How ChatGPT is ruining blogging for a freelance writer in Japan

Blogging is like dancing through a field of wildflowers on a sunny spring day, each keystroke a gentle breeze carrying the fragrance of creativity. It's a whimsical journey where words pirouette gracefully across the digital canvas, painting vibrant tapestries of imagination and insight. With every click, bloggers sprinkle stardust on the internet, weaving dreams into pixels and melodies into prose. It's a joyous symphony of ideas, where voices harmonize in a chorus of inspiration, uplifting souls and sparking conversations.

Find something wrong or just... uncomfortable-sounding with that entire paragraph? It was written by ChatGPT. As someone who makes most of my bread and butter in Japan by freelance writing, I've noticed more and more content online having the clear indications that it was written by a computer. The first dead giveaway? What I like to refer to as "overly fluffy language." Yes, writing descriptively is wonderful, but I think there are limits. Bodies of text that look like the one above just scream "this was written by a bot and not a human."

The rise of ChatGPT use for blogging has made me wonder about the future of those in writing-based professions. Pic Credit: Emiliano Vittoriosi/Unsplash

It has me wondering though what the future will be for people in writing-based professions in Japan. ChatGPT is always going to be able to crank out text and ideas faster than I can as a human, and naturally that puts me at a disadvantage depending on what a client wants. Because my Japanese is nowhere near native level, I'm limited in terms of the employment I can find here, and writing tasks for clients in English is one way I help support my family. If a machine can do that faster–and ultimately, cheaper–then what's the landscape going to look like for people who write their own content over the next decade?

Now don't get me wrong – I think the advent of ChatGPT and other AI tools can be exceptionally helpful when it comes to brainstorming ideas and so forth. But I think it should be used for that and not just for copying and pasting full bodies of text that it spits out, submitting it, and calling it a day. There's also the key issue that the information ChatGPT and other AI tools generate can be littered with errors, whereas some folks seem to take what it says as gospel.

I miss the human element of writing and worry that real voices are being lost.

Do you see a rise of AI tools helping or harming your line of work in Japan?