Elizabeth Hanes 0:07
Welcome to The RN2writer Show where we help nurses and other health care professionals become freelance writers. I'm your host, Elizabeth Hanes, RN, and today we're talking about isn't AI taking all the writing jobs? Lots of nurses today are expressing skepticism to me about becoming a freelance writer because of all the chatter chat chat about AI tools like chat GPT, Google Bard, and others, which they think will be quote taking over the writing industry imminently. This is in a word false. But I understand why people are unfamiliar with how health writing works, might think this is going to be the case. The media is filled with stories about artificial intelligence, writing software that can do seemingly amazing things. Like crank out an 800 word article on breast cancer in just a few seconds. What human writer can compete with that, right? But what you might be hearing in the media isn't the whole story. Let me explain to you how the health writing industry really works, including the shocking secret about what our clients really buy from us. Spoiler alert, it's not exactly are writing skills. Let me start by giving you a little history of the evolution of health writing. As nurse writers, we create all kinds of content from health articles, like the ones you see on sites like everyday health, to white papers on arcane healthcare topics, to web pages for a health system. Historically, the vast majority of health writers have not been clinicians. Most of this writing has been done by professional journalists, or just regular folks who decided to become freelance writers because they loved writing. These people have no clinical background whatsoever. And that became somewhat problematic. In the mid 2000s, Google took steps to prioritize health content written by actual health professionals over content written by non clinicians, because as you may remember, the World Wide Web was flooded with inaccurate or even misleading health content, written by people with little knowledge of actual pathophysiology. At that time, editors and clients started looking for clinicians, nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and so on to produce content because Google would prioritize it in the search listings. This approach was not only better for the client, but also for the general public, who was reading health content now written by people who actually understand things, like how to parse a research, study and interpret it for patients. Fast forward to today. Now, AI tools can write health content, too. There's no disputing that. I myself asked chat GPT to write a 500 word article on recovery after mastectomy. And the program turned that article out in about one minute. But here's the thing. It wasn't a great article by human reader standards. For instance, it did not take a conversational tone, which is prized by content marketing clients. And the AI was unable to incorporate any research references newer than about 2021 Because it doesn't possess that information in its database. However, none of that actually matters. Here's the mind blowing part of this. No matter how cleverly AI strings together sentences, the fact is, AI has never sat in an exam room holding a sobbing patient as I have, as you have. And this is what editors and clients actually pay us for. Sure, our clients want us to possess good writing skills, but they primarily hire nurse writers because of our deep knowledge of human health and the healthcare industry. That's what holds great value to them. Let that sink in for a moment. Remember how I said that companies shifted away from having journalists and non clinicians write content in favor of having nurses and other health professionals do it? Well, that hasn't changed. Google and other search engines still prioritize health content written by clinicians over content written by others. That won't change with the advent of AI In fact, many healthcare marketing agencies, magazines and other clients have already inserted clauses into their contracts forbidding freelance writers from using AI to create any of the content. This is why now is still the best time in history for nurses and other health care professionals to become freelance writers. The field remains wide open. I hope this episode eases your mind and clarifies why you need not fear the rise of generative AI. In a future episode, I'll talk more about how you can actually leverage AI tools to make you more efficient as a writer. That's it for this episode of The RN2writer Show. Don't forget to click that subscribe button here on Facebook and follow us on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And until next time, keep pitching
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
