I'm going to go out on a limb here. My answer to the title question is, "Damned right we should fear them!"
I've been reading as much as I can - and thinking- about this relatively new development. Commentators appear to be trying to be balanced in their assessments, from what I read and hear. But for those same commentators in ink or pixels, and for all other writers, I can only see the apocalypse coming. Alright, maybe apocalypse is too strong a word, but danger certainly lurks for all of us.
What's There to Fear?
Plenty, and here's how I come to my assessment. Chatbots have only very recently entered the public forum. They've been in development for more than a decade now, probably a lot longer when you look at all the precursor advances in computing and coding that contributed to its lineage. So if you're only looking at the current products that are being touted in the media, you have myopia.
Current chatbots are neonates, not even at the toddler stage. This technology will grow exponentially with stronger algorithms, more powerful computers and investors lined up to profit from the next big thing. Ezra Klein, writing in The New York Times, addresses these concerns in an interesting and sobering article.
What does that mean for us? It means bots will put out ever smarter, ever more accurate and deeper research and writing, performed in seconds. That writing may not win a Pulitzer (then again, who knows?), but may be acceptable to 80% of readers. After all, recent reports show that most people shown chatbot passages could not differentiate them from human writing on the same subject. Scary.
Even more frightening is the way chatbots will be embraced by political enemies, extremists, foreign countries, scammers and other nefarious actors. They will inevitably send out torrents of chatbot produced hate mail, misinformation, racist, anti-semitic, anti-democratic missives, all well-written and backed by fake documentation. But I'm diverging.
Yes, I know that academics are already working on ways to defeat chatbots. Given how many computer hacks occur every year, even on high security government databases, I'll take bets on which side will win the chatbot war.
A Personal Story
Look, I don't want to be entirely negative here but, as the famed philosopher Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again. Some of you older writing veterans can remember when we were paid $2 or more per word even for lengthy articles. This new generation of writers are hard working, but are paid peanuts for churning out Internet articles, for example.
Thing is, I've seen this before. As some of you know, I'm also a professional nature and fine art photographer. I used to sell my images to major magazines for covers and to illustrate my writing. That actually paid good money. Then one day I opened Time magazine and saw a credit for one of the images inside that read iStock. I had no idea what that was, so I called my editor at Fortune. He told me that the magazine had paid something like 50 cents for use of the image and that I'd better find a new revenue stream because that image purchase announced the future. Within months selling stock photos went belly up.
It may seem like I'm a doomsayer, but I'm actually bullish on writing as a career, avocation, or to fill a need for self-expression. But be prepared. We will undoubtedly find niches where bots underperform. We will find readers who cherish the written word... by humans that is, and are willing to pay for the experience (thank you, Substack!).
We will write fiction that a bot cannot imitate because good human writing speaks to our hearts, to our emotions, to senses that a bot cannot experience. Non-fiction will always have a market because the subjects are so varied and often require a human mindset to analyze the data in ways the rest of us can comprehend. So, stay the course and remember to exercise your writer muscles.