AI will kill freelance content writing – And freelancers are responsible for this

Recently I’ve posted multiple jobs and contests on several outsourcing platforms, especially freelancer.com and Upwork. As an individual client without having a team this seemed the most optimal way to reach talents globally. I basically posted jobs asking for a few quality articles on WordPress and the digital content creation to publish on Solidie website. The goal was to provide quality blog posts aimed at content creators and developers that helps them enhance knowledge base and also is relevant to the project Solidie at the same time. 

Initially I’ve posted direct jobs on these platforms. However, for several factors and situations posting direct jobs wasn’t a good solution. Either the freelancers were overpriced for my requirements or they weren’t willing enough to discuss initial stuff before making a contract which seemed risky to move forward to. Then I thought posting an article writing contest on freelancer.com might be a good deal as it enables any freelancer to submit their content without any contract or finalizing deal at first. And then I can select someone from the contest for the long run.  

So, as a client I expected at least the majority of articles would be considerable and most likely I’d have to even struggle to select the final one to award from so many submissions. And you know what? I was horribly wrong! I was met with a flood of AI generated content. They didn’t even read my contest description and guidelines. Almost every single content was a direct copy paste of AI generated output. It was obvious that they just copied the contest description, pasted it as a ChatGPT prompt and submitted the results to the contest.

AI is not a new thing anymore. We saw so many AI generated articles and other forms of content. We are familiar with the pattern of AI outputs already. If you as a client give freelancers several topics to pick one from and write an article and they just blend every mentioned topic in a single article, that’s enough to determine that they were not attentive enough to the required rules. Moreover if you see so many submissions following the same title and content patterns, then it can never be a coincidence. They just used the same tool to generate.

Now the point is, if as a freelancer you just copy job description and generate articles using AI, then there’s no point in hiring you really. I myself could just do it in less time. Even there would be no extra time to waste in reviewing your submissions and following all the procedures. And most importantly I won’t have to waste money on fake things. 

The question is, is it all about AI that is killing the content writing industry? 

No. Rather it’s about a sense of ethics and attention to details that is getting decayed because of using AI in creative fields. The problem with AI is it doesn’t create new ideas to the field, no new style or anything on its own. It just gets through all the previous dataset and provides us some sort of predetermined result. How could you think this old data would be beneficial for a company and their new services? To make AI modern, first we humans need to be modern. 

After AI started evolving, people say AI will replace jobs. Well, it may or may not. But our lack of commitment and ethics will take a heavy toll on us. That’s definitely true. 

So what can you do as an individual content writer? 

All I can say is, be respectful to work ethics and maintain attention to details. The new world is looking for you. Don’t waste your potential on cheap things.

– Jayedul K.