I won’t lie. I felt my confidence shake and a growing identity crisis burning in my heart as I read various articles about ChatGPT back in December. From speculation to observations, some of the messages that rocked me were how writing appears to become obsolete. Let me reframe: writing was being made more “efficient” with the likes of ChatGPT and having writers was a lot less important because there was a machine to do the work.
I didn’t like how that made me feel. It made me feel expendable and easily replaced. While I don’t write as my sole income and for much of my life it has been an outlet, I felt like something was being taken from me. What chance did I have if there was a machine to regurgitate text at a more efficient rate than an ordinary human like myself? Stories like this one from Forbes or an earlier article from February 2023 where Clarksworld had to shut down submissions after an influx of AI-generated submissions don’t bode well either. As a result, I’m forcing myself to rethink my relationship with writing. Again.
I have written in the past about how writing has been an important part of my life:
