the people who own the capital machinery - in this case, the tech bros - that use and profit most from the content they don't have the skill or imagination to create for themselves.

I used to be worried about all this, but now I'm not. The reason is that I'm delighted instead. Delighted that I won't have to write commercial copy about a hotel I have never visited, a food I have not tasted, an experience I've never had. Ecstatic, in fact, that in the re-personalisation of myself I have discovered how to write better from a standpoint than a shop front.

That's where I'm at. ChatGPT has done me a huge favour and shown me how much of my precious time I have been wasting. No longer. Being creative just for the sake of it seems like the last stand of humanity.