Hi Reader,
There's a war being fought in the online writing space. On one side are the writers - and their allies - doing their best to demonstrate their value as unique, distinguishable providers of a premium product.
On the other side are the forces doing everything they can to reduce writing to a commodity.
The consequences of the war will be dramatic. If the writers win, we all have an economic future doing what we love to do. If we lose, the value of our product will become so degraded that none of us will be able to earn a living wage as writers.
A commodity vs. a differentiated product
At the heart of this battle is the definition and classification of written work. Will it be a commodity or a differentiated product?
A commodity is a particular kind of product that's bought, traded and sold. Its defining feature is that it has no defining features. In other words, it's almost entirely fungible. One bit of a commodity is much like the next, so that the buyer of the product doesn't much care which item he gets.
For example, a person trading barrels of crude oil doesn't care which barrels of crude oil he has the rights to. He just wants an amount of oil.
A person trading buying or selling gold bars doesn't care which gold bars he buys or sells, so long as he has the amount of gold he was promised.
A differentiated product, on the other hand, is unique. It can't be swapped for another of its kind without changing the nature of what the owner has. No original Picasso painting can be traded for another without affecting the owner.
As a writer, you want to be in a position where your skills and product are recognized as uniquely valuable. You want to be the creator of a differentiated product that is difficult or impossible to easily replicate. If you are, your work will command a much higher price that will be less sensitive to shifts in supply and demand.
Bad clients and ChatGPT
In the recent past, there's been a concerted effort to reduce written work to a commodity. The most egregious examples of this are the Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT.
LLMs ingest massive quantities of human writing so they can output dynamically generated text in response to prompts written by the users of the software. They're basically "word calculators" (shoutout to Adam Conover, who, as far as I know, coined that term) that figure out what word should come next in a sequence.
The problem is that the owners of LLMs don't pay the creators of the data they're trained on, so writers everywhere find ourselves in a position where our work is being used - without our permission - to train the machines that many clients are replacing us with.
Writing is literally being reduced to "tokens" that are being jumbled together with the work of other writers and being spit out as a word salad.
This same attitude has spilled over to some of the people hiring freelance writers, who seem to view writers as totally indistinguishable from one another. To this group of employers, one writer is as good as the next, and the only thing that makes one better than another is a lower price point.
These clients are numerous on platforms like Upwork, where the race to the bottom is especially pronounced. In these environments, it seems that the only thing that matters to (the worst kind of) clients is your ability to work for pennies on the dollar.
How to avoid being commodified
So, how can you avoid becoming just another "token" in a sea of undifferentiated writers and product?
I've found that leaning into what makes me and my background unique is the only solution that works for me.
In my case, that means heavily emphasizing my educational and professional background. For you, it might mean focusing on some other part of your CV or your personal or professional experience that sets you apart from other writers.
For instance, maybe you have:
- Unique and valuable subject matter knowledge in a particular area
- Substantial industry experience or credentials
- Provably superior client management and service skills (and the testimonials to back it up)
- Superior technical writing skills and a singular command of the English language
Or maybe you have all these things in your back pocket.
Whatever you have or do that distinguishes you from the masses is key to convincing clients and readers that they don't need to reduce themselves to using the generic, hallucination-filled messes coming out of the latest Large Language Models.
The definition of irony
You know, it's funny. For years, marketers have been trumpeting the importance of firms using a unique and powerful voice to set themselves apart from the competition. And, what do many of these same firms do when given the opportunity?
They run directly to LLMs and content mills that guarantee their blogs, case studies, PR, press releases, and other public-facing communications will look and sound exactly like all their competitors.
I just don't get it.
Thanks for reading,
Steve
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