Do Copywriters Need AI? Or does AI Need Copywriters?

Copywriting AI

Asking AI to be creative is like asking your food mixer to make you a cake. It’s the ingredients you add – and those you leave out. The exact amounts, the time, the speed, and your tastebuds, that make all the difference. So do copywriters actually need AI?

When we prompt an AI for creative writing, we’re asking the impossible.

The only way to get creative, human copy from an AI is for an experienced copywriter to shape it. Which takes time and skill.

No prompt-and-go

With AI copy, you can’t just ‘prompt and go’. Unless you’re happy with generic, uninspiring copy.

Left unedited, something is always off with AI copy.

It could be the tone. Or the syntax. It could even be the information. (Chat GPT is well known for ‘hallucinating’ information. Oops…)

You’d think that no one would want lifeless, factually incorrect copy. But some companies are so caught up in the AI hype, they’re in danger of getting exactly that.

Fit for human consumption?

When you choose the cheap, coin-operated words of AI over an experienced copywriter you take a risk. You could be putting out words that neither move people nor have sound foundations. AI can’t decide if its writing is fit for human consumption or fact-check itself. You need the bright eyes of an experienced copywriter for that.

Removing human writers from the writing process not only stops quality control, it snuffs out the energy that makes writing worth reading. And if it isn’t worth reading, what’s the point of it?

A false economy

If you’re a content farm churning out clickbait blogs, like ‘This Ancient Health Hack Doctors Don’t Want You To Know!’ or ‘Couple Call POLICE After Adopting What They THOUGHT Was A Pig’ – then cheap AI copy is probably what you’re after.

Let’s face it, readers aren’t discerning about this kind of content.

However, the idea of quality writing at bargain-basement prices is a false economy. AI will never attain the synaptic heights of human intelligence. Memories, personality, morality, and irony all require feats of biological processing a machine could only dream of. If it could dream.

It’s these traits that grab the hearts and minds of readers. What makes good, human writing a valuable commodity worth paying for.

If you can’t be bothered to write it, why should anyone be bothered to read it?

As Stephen King puts it; writing is ‘telepathy’. A transmission of thoughts from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader – a mental connection between two humans. When AI has written something, it feels like some cold entity is trying on a human suit.

Copywriting: it’s a human thing

The quality of copy an agency or copywriting studio puts out is crucial. Sure, as copywriters, we use AI as a tool. But we’d never send raw AI copy to our clients. We don’t even send lightly edited AI copy to them. It’s too obvious and it short-changes them and their audience.

When clients pay for humans they should get humans. In the world of professional copywriting no one should be exposed to unedited AI copy without their knowledge.