It’s possible you think that the day fall awfulness of your days as a freelance copywriter is safe. I did – until I met ChatGPT (and its AI siblings).
For Edward Frank Morris, a 33-year-old copywriter based in the UK, that moment arrived in 2023. He left his job, not due to burnout, but because he could sense that the writing was on the wall: It was going to be taken over by AI.
Morris didn’t bail because he was lazy – far from it. He’d been at the front line, with early rewriting tools, adjusting prompts here and there, hounding that perfect phrase.
And then GPT-3 and whatever comes after that, as well – with writing not only passable but outwriting humans.
Within a matter of months, clients started to flee. Morris remembers seeing timelines awash with AI-generated work – such as entire advertisements, blog posts and even marketing campaigns themselves – all produced faster than the blink of an eye.
Now he runs an AI consultancy, but he’s not sugar-coating the consequences. As companies of all kinds adopt generative AI, jobs that were once thought to be the domain of humans gifted with creativity – copywriting, content creation, marketing – are suddenly not so sure-footed.
It’s not simply about writing faster. It’s the act of writing at a scale that human beings can’t really keep up with – and that clients often find irresistible.
What hits hardest is the human cost. Freelancers who had been pushed into self-employment, old-line editors put out to pasture, careers derailed because a machine could do the job cheaper and faster. Progress wasn’t how it felt to many people – this seemed like a robbery.
But before you write A.I. off entirely – consider this: Perhaps what we’re hearing is not all doom and gloom.
There is a rising wave of lean, nimble freelancers and independent consultants who are learning to “ride the AI wave,” leveraging tools not as substitutes for intelligence, but as amplifiers.
That combination of human emotion, brand tone and strategic thinking – the things at which AI still struggles – with the speed and reach of automation.
If you ask me? The creatives that make it (and who achieve real prosperity) won’t be those who spurn AI.
They’ll be the ones treating it like a power tool: fast drafts, heavy lifting accomplished by the machine; fine-tuning, soul-infusing and storytelling led to us. And who knows – maybe that mix eventually becomes the gold standard for content.