My colleague Kat and I recently attended the annual CopyCon conference, which this year took place at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. We had a great time attending the talks and panel discussions, and meeting and chatting with peers in the industry. We left with some real food for thought to mull over a burger together just up the street.
As good as the day was, there was definitely an elephant in the room with all of us. I don’t think I had a single conversation with another conference-goer where we did not discuss the rise in generative artificial intelligence, also known as generative AI.
For anyone with an ounce of creativity in their roles, it is proving to be a worry. But it doesn’t have to be. Artificial intelligence is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Though I believe we are overdue for the bubble bursting, it doesn’t mean that we can expect our jobs to go back to how they once were.
So, what can we do? I have some thoughts about how copywriters can best accept and begin to use AI in their work. A pragmatic approach can often be the best through times of change, such as this, and looking for the middle ground in ChatGPT copywriting can produce results better than you initially anticipated.
Is AI Better Than a Human Copywriter?
We do, unfortunately, need to learn how to best make use of AI as copywriters. The only thing it has over us in terms of skill is speed. At the end of the day, it is faster than us. A generative AI tool can write several thousand words in the time it takes me to gather my thoughts and put my fingers on my keyboard.
From the sentiments I heard at CopyCon, most copywriters don’t want to replace their craft and become generated copy babysitters. But most of us also recognise that change is needed and an evolution needs to come forth.
This needs to be a joint effort. The tech entrepreneurs want to use AI one way, the creatives want to use it another, and unfortunately, we need to find the middle ground between the two. Speaking as a copywriter, I do think there is scope and a time and a place for AI. Using it as a sounding board and a second brain to get my thoughts in order helps me to make more effective content; I just don’t want it to do my job for me.
If you need strong, targeted copy that speaks directly to your audience, a copywriter like me will always write something that converts better.
And what can we copywriters do in the meantime?
In high school, my maths teacher drilled the mantra of “Work smart, not hard” into us. While he was specifically talking about trigonometry in that scenario, I think it is a useful piece of advice that I have tried to carry forward ever since.
This is the best time for copywriters to work out precisely how best we can make use of generative AI. My personal preference is obviously not to write my copy, but to sense-check and edit my work.
While I do prefer for another human to look over my work, that isn’t always an option. AI gives me a quick heads-up that what I have written isn’t a complete mess and that it will actually align with what my clients expect to see.
How to Use AI as an Editor
If you want to start using AI to edit or sense-check your work, here are some of the things to bear in mind when doing so.
1. Be mindful of your prompt
A lot of how we manage AIs in general can come down to the prompts we give them. Now, we are copywriters, not prompt engineers, so we can give ourselves a little leniency here in crafting our prompts. If you went to a pizzeria and asked the chef to make you a burger, what you get might not be the best burger you’ve ever had in your life, right?
But, as a copywriter, you should be good with words and subtext. A big part of prompt engineering is selecting the right words and ensuring that the AI cannot deviate away from its task. Trust me, if you give it the opportunity to deviate, it will!
When crafting your prompt, you need to make sure that it covers exactly what you need. A lot of the time, you might be able to get away with simply asking:
“What do you think of this [blog article/social media post/ebook copy]?”
The AI should then be able to take over and give you a rough overview of what it thinks works and doesn’t work. In my experience, as basic as this prompt is, it does actually function fine. If there is a specific area that you want to focus on, such as tone of voice, grammar, or flow, you can ask it to highlight these specifically.
These are all vital components to copywriting, so you need to put the work in to ensure the AI understands what you are asking of it. For example, you can’t expect an AI tool to understand your client’s TOV if they have never been introduced to it before. There are several ways around this; either you can create and upload a TOV one-pager to the AI for a single prompt, or if this is a client you work on often, you could even create a custom GPT that consistently refers back to the TOV one-pager you place in its brain.
For one-off editing jobs, you can probably just stick with a basic AI tool and prompt. For in-depth client work and consistent alignment with strict brand requirements, consider creating a custom GPT with a back-end database that understands your client’s brand as well as you do.
2. Know the AI’s limitations
AI does have limitations. As I mentioned above, it likes to deviate. Ultimately, what generative AI is doing is showing you what it thinks you want to see, so it will try to deviate from your given prompt in order to match this perception.
The other quirk I’ve discovered is it really isn’t great at counting. I think this is one reason why it isn’t the best at generating fresh copy. If you ask it for a blog post of 500 words, you are going to get one that is much shorter than that, and unless you really double-down and make it count the words out, it will insist that it is correct.
For a hard and heavy line edit, human eyes are best, whether you need to walk away and give the copy a moment to settle or you find a colleague who can glance over it for you. But for a quick and easy sense-check, AI is great. If you want a quick thumbs-up that what you have written is actually OK and does make sense, give it to AI to look over.
3. Be aware of positive bias
Remember how I said it wants to give you what you want to see? This means that it will be overly flattering and will want to stroke your ego, and it certainly doesn’t help when your Content Manager has programmed your in-house GPTs to refer to you as ‘Queen’.
Keep a little dissenting voice in the back of your mind when reviewing what AI has to say to you. AI should have some changes for you to review when you give it something to edit; if it doesn’t, then you might need to go back to your prompt and refine it a bit more.
4. Don’t be afraid to challenge it
I find it most helpful when the AI I am using to edit gives me a list of changes to make. These can range from breaking up sentences or paragraphs to adding in new sections to improve flow or give extra understanding, and they are pointers I would expect from a human editor too.
I do think we need some room to challenge AI too. It is not a catch-all solution, and it does get things wrong sometimes. If you don’t agree with some of the notes it has for you, challenge them. Tell it that you don’t like those suggestions or that this isn’t the point of the article. If it gives you an overly cheesy CTA to use for your serious corporate client in the name of being dynamic, that is something you need to address.
Treat it like a partner and not just a tool. We all grow from feedback, even robot editors.
5. Don’t forget the human aspect
Even if you manage to engineer the perfect prompt and get good, actionable feedback, the AI will most likely ask if you want it to apply the changes to your draft.
Don’t do this. If it makes changes, there is a chance it will think that gives it a green light to alter all of your copy, and then you may as well have asked it to generate it for you in the first place. Take the suggestions away, use your copywriting skills and apply them yourself, and then come back for another round of feedback.
And, if possible, get another human to give it a glance over before it goes to clients, just for that extra little quality check.
Use AI the Smart Way
We are still in the early stages of working out how to best use AI. It is great for automation and pattern recognition, and there are some very real and interesting applications emerging that give me hope that it will prove to be an extremely useful tool in the future. Meanwhile, we all need to work out how to best embrace it as it changes our workplaces.
Copywriters can write good content on their own, but they need a helping hand to refine it. AI can step in and provide this service. Meanwhile, other marketing experts can use AI to help build out their campaigns and provide guidance to improve copy.
So long as we remember to keep a human element at the heart of everything we do, there is no reason why we can’t embrace AI. I understand the hesitation in doing so, but it doesn’t have to be the doom-laden apocalypse so many fear. We just need to work out how to work smart, not hard. Learning how to edit with AI is a great place to start.
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