Now that we all use ChatGPT, do you still need to hire a content writer?

With the explosion in the use of GenAI tools like ChatGPT, it seems we don’t need content writers and copywriters anymore. Or do we?

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It's easy to ask ChatGPT to help write something for us. On the surface, what it creates looks pretty decent. It seems better than what we could come up with ourselves. That's good enough, right?

The problem with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is that they tend to produce rather generic written content. Say you're a business asking ChatGPT to help write copy for your business website. Chances are that many of your competitors are doing the exact same thing. And everyone ends up with the same vanilla, repetitive website content.

It's gotten to a point where nearly every social media post, every article, every website reads like it's been written by GenAI, not a human being. It's getting easier to spot nowadays, and it certainly makes me cringe when I read it.

From a business standpoint, leaning heavily on GenAI to generate sloppy content means you'll end up sounding like just every other business out there that's also overusing GenAI. That's not ideal if you want to stand out from your competitors.

Also, consider the message you may be sending to customers. By copying and pasting GenAI content without refining it first, you're potentially signalling:

• I don't value the customer experience.

• I'm time-poor.

• I'm impersonal.

• I lack communication skills.

True story: I was shopping on Etsy recently and came across a product description that ended with: "Would you like me to come up with a shorter, 140-word description suitable for Etsy with even more SEO-friendly keywords?"

Suffice to say, I ended my shopping experience with that store right then and there.

As more and more people rely on GenAI to write content for them, we're losing the skill to write effectively. In fact, we're losing the skill to write at all. A 2022 ABC News article reported that Australian students' writing ability has declined over the past seven years. The research found that "85 per cent of Year 9 students are constructing sentences at or below the level expected of students two years below them… the majority were also using punctuation to a Year 3 standard."

That topic alone is a whole other blog post for another day.

Coming back to the original question. Do we still need content writers and copywriters in this day and age?

Yes, we do.

These people can write originally, persuasively and creatively in ways that GenAI simply cannot. In an online landscape saturated with GenAI content, reading content written by a real person feels like a breath of fresh air. There's a raw, unfiltered quality about it that just speaks to the reader. While GenAI might help you create written content that's perhaps more accurate in terms of spelling and punctuation, you lose something critical: the human touch.

And this is something that people are craving now, more than ever.

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Stella Logan is a freelance Australian content writer who's doing her best not to let writing fall into the hands of Cyberdyne's Skynet.