In the same way that B&Q put all professional plumbers out of work, and Fiiver was the end of all Design Agencies in the UK, ChatGPT is the death toll for Copywriters…right? Obviously not. Calm down everyone, it’s going to be ok.
BUT AI will change copywriting.
I began playing with ChatGPT shortly after it became publicly available in November 2022 and I can promise you that it is one of the best tools I have ever played with, but it is not making me quake in my stylish-yet-affordable boots.
What is ChatGPT?
For anyone who has not heard of this huge evolution in the technological landscape, ChatGPT is an advanced AI language model. It is a chat function allowing for person-to-machine conversations, and its advanced intelligence means you can ask it questions and it produces (usually) pretty accurate answers. This is what is enabling people to write essays, stories, articles and more with no more skill than the ability to ask a question. In other words, someone can ask ChatGPT to “Write me a blog post on cheese made in the UK”, and it will do just that.
It also learns, meaning you can train it to improve its answers – but this takes time, patience, and no small amount of skill!
So why am I so confident that clients will continue to use copywriters, and why has it actually generated more work for me in the last two months?
1. Up-to-date Information
ChatGPT was cut off from the internet in 2021, so if you ask it who is the monarch of Great Britain, it will proudly tell you that it’s Queen Elizabeth. Yes, you can train it with up-to-date information, but you need to know the information first in order to know that the answer is wrong! So the fact-checking is key to successful ChatGPT outputs.
2. Creativity and Emotional Intelligence
There is no denying the utter brilliance that AI possesses. It can create coherent, even clever copy, from very little input. However, it lacks the inherent creativity and emotional intelligence that (most) copywriters provide. Good writers understand the nuances of language, allowing us to adapt our writing style to evoke specific emotions with more finesse than the AI I’ve challenged so far.
If you want to create mass amounts of articles for your blog to ‘fill the void’ – by all means, use ChatGPT and I will show you how! But if you need to drive engagement and build meaningful connections with the people reading the articles, AI is just not quite there yet.
3. Brand Voice
As a copywriter, I can infuse a brand’s personality, tone, and emotions into my work; I can craft a narrative that will resonate with their target audience. Yes, I can teach ChatGPT to speak like your brand. I can feed it the information, the research, and endless examples of great copy in order to fine-tune it to produce great copy, but so far on side-by-side tests, I cannot get it to beat a professional copywriter who has done their due diligence with a Brand Voice guide!
4. Strategic Thinking
This one I heard from an interview with Emily Hirsh – one of AI’s current limitations is its inability to think strategically. Good copywriters and marketers are experienced in strategic thinking and big-picture planning. They understand how to align messaging with a brand’s values and mission, and slowly build a campaign to a desired outcome. AI is very linear – ask and get, it doesn’t do the thinking for you.
5. Contextual Adaptation
Effective communication requires adaptability. Copywriters have the ability to tailor their writing to specific contexts and platforms. They understand the nuances of different mediums, whether it’s writing engaging social media posts, persuasive website copy, or sales emails that convert. Copywriters can adapt their tone, style, and messaging to suit the requirements of each platform, ensuring maximum impact and relevance.
AI Trainer
So how is it creating work for me? I’ve been working with brands and small companies to train their ChatGPT, Wordsonic and other amazing AI technologies to get them to surpass these hurdles and become a truly useful tool for businesses.
For example, using some existing APIs, I have helped an education company trawl its forums for the most common issues and had the now trained ChatGPT to produce articles which answer those questions. The outputs have been shaky and still needed some proofing and editing, but even with that human input, the speed that we can complete the task at now is incredible.
In the end, I think it will be a long time before AI replaces copywriters. I agree with Emily Hirsh that the better these Open Source AI interfaces get, the more expensive that high-quality human written copy will become as it moves into being a premium product.
For now, I’m happy integrating ChatGPT into my services and lets see how far I can take it.
