Notes from a Hired Pen: Has my work been affected by AI?

Readers!

 

It’s mail bag time!

Do you feel like AI has impacted your freelance career? I’m worried that most companies will just use ChatGPT now and I find it hard to get a clear picture of the situation. There are writers who say they have lost clients, but then these clients came back once they realized ChatGPT’s output is too generic for their purposes. But the subreddit for freelance writers is full of horror stories of people claiming they lost all of their clients and income. Could you sense an impact on your work, and how?

I haven’t lost any work to AI, as far as I can tell. I include that caveat because there’s no way for me to know.

Unless some giant assignment comes in right now, my income is going to be down about 10% this year compared to last year. But that’s mostly because this administration is trying to dismantle higher education, where I do a lot of writing, and budgets have been cut. Oh yeah and I ran around Italy for six weeks this year, and I’m coming off a two week vacation, which might have impacted my work (no regrets! more on that in my year end wrap up) But it’s not like an editor is going to come to me and say “hey Jen, we were going to assign something to you, but this lying plagiarism machine is right here, so…” If they do that, they’re not going to tell me. This is the only reason for the caveat.

That’s not to say it isn’t affecting writers. Just like with the “write for exposure!” and content mill trends of days past, which was going to “revolutionize” writing by paying people less, AI is being used to try to replace entry level work, and by publishers who weren’t paying much to their freelancers anyway. I’m not saying this is a good thing, because people need to start somewhere. But it’s a data point to show that AI is another thing being pushed to save money to publishers who don’t care about the quality of what they’re publishing. I suspect it’s all going to going to crash and burn just like those other trends did (it’s not just me saying that either).

I also want to address what the letter writer is saying about reddit. I’ve been in the freelancing subreddits. I’ve also been in Facebook groups for freelance writers. People are trying to help, but there’s no quality control since they are populated by a lot of people new to writing, some who talk like they are the experts when they’re really not. I had to leave one of the Facebook groups when I got flamed for saying $.10 per word was a bad rate. I was told I didn’t know what I was talking about. Yes, it was after I published this. Since the letter writer is here, and you’re here reading this, you already know to go to people who have been in this business, and successful in it, for a long time when looking for advice. Reddit is useful for a lot of things (it’s how I fixed a problem with my running earbuds!), but it’s not a place I’d go for this kind of guidance.

AI has affected me in other ways than being replaced by it though. Here are seven:

1. I’ve written a lot about AI. Technology and cybersecurity, particularly in banking and healthcare, is one of my specialties, so technically I’ve been writing about AI for years. Of course, it hasn’t always been called that. It was machine learning, or an algorithm or big data or data analytics. One client has assigned me multiple pieces about the same piece of technology as it’s evolved over almost a decade, and only last year did they start calling it AI. “Did it change?” I asked my source. “No, we’re just changing how we describe it now,” they said. So when generative AI (genAI) was shoved down our throats, I was asked to write about it, and it’s the topic I wrote most about this year. This might seem odd. But genAI is not the only AI being used. I have been able to write about the dark side of the technology, like how it’s a cybersecurity problem, and my skepticism has also enabled me to ask tough questions to people who may not have been challenged before, write about dealing with employees using AI, cover how AI isn’t living up to its promises, discuss the ethics of AI use from something other than a fan girl position, and to recognize genuine use cases, which are typically small and specific and need more work to be proven useful.
2. Contracts and writer guidelines now include anti-AI clauses. In contracts, you are swearing that you don’t use it, and writers guidelines are saying that you can’t use it. So for all the hullabaloo that everyone is rushing to use genAI, my clients sure are against it (which is good!)
3. But some editors editors have used AI for outlines. One such outline included a question about a “fact” they wanted me to ask the source. When I did, the source had no idea what I was talking about. So I now have to fact check my editors. Lovely.
4. PR people and scammers are flooding my inbox. A lot of the spam is about helping me sell my books. I got one of these from a fake person on LinkedIn too. On the PR side, I hated doing interviews by email before, but now it’s almost always a no-go because I don’t know if the person writing the answers is really writing them, and we know how much the lying plagiarism machine loves to lie. I now only allow written answers in rare cases.
5. Bad actors are using AI to trick editors into buying fake articles, which means we’re all going to come under the microscope to prove we’re real people. One reason The Local suspected that this scammer wasn’t who she said she was is that she wouldn’t do a video call. I really hate doing video calls in part because I feel there’s more pressure on women to look a certain way on them (as there is with any arena we enter). But if I have to to prove I’m real, well, I guess it’s something I now have to do because people are using the lying plagiarism machine for the lolz.
6. Organizations for writers are, for some [redacted] reason, pushing AI, so I’ve distanced myself from them. I’m not going to pay them dues to continue that work. I suspect after the bubble bursts, they will reverse course, but until then, I’m sitting on the sidelines. Funny enough, at a conference for one of them, all the editors talked about how much they hate AI and forbade their writers to use it. Maybe they should listen to their members?
7. People have gotten really mad at me for calling genAI the lying plagiarism machine. This is mostly outside of work. But anytime someone says “well I asked [insert brand of lying plagiarism machine] and..” I tell them the stop because the answer is invalid. It is distressing to me how many people believe whatever it says. One person accused me of discriminating against it for my stance. It’s not a person. It’s a thing that is being used by the worst people to cause real harm, and people are dying because of it.

Yes I have taken a hard line against genAI, as I have againsts bigotry, transphobia, and the current fascist administration (and of course fascists LOVE AI). So it should not be a surprise! I also know I can afford to be this outspoken, so if you can’t because you’re worried about losing work, I got you.

 

Recent Bylines

“Refugee Solomon Tesfaye *20 Finds New Footing, and  Novel, in the U.S.” Princeton Alumni Weekly

What I’m Reading

• Badlands by C.J. Box. Whenever I look for the next C.J. Box book to read, I usually search “C.J. Box books in order” and see a list of Joe Pickett novels, which center on our friendly neighborhood Wyoming game warden. I had no idea he also had a series about Cassie Dewell, which was turned into a TV show — starring Reba! So this is the second book about her, where Dewell moves to North Dakota to take a job in a recent town that has exploded in size due to an energy boom. Drugs, of course, followed. I liked it. I’m going to go back and read the first book, and try  to catch up because a cross over with Pickett is apparently happening. Exciting stuff in the mystery world!
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Wil Wheaton. This was the audio book I took with me on most of my road trip. It’s about a near-distant dystopia where most people go into an online world called the Oasis to escape their grim reality. The creator of the Oasis has died, and whoever can solve a series of puzzles to find an egg he put into the simulation will inherit control of the Oasis and all of his wealth. In order to do so, players, like high schooler Wade Watts, needed to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture of the 1980s, so that was fun for me. It wasn’t a bad road trip companion, but I would have cut about 25% out of it, especially in those challenges, which just got too tricky and too long.

 

What I’m Watching

• Ready Player One. Of course I had to then go watch the movie. They were wise enough change and slim down the challenges, and cut the whole “going to school” part of the adventure, which made this a rare instance where the movie was better than the book (another being The Devil Wears Prada). I’m not saying it’s a great movie, but the story was much better paced here.
• The Plausible Impossible. This is one of those Disney things I have watched a zillion times before, so put it on while I was decorating for Christmas. I would not trust 1950s era Walt Disney for his retelling of the dinosaurs and ancient civilizations, but the segment where he plays with an animated Donald Duck to show what animation can do is a classic. I was going to complain that there’s no way on Disney+ I can just watch a series of Donald Duck shorts without starting a new one every nine minutes, but I could just plug in my DVD player and watch what I have — a DVD set that includes the WW II propaganda shorts that aren’t on Disney+ for a very good reason! (the DVDs I have include commentary by Leonard Maltin that you can’t skip before watching them).

 

Nail Polish of the Week

Spread the Cherry by OPI. This shiny red is way more CHRISTMAS than I anticipated, especially because I used the Zoya Ultra Glossy Top Coat, but ah well it’s December. I bought this from an Ulta in Waco, Tx. while taking a break on my road trip and trying to figure out how much further I was going to drive that day due to incoming storms. I know people talk about traffic in and around cities in Texas and phew that was a lot to experience it, and also a great example of how adding more lanes doesn’t solve traffic problems, but instead will make traffic worse. FUN!

 

Until next time!

Jen A. Miller (she/her)

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