AI is coming, there really is no use in running from it.
Artificial intelligence has been in people’s consciousness since the 50s when British mathematician and war hero, Alan Turing, proposed the Turing test for AI.
Through time we’ve seen a number of incredible developments involving machines with everything from building cars to beating chess champions.
In business, cars aside, we have seen great advancements in technology that many doing the job manually at the time would have called ludicrous. I can imagine in the early 1900s many wouldn’t have believed that a car could be mass produced on a moving assembly line. Then watched in disbelief as around 10,000 Ford Model T cars left the factory each day.
As a copywriter I’ve seen my services ‘threatened’ by the introduction of apps like Jasper, and more recently, Chat GPT. Both apps allow you to write a question into a search box and then let it automatically create some copy for you.
For example, you could say ‘write a paragraph for me on copywriters and their immense contribution to those wanting help with the written word, with a human touch that won’t get what you’re writing kicked off Google for spam,’ and it will write you a paragraph of text.
Of course, that’s not a genuine example and you can maybe see my thoughts on AI replacing copywriters, but I hope that you get the gist.
All joking aside it is already a very clever resource and is only going to get more intelligent. If you use it properly then it will help with your writing incredibly. It can create you a list of blog topics in seconds, it can write you a block of text without you thinking and it can do, well, pretty much anything a human writer can – except bring that human flair.
One of my favourite things about my job is talking to people, getting to know their business and them, and then finding out exactly what they want from whatever copy I’m producing.
I then spend the time researching, finding the right words to suit a search engine, and matching the writing to the tone of voice that has been agreed upon/suits that particular business. You just don’t get that with AI – not yet at least.
I’ve had it argued to me that I could create 100 blogs with this kind of service, at a ‘C-grade’ quality and charge a ‘C-grade’ price. Which is all well and good if you can find a customer who wants a C-grade’ product. That’s just not something I either offer or want to offer. I want to do my best with every single piece I write, and if that means spending a little bit more time over something then I will do.
However, I understand people will want that level of fast content, something where they only have to think of a title and the computer does the rest, and that’s great. My only advice with that is that you’ll probably end up spending just as much time checking and editing your work as you would have done writing it yourself. Either that or Google will sense that it’s been written by a bot and penalise you regardless.
All in all, I think it definitely has its uses and as a copywriter I HAVE to find a way to utilise it or end up at risk of being left behind my competitors. But right now, my argument is that to have AI write something is all well and good, but I’d spend so much time re-writing and editing it that I might as well just write it myself.
It’s what I trained for more than 20 years to do, after all.
