
ALT I literally lost my biggest and best client to ChatGPT today. This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. For reference this is a client I picked up in the last year. I took about 3 years off from writing when I had a baby. He was extremely eager to hire me and very happy with my work. I started with him at my normal rate of $50/hour which he has voluntarily increased to $80/hour after I’ve been consistently providing good work for him.

ALT Again, I keep seeing people (myself included) saying things like, “it’s not a threat if you’re a GOOD writer.” I get it. Am I the most renowned writer in the world? No. But I have been working as a writer for over a decade, have worked with top brands as a freelancer, have more than a dozen published articles on well known websites. I am a career freelance writer with plenty of good work under my belt. Yes, I am better than ChatGPT. But, and I will say this again and again, businesses/clients, beyond very high end brands, DO NOT CARE. They have to put profits first. Small businesses especially, but even corporations are always cutting corners. Please do not think you are immune to this unless you are the top 1% of writers. I just signed up for Doordash as a driver. I really wish I was kidding.

ALT Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.


























