Generative AI is the future of content design

Let ChatGPT come for my job

These days it’s impossible to spend more than a few minutes on LinkedIn before stumbling across a post about generative AI. As content designers, all too often our partners think we just write copy so it’s not surprising that people are feeling afraid of the future. After all, if ChatGPT can write strings, will there still be a place for us?

Absolutely. But the content design landscape is going to change.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

In my role, I work with technologies like ChatGPT for conversational design every day. We’re already using AI for our chatbots but generative AI opens up entirely new possibilities. We’ll be able to shift away from laboriously created conversation trees and create conversational experiences that feel, well, human. For our users, it’s going to be a huge win. But it’s hard not to see the impact on content design.

ChatGPT and other generative AI are never going to replace content design entirely. In fact, it takes a huge amount of work to properly design and implement generative AI. Content designers will be at the core of that work. But there’s no escaping the reality that generative AI will reduce the number of people we need to do the writing itself.

In some ways, I think that’s a good thing. We never wanted to be seen as copywriters and as we continue to leverage ChatGPT for that work, it will help our partners understand the core value we bring. We are architects and designers, and that will become more apparent as we leverage generative AI for more of the writing itself.

But what does that mean for our community? It’s going to require us to adapt and embrace generative AI for how it can help us and to clearly communicate where it can’t. We need to have a point of view about the evolution of our role and the value we bring to generative AI experiences.

Some content designers thrive on the writing itself — for those content designers, I’d ask them whether content design is the direction they really want to go in. Do they want to be experience architects who implement generative AI? Because that’s the direction I think we’re moving in.

While we may not need as many content designers in this new paradigm, that doesn’t mean we won’t need content designers working in new ways. We’ll need people to engineer prompts and implement generative AI in ways we can barely even imagine today. And no one is better suited to these roles than content designers.

In a year or two, many content designers may have other titles — and that’s okay. Rather than fearing generative AI and trying to argue against its value, we can position ourselves as the discipline leading the charge.