But the sunlight prevailed at Jasper’s GenAI event, where it lightened the mood. Jasper front-loaded the conference with creative presentations, instead of diving right into content marketing and KPIs. The strategy had a soothing effect. A charismatic short-form video creator, Zach King, told his life story through photo slides generated by AI. A famous freestyle rapper, Harry Mack, spun up a four-minute rap based off of 10 words generated by Jasper’s software. Aleah Bradshaw, a slam poet and teacher at Youth Speaks, told the buttoned-down crowd in a powerful soliloquy that art is proof of humanness.

“How much taking and leaving makes something human?” Bradshaw asked. “What’s the balance of input and output a machine must do to make itself alive?”

It’s the question of the era. A more direct version of the question: Is generative AI good enough to replace me at my job? This was the subtext of Jasper’s GenAI event. Software businesses sell software to other businesses to make business more efficient, a point that Rogenmoser underscored when the artsy part of the morning had concluded. “At companies, demands are up and resources are down,” he declared. Mongoose Media “turned to Jasper to help their already amazing team of writers,” Rogenmoser said. Morningstar is “thriving,” using Jasper to churn out SEO content for the company’s digital channels and experiencing a 40 percent increase in content downloads.

This has long been the messaging of techno-optimists, that AI will allow us all to level up. It will lighten the workload and make way for more important tasks or entirely new jobs. Morgan Knox, a bookkeeping and content marketing consultant for trade workers, crowed about tools like Jasper AI and Writesonic while we were both waiting in line to receive AI-generated Valentine’s Day poems. She not only uses these tools herself, but teaches painters, plumbers, and even professional Christmas light designers how to write compelling ads for their businesses.

“Before this, they were outsourcing a lot of their content creation, but it wasn’t always done well,” Knox said. “This lets them bring it back in house. And you can train the AI on an avatar, like, ‘What kind of contract work is Sabrina the soccer mom looking for?’ As a consultant, this kind of profile-building would normally take me weeks, but the amount of information you can get in a short amount of time is incredible.” 

I asked Knox whether she thought these apps were good enough to replace human writers, despite the tendency of these apps to “hallucinate” false information. She paused to think. 

“I think it’s going to raise the bar so substantially for how businesses are going to show up in advertising that if you don’t improve your language, you’re going to be left behind. Like, you might have one writer who oversees other writers using the AI, instead of five to 10 writers,” she said. “But with the amount of people retiring out and with the lowering birth rate, there might be some equilibrium.”