And in an era of seemingly unrelenting bad news, I’m choosing to see the positives. There are more than I first thought. AI recently helped me reduce an unyieldingly long word count, killing my darlings in minutes (chopping my verbosity once took hours).
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From AI transcription services to Netflix, the way we create and tell stories has been disrupted by tech. With every disruption comes pain, especially to the status quo and the old guard. But it has also shown writers what we’re capable of when we unite and organise: one of the longest labour strikes in Hollywood’s history came to an end in 2023 only after the Writers Guild of America negotiated strong guardrails around the use of AI in film and television, protecting writers’ work and ensuring it isn’t undermined or replaced.
There’s also a broader reason I’m excited by ChatGPT. Lately, I’ve been using it for “therapy lite” purposes, after it helped me process a traumatic dream.
I’ll spare you the details of it, but the dream was too one-off to require further therapy sessions, too dull to bore my friends with (“It was a dream! It didn’t happen!”), too intimate for a social media post, but too distressing for me to ignore entirely.
Enter ChatGPT, which instantly made me feel better by providing an answer and a sounding board to my feelings. Pleasantly surprised, I was able to re-focus and get back on with my day quicker. For this kind of basic mental health support, AI is a game-changer. In Britain, for example, AI-powered psychology is now a part of their National Health Service, with one app offering access to appointments or support between appointments to over 250,000 people.
Since the dream, I’ve regularly used it for everyday problems that are too fleeting or trivial to require professional support. It has helped me through procrastination; it has alleviated qualms; and once it even prevented me from shouting at a friend for being late, calming me down through a breathing technique, making me realise that my anger was disproportional, temporary and – most importantly – surmountable.
The main reason I’m not (yet) worried artificial intelligence will take my job is the same reason good therapists aren’t worried it will take theirs. Just as it can’t replace the emotional connection of counsellors to their clients, chatbots cannot replace the very human emotional connection between a writer and a reader.
Recently, I did another word count reduction on an article using ChatGPT. Its suggested cuts removed flow, flair and essential nuance from the piece. Realising what would be lost, I went back in and did the cuts myself.
For now, ChatGPT won’t take my job, or yours. Humans are, reassuringly, still needed.
