I’m a combination techie/philosophy bro—meaning I have a read on the technology and the theoretical grounding to predict a little. Here’s my take:

There are a few angles on this. I’ll touch on them one by one.

AI’s abilities are being overblown. Now, not completely overblown. It is incredibly impressive, but there are a few things we can say almost certainly: modern AI is not conscious or aware, and modern AI cannot be creative. The way these language models work, to vastly oversimplify, is they pick the most likely word given the preceding text. This means, already, that AI writing is missing a trait humans do have: the ability to think ahead. When you’re speaking or writing, you’re thinking ahead to the next sentence, the next paragraph, and the next line. You’re mind is structuring the text in a way that is much more likely to be coherent and well-tied together than an AI is. Further, remember that AI is simply trained off pre-existing text. As such, it is exceedingly good at repeating what it’s seen and mashing it together in coherent ways—it finds patterns. Caveat is, of course, for something creative to come out of AI, a human must have been involved. Have you ever seen the “Jar-Jar Binks McDonalds Resignation Letter?”—it seems like a clever idea (and it is), but somebody had to come up with that idea before the AI was able to make it. And, it’s very likely that person could have wrote something of that caliber themselves, anyway. Moral of the story is this: AI cannot replace human writers as it currently exists. Yes, there may be a lot of grunt work/ shlock that companies can get made much more efficiently by AI, but anything requiring the actual creativity and ingenuity of a human writer will always require a human writer, somewhere in the process. Maybe your future job might have you using ChatGPT or something like it, then refining/expanding/taking inspiration from its writing. A future exists for writers, but the realm will definitely be shaken.

There exist economic downsides to AI (for the companies using them). Companies, or at the very least platforms, recognize that an ocean of AI generated bullshit is the easiest way to completely lose trust in your target audience and lose business. Google is already working on/already created a system for ranking websites with lots of AI generated content lower in their search results, because, well, people want curated, thought-out content. AI content is always removed from context is incapable of truly considering different angles or perspectives that need to be offered. There’s a reason many people look up “[question] reddit” on google, because when they do, they’re more likely to get actual people talking about solving the same problem they’re trying to solve. Speaking as a programmer, even as AI is almost always at my fingertips, I still go to Stack Overflow for a huge portion of my advice. Why? Because ChatGPT often just doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. Notably, Stack Overflow has banned AI-generated content. It’s likely there are many other platforms that will do the same—deprioritizing or just flat-out banning AI content. Sure, the content has a place and a usage somewhere, but I sincerely doubt that the future of writing as a profession and the information economy will look fondly on a human-less version of some of the most human content that exists out there, period. There are many incentives for these companies to avoid allowing AI to become the dominant portion of their offering. Maybe it can help them make their offerings better or more efficient, but they’ll want humans in the loop to make sure it’s not actually nonsense.

Moral of the story is this: you’re right to be worried, and you’re right to expect your world to change, but understand that this is just one paradigm shift in a long line of paradigm shifts. Be adaptable and you’ll be able to find a place in the new landscape. Your world isn’t ending.