What AI might mean for consultants and freelancers

I wrote a large (and, we hoped, financially pivotal) project for a client.

There were going to be a lot of eyes on my work. We knew that. It would include uninformed board members and people from departments not normally involved in (or held accountable for) fundraising.

It was going to be a challenge.

Then ChatGPT joined the party.

I hardly knew what hit me.

My client had fed the copy into ChatGPT and asked it to critique it.

It did so with the verve, energy, and thoroughness of a chipmunk on psychedelics.

It had a lot to say.

A lot. As AI often does.

It had some good points.

And a lot of AI slop. Ranging from wacky hallucinations about things that weren’t really there … to statements of the obvious … to deeply terrible advice.

Typical AI slop. Just wading through it all tried my patience.

Thing is, my client had sent it over in good faith, fully believing it was going to help us improve the project. And, as I said, the AI had a few good suggestions.

I joked with a colleague that I was thinking about having an AI surcharge. The colleague suggested 200%.

Because AI often makes simple things complicated and since you can’t trust it to tell the truth or to be genuinely useful, you have to wade through all the slop it serves up. Which is tedious. A waste of time. Frustrating and annoying. You feel less knowledgeable afterward than you’d been before.

So far, this has only happened to me once. But I think it’s going to keep happening, and likely more often as dependence on AI spreads.

So this post from a freelance editor caught my attention: After Editing Two AI-Assisted Manuscripts, I Rewrote My Client Agreement.

Short version: She now has a 50% surcharge for AI-assisted manuscripts. The poster is a book editor, so her work is quite different from mine. But it’s worth thinking about for all freelancers:

As a human editor, I cannot concentrate for as long on the mind-numbing soulless prose generated by AI. Worse yet, I need to rewrite every word of AI-generated text to ensure that the result is eligible for copyright. That’s at least 50% more work than editing a human-generated manuscript.

(Read the blog. It includes a sample work agreement that deals with the issues that AI can create for freelancers.)

If you are a consultant or freelancer in fundraising (or any other industry), AI will soon become a factor in your work. If it hasn’t already.

I suggest you find fair ways to charge more when AI is involved, both to discourage bad or indiscriminate use of AI and to make sure you are properly compensated for the work you do.

From Marketoonist.

More posts on AI and fundraising.

Over at Moceanic, we’ve built (and continue to refine) an AI fundraising tool. It’s called Copy Koala. It has a great track record of producing superb response in direct mail and email fundraising. It combines powerful training, smart input and prompting, and expert human editing. And the cost to use it is shockingly low. It might be right for your organization. If you have budget and the authority to spend it, consider setting up a quick online meeting with Sean Triner to see if Copy Koala might be right for you.