Why are you always going on about AI?

You haven’t said this, but you may be thinking it.

“Why all this stuff on AI? I thought this site was supposed to be about white papers?”

You’re right. It is. So please allow me to explain.

I’ve written about software my entire career.

In the 1980s I played with Eliza—the program that simulates a Rogerian psychotherapist.

I did technical writing on software for 20 years, including a few projects that touched on machine learning.

So I knew a litle about AI. But I was never much interested in it.

A couple years ago, I saw a report from Gartner consulting firm saying soon AI would be writing emails, blog posts, and white papers.

I scoffed.

“AI will never be able to write white papers,” I thought smugly. “They’re just too long and difficult.”

Fast forward to October 2022 when ChatGPT was first released to the public.

Like everyone else, I was struck by a barrage of media noise about it.

By 2023 I was curious, but I got stuck on the waitlist for a few weeks.

I didn’t get a chance to try ChatGPT for myself until February 2023.

And I’ll never forget the first time…

It was like an electric shock to my body.

Like how some people describe taking heroin.

I felt like the floor was melting and swallowing me up.

The walls were swirling around me.

I was getting pulled through a black hole.

“This is it!” I thought. “This is the Singularity!”

The Singularity is an event or discovery that changes everything so fundamentally that we can’t begin to imagine what happens next.

I still feel like that’s going on with AI.

Freelancers are always short of time

Let me put it to you this way: If you’re a white paper writer, do you have a website?

Probably.

Are you on LinkedIn?

Certainly.

What’s stopping you from posting more web content or being more active on LinkedIn?

Time.

If you’re a B2B writer, you’re so busy working for your clients and picking up the kids or fixing the house and trying to find time for your book club or for beers with your buddies that the thought of spending a whole Saturday chained to your computer to write another blog post sounds like mind-numbing drudgery, right?

Probably.

So you just put it off, right?

Certainly.

Or else try to cram it in by working til 2 AM once in a while.

What if there was a way you could snap your fingers and get a whole blog post written for no cost?

A blog post you could polish up in a few minutes and add to your site.

And then you could snap your fingers again and get 10 LinkedIn posts that pointed to it.

Wouldn’t you want that?

Marketing managers are always short of time

If you’re a B2B marketing manager, do you have social media channels?

Probably.

Do you have some campaigns running?

Certainly.

What’s stopping you from doing more on social media or running more campaigns?

Time.

If you’re a marketing manager, you’re so busy going to meeting after meeting after meeting from morning til night on top of juggling campaigns and keeping your team motivated and hiring the occasional freelancer that the thought of actually sitting down to plan a new campaign by yourself or asking anyone else on your overworked team to do it sounds ridiculous, right?

So you just put it off, right?

Certainly.

Or else try to cram it in by working til midnight once in a while. Or logging in on the weekend.

What if there was a way you could snap your fingers and get a whole campaign planned out for you in seconds for no cost?

A campaign complete with ideas for content you could generate simply by snapping your fingers again.

Wouldn’t you want that?

AI is already 100X as fast as any human writer

The first time I used it, I realized ChatGPT can plan, outline, and draft content as well as most writers I’ve ever worked with.

And it can do it at least 100X as fast.

That changes everything about making a living as a writer.

The writers who learn about AI and start to use it have a chance of staying in business.

The ones who don’t, not so much.

Our clients aren’t dumb. They have a marketing budget to spend, and if they can use AI to stretch their budget for freelancers out by 100 times, they’ll think about it.

And I don’t want to go on blithely saying, AI won’t get to white papers. It will and it has and I proved it with the one I wrote with it.