How do you know ChatGPT didn't write this article?
That's the question that Sarah Stockdale, who's the founder and CEO of Growclass - a six-week online growth marketing course taught by industry experts - wrote on LinkedIn that a member of the Growclass community recently was faced with.
"He's a content marketer and an incredible writer currently working on a project for a client who got this message from a client: 'How do I know you didn't use ChatGPT to write this?'" Stockdale said on LinkedIn.
"He didn't. But it's a funny question— because ChatGPT is a plagiarism machine. So the question that the client asked is: Did you use the plagiarism tool that plagiarized the entire internet, to, I guess, plagiarize?
"That's what language models do— they munch on huge data sets often stolen from the internet, content creators, and authors in order to make mathematical predictions about language. Basically, it’s using math to predict what the next most likely word in a sentence is.
"AI Language Models don't create anything, they predict. And it can only predict because it ate up things you created, and things I created, and every scrap of content created by humans in the last hundred years. And even with all of that content, it's still hungry.
"But, here's the problem: AI can't cook. AI can only eat if we create."
Stockdale, who's based out of Toronto, Canada, said AI is only as good as the data it consumes and learns from.
"The "synthetic content" AI generates is often unreliable. It lies. It contains racial and cultural bias. And now that content is everywhere, so when it scrapes the web to learn— it's going to start eating itself," said Stockdale.
"And when it eats its own content it gets sick. Or what researchers call Model Collapse. The outputs become more homogenous, inaccurate, and lose their value.
"The biggest risk to AI isn't government regulation or sentience (knocks wood) — its biggest threat is us. AI language models will fail if they can't steal from our creativity. Despite what reactionary headlines tell us, human-created content is where the real value is. And it's going to become more scarce.
"We all need to fully understand how these tools work— and that our writing is being scraped and used to teach them. That's why these copyright lawsuits are so important. It's why the Writers Strike is so important.
"It's time for creators to get wise, and fight for our content. Because if these plagiarism machines can't eat our work, they'll starve."
In the comments of Stockdale's post, Duncan Shand, MD at independent advertising agency YoungShand in Auckland, said AI is good at helping tidy up content, writing straight copy, researching other content and making a coherent summary, it won't write interesting, fresh, thought-provoking content.
"It won't replace creativity, but it will be a useful tool that helps us bring ideas to life," he said.
Ragheb El Borni, a freelance content writer from Tunisia, said that his issue with the 'AI is being trained on stolen content' argument is that, in essence, every writer who ever lived 'stole' from someone else.
"What irks me is that for us humans, we say 'was inspired by' instead of 'stole from.' Language models are just 'being inspired' by our content, just on a much larger scale than any human ever could," he said.
Victor Lai, the founder of Canadian growth marketing agency Big Cedar, said that humans are inherently predictive machines- when we have a conversation with someone, we're subconsciously predicting what they'll say next.
"That's why hooks work – we're expecting something, then that gets flipped on its head so we're hooked!" he said.
"We're a product of our inputs. Very little is original, it's all a remix. Humans have the edge over AI in that we have the most recent training data. You're fighting a losing battle to try to starve AI – look at what Reddit is doing trying to profit from the AI scrapers. Even if they succeed, AI will learn from somewhere.
"If you're feeling threatened by AI writing, you need to adapt, not fight that losing battle."
Tina S., a Melbourne-based growth and content marketing strategist, said AI is a tool, not a replacement writer and "thinking it’s the latter is when it goes wrong".
"AI is great for ideation and when you’re stuck, but writers can give so much more value when applying the human aspect to a piece," she said.
"Personal anecdotes. Humor. Subject matter expertise. Varying styles and sentence constructions. Research and their interpretation of it.
"But to another point, the client asking such question (and how they framed it) is insulting. It’s quality over tactics.
"If it’s great, why ask how it’s done? Even Google said they don’t care how you write content. What they care about is the quality and value it offers. Even AI content detectors are inaccurate. Some content I write without AI get a high AI detection score in one tool, and 100% human in other tools."
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