Why I decided AI was fine.

It’s not just because I look hot.

I am 49 and I will never look like this but it’s fun to see, and I have some great ideas to take to my hairstylist. I have to say I really DID always wonder what I might look like with a curly mullet, and it’s kinda cute!

“This is gonna kill us.”

“A machine will never be able to do what we do.”

“This is the end of art as we know it.”

These were some of the comments in a content-writing group over whether AI-generated content was a good idea.

I admit I felt some panic right then. As a full-time student, shilling content for a few mills is a great side hustle for me. I do a lot of product listings and short descriptions of things, because I can do them quickly — in between classes, before I settle into my mounds of homework and reading, and in the morning before I head into my student-worker job (honestly, sometimes I do them at my student-worker job if I don’t have anything else to do).

AI might, indeed, kill me in this regard, at least for a minute, and it will suck. I’ll have to find another little side hustle. In the meantime, I tested an AI content generator and lo and behold, at the moment, for a perfectionist like me it’s actually golden.

It’s really easy to fall into a boilerplating habit when you’re cranking out product listings for a website (meaning that all your descriptions start to look exactly alike). Clients actually hate that. The AI content generator cranked out a series of product listings for me that, if not all that well-written, at least had a different structure to them. I copied & pasted each one of them to a Google doc and then spent half an hour tweaking them to match the style guide and voice of the product better.

In the end, after the wait time and the tweaking, it saved me about ten minutes of writing. But while I waited, I did the dishes and folded some laundry, and I saved my creative juice for a 5000-word long-form piece for my creative non-fiction class.

Likely you’ve seen hundreds of Lensa-generated avatars in the past week. I held on to some fear for a few days, myself: “It’s owned by Russians! It’s data-mining! It’s going to kill art!”

And then I jumped on the bandwagon because a) so fun b) if someone wants 20 selfies of a middle-aged woman and her email address, Facebook beat them to it already and and c) after sitting there thinking about it, I realized that this happens every…