And what to do if you consider ChatGPT your competition
Since the ChatGPT came out in November 2022, I’ve seen sh*t tons of people complaining about it.
My Medium newsfeed got flooded by posts from people claiming their creator’s career is over, and my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds didn’t stay far behind.
Honestly, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.
The first AI writing assistants appeared already in 1980, but the real breakthrough in AI content tools happened after 2010.
Since then, bloggers, marketers, and companies implemented artificial intelligence into their content marketing strategies, and no one was really freaking out about it — until ChatGPT arrived on the scene last year.
As ChatGPT is available free of charge for anyone with an internet connection, it accumulated a massive amount of users in a matter of a few weeks:
- 1 million users during the first week of December 2022
- 57 million monthly users in December 2022
- 100 million monthly users in January 2023
Besides this, around 13 million unique visitors use ChatGPT daily.
Although it’s hard to say how many people use it for conversations rather than content creation, the nervous questions of many writers remain:
How am I going to compete with AI-generated content?
Is it even worth trying to beat it?
Why would a client pay me when they can generate free content in ChatGPT in five seconds?
However, these questions bother only one group of creators.
Some writers stayed untouchable
Have you noticed that the top performers on the writing scene aren’t bothered or concerned about AI? I haven’t seen James Clear, Ryan Holiday, or any top writers on Medium or LinkedIn crying out about the rise of AI content.
It’s no surprise.
Any content creator aware of their skills, experience, usefulness, unique voice, and opinions doesn’t have to go bananas about something that
a, can’t produce quality, fact-based content without human intervention
b, can’t come with something original
c, can’t understand emotions — the crucial part of copywriting
If you’re aware of your writing qualities, you consider AI content tools your assistance, not a replacement.
This insight should already indicate who might be concerned about AI.
Those afraid are in charge
The online space gets polluted by low-quality content every second. Poorly written blog posts, articles, product descriptions, or landing pages — at times it literally hurts to read them.
And the worst thing? A lot of this content is made by people, not AI.
So the question is: Why do certain folks complain about ChatGPT stealing their creative jobs when it can periodically produce better content than them?
It was a question and the answer at the same time.
The only ones frightened of ChatGPT belong to creators who:
- Can’t come up with new ideas.
- Keep rewriting things already said a million times without adding a new perspective.
- Are afraid to use their unique voice.
- Don’t enhance their writing and editing skills.
- Never improve their niche-related knowledge.
- Chase numbers instead of value.
- Don’t understand marketing & copywriting fundamentals.
- Don’t take a time to study their audience.
- Ignore data and a writing market demand.
I didn’t make it all up.
These are the most common reasons why writers can’t find clients, build an online presence & following on writing platforms, or create content better than the one generated by AI.
And if you look closer, you’ll realize that none of the mistakes mentioned above have their cause in external factors.
All of them present something the creators can change themselves — thus, they are completely in charge of their writing journey direction.
Everyone can beat AI with some effort
I’m far from being a great writer to diss other people’s writing skills, yet somehow, I still manage to make my living as a writer.
I didn’t graduate from any subject related to writing, English is not my mother tongue, and I only write since 2019. Despite this, the clients keep paying for my content four digits every month, and the arrival of ChatGPT changed nothing about it.
Why?
Because I’m regularly improving my skills and growing my network.
And I can confidently say that during my first writing year, I was 100% replaceable by ChatGPT, Jasper, on any other AI writing tool. My content sucked way more than it does now, and looking at my first 50 posts still makes me cringe.
But that didn’t stop me from growing.
I knew if I wanted to make a living from content creation, I had to get good at it. I’m still a long way from where I want to be as a writer, but that’s the magic of this job.
It’s not the end of the world
If you didn’t take your time to learn how to produce meaningful writing, you shouldn’t be surprised ChatGPT became your direct competitor.
But it’s not the end of the world, though.
Just because your work might be replaceable today, it doesn’t mean you should give up. And it definitely doesn’t imply it has to stay this way.
You have countless options to grow, improve your skills, expand your knowledge, find your voice, learn to generate original ideas, gain experience, and become better at networking or data analysis.
Some gurus have maybe convinced you that you can make money writing online overnight, but it’s far from the truth. And the longer you keep rejecting this fact, the harder your growth to success will be.
Conclusion
Making good money writing is possible, but only if you produce valuable, noteworthy work. And to be able to do this, you have to invest a lot of time and energy into your growth — and realize that becoming a better writer is a process and journey rather than a goal or a destination.
The moment you dare to take these extra steps, you set yourself apart from the rest.
And at that point, you won’t have to panic about AI advancement in the writing world — at least not yet.