Great point, Paula. How is that a bonus for anyone?

Puke is right.

Puke.

The whole thing put me off, Jenn. This mystery person who’s all but promising the writer’s success, the “mulitple thousands” whatever that means, the use of AI to do “most of the work” and the feeling that this is yet another posting where the poster gets rich and the writer gets the shaft.

My take: Those four hours will be spent res-pinning someone else’s work (multiple someones — maybe that’s what they mean by “multiple thousands” 😉 ) into a bastardized version of the original. Let’s hope that person who is about to be grossly underpaid for “four hours” of work understands fair use and copyright law.

I’m fine with the rate on this if we’re talking short-ish blog posts on non-complex topics, which would take an hour or two for even a newer writer. Better than a lot of early-career gigs out there.

But…

1. They don’t mention the word count targets, so there’s no way to estimate what you’re actually earning per hour. Given the AI involvement (which I’m also 100% OK with as long as they aren’t crossing the line and directly posting plagiarized AI-generated content, which it doesn’t sound like they’re planning to do if they’re hiring writers). My concern is they could be over-estimating AI’s efficiency and expecting these to then be very long pieces.

2. The weird ego bit is another red flag, but it does make me wonder who’s behind the site. There are plenty of SEOs and other webmasters already making huge amounts of money with AI content, so they could be experienced enough with this that they’re right. Or they could just be some BS-artist kid who heard this is the answer without fully understanding the AI environment right now, and when they don’t get rich quick with your help, they’ll blame the writer. No way to tell, but if anyone reading this ends up taking this gig, I would love to hear more about what’s going on.

3. The other thing is they mention AI generally. Are they expecting the writer to work with something like the free version of ChatGPT? That would be a problem because it’s already famous for “hallucinating” non-facts, it isn’t connected to the internet, makes up sources, etc. Now, GPT-4 is a completely different story. So are some other specialized tools. They can provide actual source documentation, are much better at vetting facts, and can even give you a list of what needs to be fact-checked before publication if you know how to write ai prompt sequences properly. But those are premium tools, some with limited access. Is this client going to provide, and pay for, that access? I didn’t see that mentioned either.

4. The real cringe moment when I stopped reading the ad completely was when they said it would take 4 hours per article. Just, no. Any client who tells a freelance pro how much time their work should take is not the kind of client you want to work with. Either they’re underestimating and really saying “this is all the time I’m willing to pay for, and if it takes you longer, it must be your fault,” or they’re overestimating and they’ll look for a reason to cut pay later when they realize you’re earning more than the $25 / hr they think you deserve (which is half what I recommend even the newest freelancers charge in the beginning given freelance pay is massively different than employee pay structures with all things accounted for).

So in general, this would fall in what I’d call a low-pro market (which is often mid-level to high in just the types of gigs that are publicly advertised), there are far too many questions to know if this would be a good deal, if it would be an ethical use of AI or not, and if this client would even be a good source to learn about AI as a tool from. But the ego oozing through is hands-down the biggest red flag for me.