The machines are coming for my job. Oh, how naive I was when wrote this post. While I did accept that AI would someday rival our best writers, I did not expect to see its widespread use this soon.
You’ll find AI text in emails, press releases, even in actual magazines. How do I know? Because they sound like that annoying friend who’d just found crypto. Just like how they’d shoehorn the subject into every conversation—crypto is future-proof, crypto can heal your mother’s cancer, you can turn that sacrificial altar into an NFT—so too would AI use words that don’t belong in a sentence.
No, the term ‘meticulous detail to craftsmanship’ is not grammatically wrong. It just doesn’t fit the vibe of a Myanmarese night market vendor. I swear, if I have to read ‘a testament to its dedication to excellence’ to describe an underwear collection one more time…
Still, I seem to be the only person rallying against this new development. The other media houses don’t seem to care. The people with the money don’t seem to care. So what change can I effect other than to ask the younger journalists to get off my lawn? Is this the mountain I want to die on?
I think the moment everything stopped making sense was when an industry veteran succumbed to fully-generated articles. The proof is online. Anyone who knows this person can compare their work pre- and post-ChatGPT to see what I mean. And here I am, cranking out articles five times slower just for the sake of a cleaner conscience.
I remember a time when all I had was pen and paper. I still keep all the legal pads upon which were scrawled the fan-fiction and poetry from 12-year-old me. Never in a million years (it only took 30) did I expect machines to be able to describe my teenage heartbreak in words. And yet, here we are, one ChatGPT prompt away from a poem for your high school crush.
It was during a rant to a friend—where I bemoaned the single ‘l’ in ‘distil’ but double ‘ll’ for every other word in UK English—that I realised how blasé we’ve grown over the written word.
“I bet it sucks knowing that nobody else cares about this as much as you do,” he said. And he was right.
Maybe that’s why my passion for writing floundered. With more and more companies joining the AI movement (Google and Apple can help you draft entire articles now), writing has turned into a product and not a skill.
But therein lies my final bastion against the machine. What if I were to return to my 12-year-old self and write for an audience of one? What if, instead of writing for adoration or likes, I write for my own satisfaction instead? What if this is my way out from the machines’ inevitable domination of the written word?
Then maybe I have found my mountain to die on.
Stuart Danker 
I’d love to hear your thoughts!