It wasn’t all that long ago that if you wanted to buy a chair or some other piece of furniture, you got one from an individual who made it via his or her own craftsmanship.
This person had to have skills, the right tools, time, effort, and care to produce said chair.
As years turned into the future, chairs increasingly became products of mass production, industrial advances, and apathy, and also resulted in lower costs for the consumer versus those made from our original craftspersons.
I’m not one to fully be able to judge if this was good or bad. Times are different. The goods in our homes are different than those in the past. And, we now have a saying that “they don’t make them like they used to” when it comes to things like furniture, cars, and even appliances and electronics.
In A.D. 2024, I’m seeing something similar happening with an art form, a practicality, and something that has reached new heights with every innovation in graphite, ink, the printing press, the typewriter, the computer, or any newer device today that displays word things.
What was once something so personal and so human — because it had to be — is going the way of everything else that became industrialized, mass-produced, and heartlessly churned out.
I’m naturally talking about writing.
When I was in college around two decades ago and thinking I was going to thrive in a journalism career, I always told myself that while technology is always going to change and modernize, there will always be a need for actual and real writing. A human is always going to be needed to make the word things.
Oh, Kevin, you naïve fool. Little did you know what was coming.
Writing in modern times
Even at its most technical, logical, and exact, writing was always human-driven.
Even if you were copying and pasting something someone still had to write the original of whatever you were stealing or borrowing.
Now we have “AI” and ChatGPT, which I suppose in some ways are continuing mankind’s tradition of stealing others’ work and thoughts when it comes to writing, but they are doing it on a much less personal level.
These things use lots of math, formulas, and algorithms to come up with what would be a good example of writing, whether it’s a book report, resume, cover letter, or even a news article.
Is this a result of people being lazy? Not necessarily.
We have machines talking to machines now.
We have this thing called “search engine optimization” or “SEO”. SEO is what people do to make sure Google gives their content the most potential eyeballs. If you use the right word that gets the search engine to notice you, you’ll get more hits and clicks, or people looking at your online work.
The more hits and clicks you get, the more credible a source your work becomes and therefore you’ll get even more clicks in a growing process.
Many people in the job searching world are dealing with something similar where real people don’t read resumes and cover letters anymore.
There are programs or apps or whatnot that do this now and look for specific buzzwords and keywords.
Do not dream of putting any sort of personality in your job applications, you won’t get past the “robots”.
Not only do we have the bots reading the job application materials, but to make sure they are written well enough for the programs, “AI” is writing the resumes and cover letters too.
We have machines talking to machines and fewer people are writing anything.
Who is really running things here?
What to do, what to do
I know humans will always find innovative ways to do things and work with what is shiny and new, but I never thought this would be the fate of writing.
Of course, much like people still make homemade furniture of high quality, these items are now viewed as a premium and can be quite pricey.
The same will be said for writing.
If we ever find ourselves down the path of the machines writing new works of fiction or research, there will still be a niche market for actual person-written stuff, it will just be more of a novelty and more costly than its technology-smothered counterparts.
Nearly 70 years ago, leery about the advent and future of television, vaudeville and radio comedian Fred Allen wrote about a “treadmill to oblivion” that we were all on placing more of an emphasis on the machine versus the person. How far of an incline do we want to increase to?
Machine-created music is already becoming a thing. Other art forms have and will follow.
Do we want, or can we accept, the written word to be an industry-created machine-produced item no different from what one would find in a big box retail store?
At this point, we probably don’t have a choice, but we really should think about the trade-off. With these new advances, what’s the good and what’s the bad?
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.