Content Designer vs. ChatGPT

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, I remember telling concerned friends and colleagues that no, Content Designers like me would not be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) within the next year.

Good content design hinges upon understanding your end users and developing content that fits their specific needs. At Research Data Scotland (RDS), for example, our work focuses on creating engaging, informative, and accessible content for researchers and the general public alike. AI tools struggle to differentiate between specific end-users and are thus a poor substitute for a Content Designer who can understand that humans have different needs. 

Still, the thought crept into my head: was I merely trying to reassure myself? After attending two conferences centred on digital technologies this summer, I can say with a little more confidence that my job is safe for the time being.

“There’s an AI for that”

At this year’s Turing Fest, no fewer than five conference presentations centred on AI. And while I may have gone into them with a great deal of scepticism, my take-home message was this: learn how to use AI now or become obsolete. Though this conclusion is hardly revelatory, I’ve struggled with the implication that not only should I accept AI into my working life, but also find a way to master it. Hack it. Exploit it. For AI is the path to optimisation. Does this kind of language strike no one else as troubling?

Bastian Grimm’s talk, “The Rise of AI: Strategies and Tips to Drive Growth,” alerted me to the fact that there’s literally an AI for everything now. As a Content Designer, it is unsettling to learn that, beyond the numerous AIs dedicated to producing web copy, there are also AIs that will write emails for you, meaning you basically never have to interact with another human again.  

I went home after that talk and decided to experiment, spending hours trying to tame ChatGPT into writing my “gothic novel in the vein of Shirley Jackson” for me. If AI could at least give me the bones of this story, maybe I’d actually finish it. 

Spoiler alert: it couldn’t. No matter how many prompts I fed into ChatGPT, all I ever got was a series of cliches ending with the line “the truth is far more twisted and complex than the heroine initially suspected.” In other words, I feel Charlie Brooker’s pain (or maybe relief) when he says that ChatGPT’s attempt to write a Black Mirror episode lacked “any real original thought.” 

At RDS, we foreground human-centred design principles, creating content with specific end users in mind. When designing our new website, which launched at the end of May 2023, we ran several rounds of user testing and developed a range of user stories to guide our content. We know that our job is to make life a little easier for our users, which means we really need to know our audience – to understand and empathise with their pain points. This kind of content really is the antithesis of AI-generated copy, which can only retread cliches.  

So, by the time you’ve entered all your prompts into ChatGPT, how much time have you really saved? And, just as importantly, how much frustration have you caused your reader at the other end?

Aim to spark joy 

People are smart enough to be able to tell when something has been crafted with empathy and when it’s been hastily produced through a paint-by-numbers exercise. Email is frustrating enough without introducing AI into the mix. Plus, is the sole purpose of using AI to cut down on resource? To free up bandwidth for more worthwhile pursuits? If it is, I ask, what is more important than sparking just a little bit of joy for your users?  

For now, at least, AI-generated text does not spark the kind of joy for me that even a well-crafted email does. If you’re looking to make your web content informative, interesting, and accessible, you need to design with users in mind. And for that reason, nothing can replace a good, human Content Designer who understands your audience.