What You Gain (And Lose) With AI

I felt naughty when I first used ChatGPT to write news clips for Benzinga. Until then, the work I put into writing those clips was entirely human. I read the article, synthesized the information, and summarized it in my own words, a task I performed with my puny human brain.

I copied and pasted the article’s contents into ChatGPT and asked it to write a brief news summary of it, and it accomplished in seconds what used to take me twenty minutes.

With my client’s blessing, I automized the writing process. They wanted to scale up, and I wanted to remain competitive as a freelancer. AI won’t replace you; someone who uses AI will. I was going to be the person who uses AI.

When I started writing the news clips using ChatGPT, my scale skyrocketed. I went from writing seven clips per day to writing 20 clips per day within a matter of months. This freed me up to infuse more creativity into the work.

However, I lost something valuable. The bot was deciding what information in the article was relevant. I easily gave over my thinking to technology. I gave a machine over my most critical - and human - skill.

Writing is work, and ChatGPT has taken the work out of writing. Something that once took effort is now effortless because a machine can do it.

The creative life is a daunting calling. It demands sacrifices on your time and resources without guaranteeing that your efforts will succeed. Sometimes, the ideas don’t come at all, and you can go weeks, months, and years without producing anything. You face your fears, doubts, and existential dread, but nothing comes out.

ChatGPT relieves some of that burden, but what are you putting effort back into? If it is helping you write, then how are you going to use that assistance to become a better writer? What are you doing to elevate your writing?

I don’t know what I will do with myself if I ever become a full-time fiction writer because I have only balanced fiction writing with “real” jobs. Either I get up early and write for two hours before my “real” job, or I come home and eke out an hour or two before I completely poop out. The “real” job is to support myself while I do the job I truly love, which is fiction writing. I wrote this post during my lunch break at the deli where I work part-time. I have been doing this for the better part of twenty-seven years. It never gets easier.

For the first few years out of college, I made the mistake of waiting for The Perfect Time to write, and then The Perfect Time came, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. The Perfect Time was so sporadic and unpredictable that I was unprepared for it. I learned that I had to make time to write. Years later, it is still a struggle.

ChatGPT isn’t going to eradicate that struggle or motivate you to sit down at the desk. However, it is going to free you to create something better with the energy that you do have. 

Being an artist is hard fucking work. It demands massive risk and sacrifice with a low chance of reward. But the alternative is worse. If you’re an artist of any kind, creative work should feel like oxygen to you. If you don’t do it, then you suffocate. It may sound dramatic, but the feeling of not creating is worse.