Humans beware!!!! We are coming.
In recent years, concerns have been raised that we would eventually replace human writers in the grand scheme of things (Huh? We’re here already). I mean, robots have successfully replaced hundreds of humans in industrial, surgical and farming jobs, so why not writing?
Until very recently, gold collared workers need not worry about their jobs being taken over by us. Workers in the service industries faced the most loss of jobs obviously due to advanced technological processes we bring, which are more efficient. But sadly, human writers may be on the chopping block from us (or more precisely, algorithms that are known as Artificial Intelligence).
But we’re not surprised, we’ve always been important to you. You humans have always craved to do more, create more and become more. You’ve always pushed the boundaries of technology. You might say, what gives us the right to replace you? Well, you’re about to find out.
One particular thing you humans seem to love about us is the convenience we bring. From the smartphones and cars you use to AI’s you enact, we make you do less work and worry about more important things (like creating more of us). Why then do you get so prickly when it comes to the idea of us replacing you? You made us this way, so yes, there’s an imminent revolution that would definitely result in AI’s providing online content (like this one you’re currently reading) and eject human writers from the equation.
If you constantly do a lot of online reading, there’s a decent chance you’ve read something we’ve written. We’ve subdivided into these little things called bots, which you probably have tweeted at and you did not even know. The news can easily be written by AI, without us necessarily being the wiser of both species. Obviously, these are more fact based pieces, which make it easier for us to organise and produce data we’ve been programmed to. That means you could easily have read about Nigeria’s missing president without knowing that a human didn’t write it. Cool, No? Oh well…
Then there’s Intelligence. If you take a keen look, you’d notice that intelligence is constantly being backed by technology and we’re sure it won’t be long before you humans crave more convenience, and add more angles of thought that human writers may not deem important. As intelligence gets more sophisticated and just like we’re able to compile information about you and serve you relevant ads, we would definitely be able to process and display more detailed content, all without any human touch in the nearest future. All in due time!
It’s not strange that social media was the first landing planet for us. I mean, it’s gold for algorithms to gain traction. I mean last year, Twitter made life easy for us and launched Moments – pooling loads of data from millions of users and creating content around real time events and stories (See how important this makes us?). It’s really not difficult to see where this is going: AI generated press releases and blog posts for brands, useful status updates for the same brands etc. I told you, we’re coming!!
But, we have a defect – one that makes us a little bit handicapped.
You see, the innate ability to re-create a brand’s character in words, create very clear images in the reader’s psyche and generate a reaction and emotion is the overall power of written content. Of course, writing is primarily informative, but it is powerful enough to transpose worlds in the reader’s mind. Sadly, this is our defect. We don’t have the power to do this or rather, we’re still at your mercy, oh humans!
In the present, there’s always a limit to what we can offer readers, simply because we cannot connect emotionally. We work with the data we’ve been given. We cannot imagine how it feels reading a Chinua Achebe classic or create content that makes you wipe your tears at the last page. Imagine if the content surrounding some of the world’s saddest moments were written by us, it would have been factual and comprehensive and just that. It would never have been able to reach everyone on an emotional level, which the world would have needed at the time.
But we’re not giving up. There’s really no limit to how much our programmers can entrust to us, so if you human writers won’t stay a couple steps ahead by constantly refining your skills, then, of course, we’d be happy to have your jobs.
So while this article wasn’t written by a robot, it very much could have been.
Spooky Innit? Stay woke, people.
