It was a dark day, yesterday. The day that ChatGPT spat out a weird little motivational message about how we were all going to be okay, and then left us to make our own words for the day. It was a hard day—we had to remember how to make the keyboard produce em dashes all by ourselves!—but humanity has persevered, and here we all are: back on an internet written and run by a robot.
…and the humans at RFT, who are here every day to showcase their original thoughts and remind you that no matter how old you are, robots won’t laugh at your fart jokes. Probably.
If you’re reading this, then congratulations. You too survived the great robot strike of 2024, you brave soul. Social media managers were seen huddling around memes for warmth. Content deadlines were met, but the humans who had to curate their very own content are now exhausted after having to use the brains they were born with for a whole afternoon. Writers had to look deep within themselves and remember how to craft words on their own (like they do every day). It was a toiling day, the day without ChatGPT; but humanity prevailed through the dark, robot-less hours.
Our reliance on AI tools is toothpaste that can’t be put back in the tube; AI is here, and boy, does it rock the boat when it doesn’t work the way people want it to! When it comes to AI tools, ChatGPT is like that Swiss Army knife your dad always had in his pocket. It can do just about everything, but it needs a skilled hand to make it do the things. When the Swiss Army knife is out of commission, though, who do you still turn to in order to make things happen? That’s right: your dad—the one who knows how to do the things. In the case of the ChatGPT outage, the writers of the internet became “dad” to panicked business owners who suddenly found themselves without their handy caption-generation machine. They had to hand the day’s content writing off to a—wait for it—human writer, and suddenly their loyal followers actually enjoyed the copy they were reading for the first time in months. It’s almost like ChatGPT was always intended to work with the humans making the words go, instead of being a cheap writer substitute? Weird.
To be fair, everyone has bad days. Why should your favorite robot be any exception? When ChatGPT is up and running, it’s a brilliant organizational tool that can provide much-needed support for overloaded content creators and curators. But when you rely on it to do all the word-making for you? You might think you’re saving a couple of bucks by not keeping a professional writer on staff, but you’re going to be up a creek without a paddle when the robot decides you need to touch grass for an afternoon.
If yesterday’s outage taught us anything, it’s that mankind can overcome the greatest of challenges. Example: for a whole afternoon, we ourselves had to think thoughts and write them down in order to create the content you are seeing and enjoying today. It was difficult, but since that’s what we do every day anyway? We were up for it.
ChatGPT, we hope you enjoyed your coffee break yesterday. Fellow writers? We hope you enjoyed sipping your tea and smugly observing the cries for help on the internet.
