I Want My Hands on the Wheel

A conscious rejection of AI writing assistance

In 2023, I lost all my freelance writing work to ChatGPT.

That’s a gross oversimplification, but it’s also the truth — compressed into a nutshell.

Generative Artificial Intelligence wasn’t new two years ago, but it had suddenly become easier to use and more accessible than ever, thanks to the sudden uptick in awareness of software like Wordsmith, Copy.ai, Storylab, Hemingway, Jasper, etc.

At the time, I was primarily writing for a company (woman-owned and run) that provided leadership training to creatives in tech. Workshops, webinars, career coaching — our staff was small in number but determined and scrappy. Women who knew how to get shit done.

When we started losing clients, it wasn’t because of any big mistakes or miscalculations on our part. (We know that because we triple-checked our work.) We were losing clients because the tech industry was imploding, folding inward upon itself, battening down the hatches and laying off hundreds, then thousands of writers and designers.

Where once budget spreadsheets held generous line items for learning and development, paying for their employees to receive further education and training, third-quarter budgets for 2023 were scraped bare of all but…