A Note On Ai In The Watch Editorial Community

The world of watch journalism is changing.

Things are going a little more iRobot and a little less iHuman, if you know what I mean. Ai has well and truly taken over our lives, and in terms of jobs it’s going to make redundant, ‘writer’ is at the top of the list. What takes me three solid days to write, ChatGPT can do in 20 seconds flat. Feed it a press release and boom, a well written, if a little robotic sounding article, ready to publish. Some see this as a massive step forward, “It will free us up to do what we want to do!”, being one of the prevailing arguments. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful or dismissive of the new technology, I ask myself what if what I want to do is write?

What are we sacrificing here?

Writing is therapy for me. I’m forced to think critically about myself as I put words on the page. There’s nowhere to hide weak ideas or overzealous justifications in the written word. My stories are my brain on show, so they had better be good. I use writing to remove confusion and gain clarity on my opinions, it’s a largely selfish thing, and the fact that people read this stuff still amazes me. The point is, where are we if we don’t have this process of refinement, organisation and mental exercise? I think It’s a good question, and one that many writers will be asking themselves if they haven’t already.

The Value Is In The Process

Why do we love watches so much?
Is it because they look cool, impress our friends, or make us feel good inside? Maybe, but let me ask you this, if I were to say to you that I had a machine that could print out whatever Patek Philippe you wanted. Push a button and out pops a Nautilus, a 5980, an Aquanaut Travel Time for example. You still have to pay for it of course, but instead of waiting for people to make it with their hands, my machine prints it out, atom by atom, perfectly in about ten minutes. Would that watch feel the same on your wrist? Yes, it’s the same. But would it feel the same in your soul? Perhaps not.

What I’m getting at here is that we value things differently based on the effort that was put into creating it. That’s why we value a hand made watch more than a mass-produced one. Even though the latter is probably going to be more accurate and reliable. This is true with many things.
It’s a little cliché, but the saying ‘It's about the journey, not the destination’ rings true here. We as humans draw the most value from the process of creation, and with AI, we’re loosing that.

Ai And Watch Editorial

I won’t lie here. I’ve thought about using ChatGPT to write articles in the past. Heck, I probably would have published 10x more stories if I did. But even though it’s getting better every day, the test articles I gave it left me feeling empty.
I missed the struggle, the friction, and the pressure that comes with squeezing your brain like a dried up orange to extract a drop of creativity. Every story I write makes me happy not because I get to publish it to the world, although that is nice, but because of the growth I’ve had to go through to write it. It’s all about the process, and I think my readers can feel that.

I don’t look down upon publications that are using it, but I do think those that do will lose something special. They will lose their humanity, their struggle, and their magic. When you become results obsessed and metric focused, you miss out on the opportunity to grow as people and as companies. I worry that as more and more people use it as a writing tool, essentially replacing flesh and blood writers, we will become stagnant as an industry. Regurgitating content over and over again until everything sounds the same.

We can't let the creative process die. I won't let it.

Cya in the next one x.

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