Who is AI Coming for Next?

By Jim Cassidy

"First they came for the typesetters, and I did not speak out – because I was not a typesetter. Then they came for the multi-image slide show producers, and I did not speak out – because I was not a multi-image slide show producer."

You can guess how that adaptation of Martin Niemoller's post-Nazi confessional ends – with the narrator alone in the crosshairs with no one left to defend them.

As a writer, I confess I never regarded technology as a threat. Quite the contrary: my first Macintosh SE made writing and editing much easier and the Internet has been the greatest research resource ever devised.

But now I'm finally starting to feel what the typesetters and multi-image slide show producers felt decades ago as desktop publishing and video workstations made their jobs obsolete. While working recently on a presentation on the future of Artificial Intelligence (yes, someone still paid a human to write it!), I learned that the GPT-3 AI autoregressive language model launched in 2020 by OpenAI is able to "write" articles virtually indistinguishable from human-written articles.

Uh-oh.

The past two years have seen a quantum leap in the capabilities of natural language AI processing. GPT-3's precursor, BERT, had about one-third of a billion parameters – an impressive number but nowhere near the 100 trillion synapses in the human brain that power human writing. Well, GPT-3 blew BERT away exponentially with 175 billion parameters, which is apparently enough to write an article that could fool a human.

With progress that dramatic, it's not unreasonable to think that AI will soon be pumping out readable content with gleeful abandon – working 24x7 and never suffering from writer's block. Most readers will likely never know the difference.

Ever the optimist, I'm going to hope the rise of AI copywriting means that clients will soon assign generic copywriting work to AI while turning their more critical copy needs over to the 100 trillion synapses of a creative and inspired human.

For the moment, I'm convinced that the most critical attributes of a good writer – understanding client needs, honing messages, and bringing them to life with freshness and clarity – will remain the exclusive domain of flesh-and-blood keyboard jockeys. That better be the case, because I doubt there's anyone left to speak out for us.