4 smart uses of AI for copywriters and content writers (and why it’s a ‘mule’ and a not a ‘muse’)
As a copywriter and content writer I have to talk about the elephant in the room—yep, it’s our friend AI.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sci-fi fan. I write it. I have the Enterprise D from Star Trek the Next Generation tattooed on my arm. There’s nothing I’d like better than to be friends with a helpful android, and teach it our human ways. I wholeheartedly embrace our robot overlords (just covering my back if any of them are reading this).
But is AI the future of copywriting? Are we all going to be replaced? Is all human creativity going down the pan?
I really hope not. Asking an AI to be creative is like designing a robot to eat ice cream for you.
And considering the current capabilities of LLMs (Large Language Models), and their quite glaring limitations—I’m going to say no.
Here’s why I’m chill about chatbots like ChatGPT coming for my job.
Why use a copywriter instead of AI?
Anyone can string a few words together cohesively, right?
And now that platforms like ChatGPT and Jasper have arrived on the scene, it seems even easier for anyone to churn out content with little to no training or experience. They can produce a passable piece of marketing copy quicker than I can write this sentence.
This leaves some professional writers (justifiably) quite worried.
But here’s the thing—mmmm, no.
Just because anyone can do it, that doesn’t make the output actually good. In the same sense that anyone can pick up a digital camera, but it doesn’t make them a professional photographer who you’d want shooting your wedding.
I may be biased, but copywriting, and writing in general, has always been a vastly undervalued skill. And now it’s like It’s the ‘anyone can write’ myth, on steroids.
Platforms like ChatGPT might seem impressive at first glance, but let’s break down what they actually do. LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT aren’t ‘thinking’ or ‘understanding’ in the human sense. They’re pattern-matching on a vast scale, pulling from colossal (sometimes copyrighted, but that’s a whole controversy for another blog post) datasets—effectively learning to mimic human language by predicting the next word in a sequence based on billions of previous sentences.
It’s just mathematics. Very, very clever mathematics.
The result: content that’s only as good as the ‘average’ writer. The lowest common denominator. Writing that is, by its very nature, unoriginal. Repetitive. Generic. It fails to do what marketers want good copy to do—and that’s stand out and grab attention.
Once you know some of ChatGPT’s most commonly overused words and sentence structures, you’ll start spotting AI-written copy from a mile off.
Humans, on the other hand, possess this mysterious thing called creativity—the product of feelings, sensations, consciousness (however you want to define it), life experience and a sense of self.
As human beings, we’ve been telling stories for millions of years. We’ve evolved to do it. Our survival as social and emotional animals has quite literally depended on it.
That goes a lot deeper than just combining words together into the most mathematically pleasing sequence.
Only a human copywriter can:
Ask the right questions to understand what makes your brand or story unique, using context and emotional intelligence.
Empathise with your ideal customer by vicariously experiencing their feelings, relating to them, and using that understanding to ignite new emotions.
Bring their expertise of your particular industry or audience, based on lived experience.
Understand and use subtlety, nuance and humour. Even make the type of mistakes and inconsistencies that read as a human speaking to another human.
Critically analyse a topic to identify biases, stereotypes and the huge array of differing perspectives of humans.
And, fundamentally: connect completely disparate ideas into something new that will make your customers take notice.
There are no shortcuts. We study and refine the skill of copywriting over many years.
That said, full disclosure—like most copywriters, I actually use AI on a near daily basis. As do most of us.
While it can’t replace the skills I’ve acquired over my career (and from a lifetime of telling stories and generally being a human), AI is a tool that can improve my productivity by taking on some of the grunt work, helping me focus on providing more value to clients.
How copywriters can use AI for efficiency
Kickstarting the creative process
Even the most seasoned writers will admit it—staring at a blank page can be daunting. Sometimes the coffee hasn’t hit yet and you just need to get the ball rolling.
With the right input, an AI engine might feed you that single word that could spark an idea for a title, a headline or a tagline. Sort of like an advanced thesaurus.
Or maybe you have one topic and want to generate a hundred ideas for blog post titles or email subject lines quickly. Most of those ideas will be pretty rubbish, banal or off the mark, but one or two might be the trigger for something new that you might not have thought about. And the ones that were rubbish give you an idea of which direction not to go in.
Initial research into a new topic
For subjects that are well covered in its training material, ChatGPT is decent at summarising, in general terms, the key points from a topic or existing information, saving time in the information gathering process.
However (and this is a big ‘however’), since it’s a language processing model and not a research tool, it can often be ‘confidently wrong’ and answers always need to be thoroughly checked for accuracy. At present, it’s best used as a starting point to go off and do more research.
Organising outlines
Like with topic ideation, AI can be useful for structuring ideas into a rough outline for you to then tweak.
Or you might want to run your existing outline through an AI platform to check if there are any points you might’ve overlooked or forgotten.
Creating copy variations and repurposing existing content
AI can be helpful for when you’ve already written a piece of content and you need multiple versions for different purposes—for example, A/B testing or across different formats.
What I’ve found it quite useful for is giving you a quick set of alternative phrases for comparison—but a copywriter’s touch is still needed to polish and refine the output.
