Is AI the Future of Copywriting?

Considering AI for your copy and content? It might be a great fit — or your worst mistake.

 

The pitch is intriguing: AI-generated content that’s already optimized for SEO and created with the touch of a button, saving you time and money. It’s certainly tempting, even for those of us who make a living crafting compelling content. Every wordsmith knows that the hardest part of writing is facing the blank page. Could AI be a content springboard, a sandbox, a place to plow through writer’s block and the first-draft slog?

Why not take advantage of the power and promise of technology?

Of course, it feels somehow shameful for a copywriter to investigate AI. Like I’m creating a logo with just the papyrus font or sending Entenmann’s to the school bake sale in my own dented Tupperware (it’s an old family recipe!). I furtively glanced over my shoulder as I perused the options and finally decided on one with a plethora of positive reviews and consistent ads on my social media.  

I experimented with a few articles and blogs, took a Silkwood-level shower, and am here to answer the question you’ve all been wondering: Is AI the future of content writing?

Let’s take a closer look at how it performed. 

Technical Blog — Verdict: No

I recently wrote a blog on the use of facial recognition technology for employee and customer identification in brick-and-mortar retail. It was part of a larger campaign on applying biometric technology to reduce shrink and improve the customer experience. Like all blogs, it was designed to be purely educational. It was fairly high level and served to explain the benefits of a complex and technical system to an untechnical, though highly educated, crowd. The original piece I wrote and submitted to the client came in just over 500 words and took around two hours, including edits. Would AI create something as good — for less?

The process is pretty simple. I supplied the AI with the topic, purpose, and keywords and prompted it to start writing.

It generated a decent introductory sentence, so I kept clicking and watched as it wrote more. And that’s when it all went sideways.

The program wrote a paragraph on targeted advertising using facial recognition. I can see how it got there, but this piece was about swapping traditional IDs for biometrics, not how to develop personalized ads using facial recognition. I indicated this to the program, and it deleted the copy and wrote more.

On the exact same subject.

I tried to course-correct to IDs, but I couldn’t see an option. I tried changing the keywords. I changed the purpose and subject. I selected and deselected text, only to always wind up in the same loop.

All in all, I spent an hour and a half clicking and re-entering data and didn’t end up with any more than a few usable sentences.

Bottom line: AI lacks the ease of working with an experienced content writer. If the goal is to create something original and targeted, you’re better off with a human pro.

Educational Article — Verdict: No

Next, I tested the AI’s prowess with an educational article. My team recently wrote a piece on how to appropriately train teaching assistants to better serve neurodiverse students. The original piece was just over 1600 words and directed to highly educated, data-driven professionals.

An interesting sidenote: educators, more than almost any other professionals, really love research. When I work with other industries, I often have to peel back the layers and ask SMEs how they know what they know and how they know it matters. So much is so obvious to a certain type of mind but leaves laypeople — aka those who will be reading the content — with spinning heads. Of course, they say, everybody knows that a flibbertigibbet is actually a will o’ the-wisp and a clown, and that’s why 1 +2 = blue llamas. A great copywriter serves as an intellectual bridge between the technical and the practical. 

Educators, on the other hand, want to know where the proof is. Oh, they say, you think X Teaching Strategy helps students? Show me the data, and make sure it’s appropriately referenced in APA so I can present it to the school board — and parents. Imagine if the whole world referenced 1+2 instead of just skipping to the “obvious” blue llamas!

But I digress.

I followed the same process as the biometric blog above and got… a whole lot of nothing. After nearly an hour of entering new keywords and subjects, rejecting the auto-copy, and watching it write more nothing, I gave up. It simply couldn’t generate anything original, much less data-driven, that my audience would find valuable.

Bottom line: AI struggles to analyze and assemble peer-reviewed data and generate something of value to a knowledgeable audience. It wasn’t even helpful as a springboard.

The I-Just-Need-Content-Piece — Verdict: Maybe

Some people just want content for content’s sake. They usually don’t have bad intentions; they’re just very, very busy. Still, they know they need to have some kind of content, some sort of blog, so they just want something about something.    

We do have a client like this. They don’t have time to assemble analytics or do consumer research. They just ask us to write something relevant to their b2c service industry that hits the right SEO buttons.

Since I didn’t have a starting point for this blog, I chose a few keywords and threw in a random topic I thought might be of interest to the business’s prospects. Honestly — the AI created some ok content here. It certainly wasn’t turnkey; the introduction needed a bit more pep, and the CTA wasn’t very compelling. In addition, it didn’t write a flowing, start-to-finish piece but several disconnected paragraphs.

All told, it assembled about 2oo usable words in about ten minutes. Had I wished to use this content, I could have spent about thirty minutes fleshing it out a bit more, speaking to the specific audience, and smoothing the transitions. That would have ultimately saved me about twenty minutes.

Bottom line: Looking to write content for content’s sake? AI might be a great solution to save you time and money. But at what cost? It’s not the end of the world to pepper a blog page with this type of nothing content. In fact, I have some clients who alternate my work with simpler, SEO-focused blogs; of course, I usually give those a quick scrub before publishing anyway. Still, people are pretty savvy (and so are search engines). A page of useless content will soon disappear from search rankings and drop in reader esteem.

 Is AI right for you? It certainly has its place, and I wouldn’t refuse to work with it if a client requested it. But… it’s not the future of content writing. My instinct here is to wax poetic about the human touch; I want to tell you about the indescribable importance of connecting a human to a brand, something no software could accomplish.

That’s true, of course.

However, even within its limited benefits, I think what’s more important to know is that AI copywriting still requires work — it’s not as turnkey and easy as it appears. It simply can’t combine digital marketing savvy and wizard-level wordsmithery as well as a great copywriter can. If you aren’t a digital marketing expert or content writing pro, you’ll still need to hire one to finesse your AI-generated content into something informative and engaging that people really want to read.

 And after all, the importance of informative, engaging content can’t be overstated. It isn’t even how you win the game — it’s the price of admission.

Melissa Garretson is the self-appointed Copy Queen of Oxford & Em, a content and copywriting team specializing in entertaining, actionable copy that converts. Learn more at oxfordandem.com.