ChatGPT has, rightly, shaken up the technical writing practice. If you are a technical writer and aren’t worried about ChatGPT, wake up!
For those who don’t know what ChatGPT is, you should search the internet and check out this fabulous technology where you can type in a question, and it replies in plain language without sending you to a webpage.
So what happens to technical writers once AI begins to guide users on how to use a product or complete a task?
We have been here before, haven’t we? When Guttenberg invented the printing press, when Henry Ford came up with the assembly line, and when robots and automation took over most of the manual labor in factories. Our reaction to these technologies has been consistently naïve and predictable. Everyone begins to talk about job losses and the need to protect a practice.
Such paradigm-shifting technologies do one of two things – grow the industry or force people upstream. Both these outcomes are welcome and necessary.
People (read scribes) saw Guttenberg’s printing press as dangerous to their jobs. But far from it, the printing press led to more books and increased readership. Overall, it grew the market many times over. The same with Ford’s assembly line; it led to more cars, which led to more jobs, not fewer. Another benefit of such technologies is to make these products more affordable. They also move human intervention upstream. For instance, computer animation made it easier to make animated films. It freed animators from the drudgery of doing multiple sketches to spend more time building the narrative. This led to better movies with more complex storylines.
AI will do the same. It will free us from the manual labor of writing content and push us to focus on making the UI text and experience better. It pushes us upstream. It will mean that we must upgrade our skills and focus on the workflow at the product design and development stage rather than writing about how to do something after the fact.
The moment when user manuals written by technical writers become a thing of the past is still a few years away, so this is the time to up skill. But if you think it is not coming or that you can stop the oncoming train, then think again.
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