I’m in a lot of writer groups online, and there’s one topic that seems to come up almost daily at the moment: ChatGPT.
The conversations around it are wide-ranging and often passionate. Some writers won’t go anywhere near it for ethical, environmental, or creative reasons. Others have fully embraced it, and are open about how they have incorporated it into their workflow. Some use it quietly, without disclosing it to clients. And some are using it against their better judgment, simply because clients expect or require them to.
It’s clear we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how AI fits into creative and professional writing. There are strong opinions and no settled norms – and as freelancers, it’s up to each of us to take an individual position that we are comfortable with.
For me, that decision is clear: I don’t use ChatGPT for client work.
Here’s why:
- Environmental concerns: The energy demands of running large language models are significant. According to a recent article on MIT News, a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search. As someone who tries to be mindful of sustainability, this matters to me. There are some areas in my life – such as taking long-haul flights to visit family overseas – where I don’t have alternatives. That means when there is an easy choice to make that can help reduce my impact, I will.
- Ethical issues: Large language models were trained on massive amounts of text (300 billion words for ChatGPT), much of it scraped from writers’ work without consent. That doesn’t sit right with me.
- Bias and representation: Much of the training data reflects the dominant voices of white, Western, male perspectives. To pick just one example, here’s a CSIRO research project I wrote about, where in a dataset of 30,000 ChatGPT answers, more than two-thirds of answers relied on the expertise of male academics working at US universities. Anything that reinforces biases instead of challenging them gets a big thumbs down from me.
- Creative practice: Writing is a craft. I believe in exercising that creative muscle, not outsourcing it to a machine. The writer Marie Le Conte recently wrote a great piece for her newsletter exploring this aspect of AI. If you are involved in the creative industries, especially as a writer, I’d definitely encourage you to read it.
- Quality and accuracy: Even if you don’t care about any of the other concerns around AI, or you think they can be overcome, surely this one is key. While AI can sound convincing, it’s often wrong. It makes factual errors (called “hallucinations”), misses nuance, and can dilute the voice and integrity of a piece. Unfortunately, even as AI becomes more powerful, these factual errors are actually increasing, not decreasing. In the kind of writing I do – explaining scientific research, or writing a travel piece that suggests places for visitors to explore, accuracy is everything. I can’t run the risk of citing an imaginary paper or recommending a restaurant that doesn’t exist.
With all that in mind, it’s easy for me to make a commitment to my clients. I will never use ChatGPT for the work you commission from me.
The only AI tool I currently use is Otter.ai for transcription. When I conduct an interview over phone or video, Otter records that call and uses the recording to create a written transcript. I then manually go through the transcript to clean up and correct any errors, and I highlight the best quotes to include in my article. It’s a time-saver, but the core work – research, analysis, writing – remains human.
That means that instead of typing in a few ChatGPT commands and churning something out in two minutes, a well-researched blog post or article might take me anywhere from 2-4 hours, sometimes longer. But it’s thoughtful, accurate, and entirely original. No shortcuts, no copy and paste, no hallucinations.
I’m deeply grateful for the clients who continue to value that approach – who still want writing that’s researched, real, and rooted in human creativity.
I think (and hope) there will always be a place for that kind of work, and for as long as that remains the case I’ll be proud to keep offering it.
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Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
Ruth Dawkins Freelance Writer 