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I remember feeling a wave of joy having received glowing feedback and prompt payment for a week-long copywriting project. It was my first ‘proper gig’ — which gave me the push I needed to make copywriting my full-time source income.
Sitting back drinking a coffee in town, I flicked through Twitter where I read an article about Artificial Intelligence (AI); I was shocked to learn that The Washington Post was already using AI to write basic news articles…
(That ‘wave of joy’ was murdered in a heartbeat.)
How typical. After quitting a job in a thriving industry and typing my fingers off to start a new one from scratch it was already looking like my job was about to be wiped out.
I asked some questions in copywriting groups on Facebook but nobody seemed too concerned about AI taking their jobs (…yet). They said things like, “Content is different it’s easy to write basic content”, “AI won’t be able to write copy for a long time.”
Since then, I avoided AI articles but a few months ago I went to BrightonCRO (a great event for marketers) where Mel Henson, Head of Creative at AWA Digital, blew my mind with her talk on AI copywriting.
AI is already writing copy and it’s MUCH better than I’d expected…
I was shocked to hear that there are already companies out there selling AI copywriting services. So is the current state of AI-written copy mind-blowingly incredible compared to human’s? No. Is it terrible? No. I’d give the examples I saw a solid 7 out of 10; you really wouldn’t know they were written by AI.
Why copywriters should be worried about AI
There’s a company named Phrasee, specialising in AI-written subject lines. The speaker told us it took a human copywriter she knew 47 attempts to beat just one of the AI’s email open rates.
Another company, named Indix, is already writing product descriptions for huge e-commerce stores. Their technology is insane: it crawls the web for reviews, questions and any other info it can find, and then it pulls it all together to write the copy.
