Writing marketing copy and brand content · Contested (since 2023)

A study of an online freelance market found that within months of the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, writing was the occupation whose postings and earnings fell most, and by the first quarter of 2026 an audit of 55,400 web articles put the share written mostly by machine at 49.9 percent.

The volume trade is gone. Product descriptions, category pages, newsletter filler and search bait are now produced by machine at a cost that no freelance rate can meet, and half the new articles on the open web appear to be machine written. Two things keep the question open. The measurement rests on detectors that disagree with each other and that flag edited human prose, so the exact share is unsettled, and the same audit found the trend flat since early 2025 rather than climbing. What has not been ceded is the line that a brand can be held to: the claim a regulator will read, the joke that can end a career, the sentence someone has to sign off on before it goes out in the company's name.