This time of year, college students everywhere are playing the in-person role-playing game Humans vs. Zombies. It’s all in good fun, of course. But online, another competition, more foreboding to the future of content creation and the future of writers is taking place.
Call it Humans vs. AI. Like some mutant undead unleashed on civilization, artificial intelligence is threatening to cannibalize online content.
As reported recently by Daily Tech Insider, AI now “writes” roughly half of new English-language articles on the internet.
We have ChatGPT to thank for that. Before its public release, AI-generated content amounted to only 5% of the English-language articles online.
At that pace, it won’t be long before the majority of online content is AI-generated.
The silver lining in all this? AI isn’t fully in command. It seems we humans still have an edge when it comes to creating top-tier content.
According to the study cited by Daily Tech Insider, by SEO firm Graphite, “86% of Google’s top results are still human-penned, and chatbots cite humans 82% of the time, suggesting algorithmic volume isn’t beating genuine voice just yet.”
So, the zombie-beast that is AI still relies on mere humans to feed it.
The Daily Tech Insider report concludes:
Researchers say publishers are learning that cranking out machine prose doesn’t guarantee search visibility. However, there are caveats: paywalled (read: mostly human-written) sites are blocking crawlers, likely skewing the counts.Meanwhile, a Pew study finds Americans leading in global AI anxiety, with nearly half more worried than excited about the tech.In short, we’ve reached a fragile equilibrium where humans keep the podium, and bots pad the bleachers.Why it matters: Your morning reading list might be a coin flip between flesh and silicon, at least by the study’s definition, which flags anything over 50% machine-written. The best-ranked material still favors human nuance, or at least human-edited final drafts. That’s good news for writers and anyone who prefers their prose sans prompt engineering.
This does not bode well for freelance writers (like me) or those working for corporations, colleges and universities, and other organizations that see efficiencies to be made by replacing human scribes with prompt engineers.
Already, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is laying off some 600 staff from its AI unit. Most of these jobs are on the technical side, but no doubt the axe will soon fall for writers, graphic designers, video creators, and other creatives.
In the past, there would have been more concessions made to culture, to continuity, to that sort of thing. That’s just not where we are. Big Tech is all about cutting to the very minimum viable staff for a variety of reasons.
– JP Gownder, Forrester vice president and principal analyst, on Meta’s AI unit layoffs
For those of us focused on creative writing–the novelists, poets, and writers of short stories and creative nonfiction–maybe the best we can do is to continue to create great stories and poems and get them published online. It’s our resistance against the AI machine. Let’s hope resistance, this time, is not futile.
Image via Daily Tech Insider (and created, yes, by AI).
Andy writes! 
I listened to a podcast from This American Life called “My Other Self.” In it, a tech journalist decides to create a speech bot that can do interviews and hold conversations while he (the real guy) is off doing other things. He didn’t intend to fool people, but that is what happened–at least for a while. After a few minutes, the bot would glitch and the person on the other end of the phone conversation (telemarketer, friend, family member) would get suspicious. During the experiment, the journalist felt bad about “fooling” people. He could hear the anxiety in their voices as they tried to figure out if the voice was from a human or a bot. Written communication lacks that nuance, to be able to hear someone’s distress. I think written AI will zoom past 50% in short measure as ChatGPT and other such programs are so easy to work with, and I’m not sure the general public cares when it comes to written material that appears on social media. When it comes to other literature, I think readers still desire pacing, creativity and surprises. But I don’t know any of that for sure. As to the podcast (spoiler) it ends with the journalist’s AI voice having a conversation with his dead father’s AI voice. Right now all I can think about is Max Headroom and the 1984 people working at Porno-sec. BTW–I think you can tell that this is human-generated as it contains lousy sentence structure and fails to make a hard-hitting point.