Is This My Job Now? Navigating the World of Copywriting in the Age of AI
As a copywriter, how can I not be at least slightly threatened by advances in AI technology? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t blink at the insanely quick adoption of ChatGPT into the world of marketing. Am I surprised by how quickly people have picked it up and claimed to be experts in it? Not at all. And some of them might actually be experts in some sense of the word — as much as is possible this early in the game. So I’m not saying that everyone claiming to be an expert is completely full of it. I’m just wondering exactly where that leaves the rest of us…
I strongly believe that the only way to move forward in this space right now is to learn as much as possible about how AI works and how I can best leverage it to do my job better. But at the same time, I refuse to trust the technology blindly and am therefore taking my time to refine my process for how to best use it in my day-to-day work. But while I’m taking my time exploring how I can use it and, more importantly — how I want to use it to elevate my work — there are marketers out there who are jumping right in without giving it a second thought.
Am I being too cautious? I personally don’t think so. There are tech leaders out there who think we need to pause and think carefully about how the technology could negatively affect the world in the very near future. So I feel like my skepticism is warranted. But I also wonder if I’m missing the boat. Should I be going all in? Or am I right to dip my toes in a bit before going under?
How Much Should Copywriters Leverage AI?
When a client requests that I use AI to do my job faster at the expense of the quality of content created, I’ll admit that my heart hurts a little. While I understand the compromise in the name of efficiency, it still feels a little bit…wrong. Can I let AI write something for me, and will it be something that serves a purpose at its bare minimum? Sure. But is that the type of service I want to be known for offering? Absolutely not.
So, how do you tell a client that you can do what they’re asking but that you also can’t be responsible for the mediocre results that follow? You might argue, “As a copywriter, you can take what AI spits out and make it better, so ultimately, you can control the end result.”
Sure. But have you ever tried to edit or rewrite something that just really missed the mark? Something I think non-writers (as in people that don’t write every day for a living) don’t always understand is that editing is rarely a quick process, especially when it involves taking another person’s writing — or in this case, a machine’s writing — and turning it into something worth reading.
Yes, I can control the final output, but when the base of the copy isn’t great, to begin with, it becomes a bit more challenging to do my job.
Editing Copy Written By AI
When editing a piece of writing written by a human writer, the first step is to take the time to understand what message the writer was trying to convey — and whether they did that successfully. However, when editing something written by AI, the first step is often determining whether the question asked was answered and, if so, whether it was answered in the best possible way.
AI writing tools essentially just spit out the right words in the right places because that’s what they’re taught to do, so it’s important to read the output and assess how well it completed the assignment before doing a line-by-line edit.
Here’s my basic process for editing content written by an AI tool:
Asses the output. The first step in editing something written by AI is to ensure that the content it created makes sense AND is relevant to your audience. Sometimes AI misunderstands the question or simply fails at the assignment. Even if you asked a very detailed question (or questions), a human writer — someone who understands the content’s purpose and its audience— is the only one who can decipher how well this was done.
Fill the gaps. Next, If there are gaps in the messaging or questions left unanswered, the human writer must fill them in. And the style of the human writer vs. the machine writer is likely going to be very different. So the human writer now needs to make changes throughout the content to avoid mismatched writing styles throughout the piece.
Check for plagiarism. Next, the human writer has to check for plagiarism because the AI tool sometimes creates sentences that exist elsewhere on the internet. Sometimes this requires the writer to rewrite phrases that make complete sense simply because they’ve been used a million times and were potentially scraped from another piece of content. This can be tricky and sometimes may result in sentences that sound strange because the writer tried to say the same thing using a slightly different string of words.
Check grammar and spelling. Next, the human writer will need to check for grammar and spelling issues. If writing for SEO, the writer will have to be careful not to remove long-tail keywords that are written in a specific order, even if there is a less wordy way to say something. It will be up to the human writer to determine if the long-tail keywords are too awkward to keep in the content or if they can stay.
And sometimes, even after doing all of this, the end result is still a mediocre article that serves no other purpose other than helping a website to show up higher in the search engines.
Is This What a Copywriter’s Job is Now?
As a creative and problem solver, I am capable of going through all of these steps to create content using AI technology. And I believe it will absolutely make the writing process faster, but is that really better? Is this really the better way to write content?
New tools are fun to experiment with, and it sure feels like it can make a lot of people’s jobs easier. But I wonder if will it actually produce a better result? For a client? For their audience? For the Internet? And how many writers out there are skipping most of the process outlined above and just copying the AI output and publishing? I cringe at the thought.
While I do believe that the ability to write more content in a shorter period of time can be a good thing, it does need to be done carefully. And my love for writing has always been about communicating things that are worth reading. So, what I’m struggling with at the moment is — just because we can create content with AI faster, should we?
[This content is 100% written by a human — on an elliptical machine at the gym, for that matter.]
