As a full-time writer, I know I should fear AI. Instead, I’m embracing it

As a professional writer, I’m supposed to fear, loathe or at least be suspicious of artificial intelligence.

The questions I often get asked about bots such as ChatGPT are how worried I am generally, and as a follow-up, am I worried they’ll take my job.

Over the years, technology has constantly threatened life as we know it. Credit: iStock

I get why. Those of us who do both editorial and commercial writing are seeing work dry up at a worrying pace as copywriting gets outsourced to AI bots who do it quicker and cheaper.

What I rarely get asked, though, is if I am excited about this technology. Somewhat guiltily, I am.

I’m not ignorant of the legitimate concerns that come with AI: potential massive retrenchments, reduction in quality of writing, and the age-old terror that the era when robots overtake humans is finally upon us.

At university, I chose not to study journalism because it was a rapidly dying profession, industry insiders told me at the time. But 20 years later, I’m a full-time working freelance journalist and this year I have more work on than ever. Around the same time, some old-school newsroom staff superciliously scoffed at social media being used as a platform on which to tell stories.

And when Gutenberg invented the printing press 600 years earlier, scribes’ guilds destroyed the machines, and chased book merchants out of town.

It’s widely been reported that attitudes towards AI fall largely into two camps: “Doomers” who fear it, and “accelerationists” who embrace it. But I sit in a third camp: the realists. Now that “the pause” in AI use is well and truly over, it’s clear that this technology is not going anywhere. So we might as well focus on its potential to help us.

And in an era of seemingly unrelenting bad news, I’m choosing to see the positives. There are more than I first thought. AI recently helped me reduce an unyieldingly long word count, killing my darlings in minutes (chopping my verbosity once took hours).

From AI transcription services to Netflix, the way we create and tell stories has been disrupted by tech. With every disruption comes pain, especially to the status quo and the old guard. But it has also shown writers what we’re capable of when we unite and organise: one of the longest labour strikes in Hollywood’s history came to an end in 2023 only after the Writers Guild of America negotiated strong guardrails around the use of AI in film and television, protecting writers’ work and ensuring it isn’t undermined or replaced.

There’s also a broader reason I’m excited by ChatGPT. Lately, I’ve been using it for “therapy lite” purposes, after it helped me process a traumatic dream.

I’ll spare you the details of it, but the dream was too one-off to require further therapy sessions, too dull to bore my friends with (“It was a dream! It didn’t happen!”), too intimate for a social media post, but too distressing for me to ignore entirely.

Enter ChatGPT, which instantly made me feel better by providing an answer and a sounding board to my feelings. Pleasantly surprised, I was able to re-focus and get back on with my day quicker. For this kind of basic mental health support, AI is a game-changer. In Britain, for example, AI-powered psychology is now a part of their National Health Service, with one app offering access to appointments or support between appointments to over 250,000 people.

Since the dream, I’ve regularly used it for everyday problems that are too fleeting or trivial to require professional support. It has helped me through procrastination; it has alleviated qualms; and once it even prevented me from shouting at a friend for being late, calming me down through a breathing technique, making me realise that my anger was disproportional, temporary and – most importantly – surmountable.

The main reason I’m not (yet) worried artificial intelligence will take my job is the same reason good therapists aren’t worried it will take theirs. Just as it can’t replace the emotional connection of counsellors to their clients, chatbots cannot replace the very human emotional connection between a writer and a reader.

Recently, I did another word count reduction on an article using ChatGPT. Its suggested cuts removed flow, flair and essential nuance from the piece. Realising what would be lost, I went back in and did the cuts myself.

For now, humans are, reassuringly, still needed. The ones who use ChatGPT well may be the ones who see work increase, rather than dry up.

Gary Nunn is a freelance journalist and an author.