All things must pass, including my beloved industry. And maybe yours, too

With the Gen AI rubber now hitting the road, knowledge workers have good reason to be jumpy

Image courtesy of DALL-E

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It’s a hell of a thing to watch your industry die. Gradually then suddenly, in Hemingway’s endlessly quoted description of how things tend to go to shit.

When I began my communications degree in 1990, I had little reason to believe I was entering a soon-to-be-terminal industry. Many media outlets, especially in Australia, were still licenced to print money back then.

Granted, almost all that money ended up in the pockets of the Murdochs and Packers, and the media industry has always been brutal and poorly paid (for all but a fortunate few). Nonetheless, hundreds, probably thousands, of 18-year-old Australians assumed in late 1989 (when applying for university courses) that, with a bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and, where feasible, some nepotism, they could forge lifelong careers working at magazines, newspapers, radio stations and TV stations.

They – we – were mistaken.

Many magazines and newspapers have been shuttered. Those that still exist are almost always pale shadows of what they used to be.  

Free-to-air television appears to be in an irreversible death spiral.

Radio, long seen as mass media’s poor cousin, seems to still be doing OK. However, I can only assume that the rise of podcasts and Spotify has significantly reduced radio listenership.

Bad things happen to good (or at least OK) people
The thing about getting older – the thing that makes the mature more risk averse – is that you understand things can go wrong.

In an abstract sense, we're all aware that things can go wrong. But young people typically assume misfortune only strikes other people. They may have their business (and then marriage) collapse. Or endure a humiliating firing. Or declare bankruptcy. Or get a cancer diagnosis.

But not them. The world is their oyster and glory awaits.

When Bad Things happen – and they do, sooner or later, happen to all of us – it’s a double whammy. In the short term, there’s all the unpleasantness involved in dealing with the Bad Thing. In the longer term, you must live with, for want of a better term, a loss of innocence. Once you’ve gone through the Bad Thing, you understand deep in your bones that Bad Things can and not infrequently do happen.

Then again, a certain amount of melancholy cynicism acquired from ‘valuable learning experiences’ can prove evolutionary advantageous.

Clambering for the lifeboats
Having seen my world crumble around me in 2012, I was sadder but wiser when Gen AI dropped. (It seems like an eternity since that happened, but it was only 18 months ago.)

Even using that basic, initial iteration of ChatGPT, I had a foreboding feeling that my colleagues and I were, once again, screwed. (Many erstwhile journos, including me, reinvented themselves as freelance or on-staff ‘content creators’ of one kind or another.)

As I seem to recall happening when ‘the Internet’ (i.e. Facebook and Google) was first starting to eat the media industry’s lunch, there was a lot of happy talk early on about how Gen AI would “augment” rather than replace content creators.

Especially after a few dispiriting conversations in early 2023 with existing or potential clients, I realised that if Gen AI wasn’t going to replace all human content creators, it would surely replace many of them. And remove almost all pricing power from the remainder. (When Gen AI can generate content – text, video, images – at close to zero cost, it’s optimistic to expect to continue earning a living wage as a ‘pure play’ writer, videographer or graphic designer.)    

As far as I’m aware, there isn’t yet any solid data about the employment impact of Gen AI on human content creators. But if the anecdata of LinkedIn posts from human content creators is anything to go by, I have noticed a change in my feed from ‘I’m-incredibly-in-demand-but-due-to-an-amazingly-unexpected-turn-of-events-suddenly-may-have-a-small-amount-of-capacity-available-if-a-worthwhile-enough-potential-client-approaches-me’ (2023) to ‘Will-work-for-food’ (2024).

The final nail
Many writers, videographers and graphic designers still work for or at least contribute to those hardy media outlets that have thus far survived. A few days ago, the news came through that Google will no longer be brushing any crumbs from its table into the famished mouths of digital media outlets.

When you search for something like ‘What smartwatch should I buy?’, rather than Google serving up links to smartwatch-related articles, it will soon just answer your question, Gen AI-style. For instance, “If you have the money, the Apple Watch Series 9 or Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro are best, but the Garmin Epix Pro is worth considering if you work out a lot.”

This change looks like the final deathblow for much of the extant legacy media. And I don’t imagine it’s likely to be much good for the independent media ecosystem either. (In both cases, traffic and therefore advertising revenue will presumably collapse.)  

As an aside, it strikes me that life is now mirroring the finale of Succession. With Lachlan Murdoch, appropriately enough, playing the role of Kendall Roy and Sundar Pichai playing the role of Lukas Matsson.   

Some final tips
As I discovered almost exactly four years ago, there’s little upside to trying to warn your colleagues that their futures don’t look bright and that they should start seriously considering a Plan B.

But having once resolutely turned a blind eye to the tidal wave of technological change looming in front of me and paid a heavy price for doing so, I feel dutybound to offer some final tips for anyone open to learning from my mistakes.

Here goes:

Remember that hope is not a strategy: If you’re a freelance content creator and your revenues have been heading consistently south for a worryingly long time, now is probably the time to stop telling yourself you’re just ‘going through a slow patch’. This is especially true if an unusually high number of your peers have also been ‘going through a slow patch’ for a long time.

You don’t necessarily have to stop being a freelance content creator. But you may want to consider pivoting your business model and working out what clients will still pay humans to do in a post-Gen AI world.

Make friends with Gen AI: Gen AI isn’t going away, any more than indoor plumbing or the automobile or nuclear weapons are going away. Constantly fuming about Gen AI’s drawbacks, many of which are now being remedied, just makes you look like a sore loser. (Soon, slagging off AI will make about as much sense as slagging off computers or electricity.)

With tech disruption, businesses generally move to a higher-volume, lower-margin model. Let’s say you used to get paid $1 a word and could research and write a 1000-word article in a day. If you switch to charging 10c a word but can churn out 10,000 words a day with technological assistance, you’re no worse off. (I’m not sure asking for even 10c a word will be feasible soon, but the general point stands.)     

Try not to beat yourself up too much: You know that climactic scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’ psychologist character has a breakthrough with blue-collar Boston genius Will Hunting (Matt Damon) by repeatedly assuring him, “It’s not your fault”?

Try to remember technological unemployment really is not your fault. Granted, maybe you could have chosen a more boring and seemingly stable career. Then again, Gen AI is also coming for many white-collar workers who did choose boring and stable careers.

They, like you, may wake up one day soon and find their income has gone, along with any status attached to their previous role. They, like you, will find their lives taking a most unexpected tangent. And they, like you, will have to go back to the drawing board and work out what they want to do with the rest of their lives.