Agency Perspectives on AI, Part 2: Copywriting

“Copywriters should not necessarily be worried about AI, but they should be prepared for the changes and opportunities that AI is bringing to the field of content creation.”

The sentence you just read makes grammatical sense. It also expresses a clear point. But it was not the product of human thinking or human hands. As you might have guessed by now, it was generated by ChatGPT, an AI program whose conversational acumen makes all previous chatbots feel like child’s play.

The prompt that generated the sentence—“Should copywriters be worried about AI?”—easily lends itself to variations based on the potentially affected profession. I replaced “copywriters” with several other occupations, including “news reporters,” “academics,” and (going straight to the point) “human writers,” as well as professionals in fields like coding and engineering.

Each ChatGPT response followed the same basic format. “[Insert profession] should not necessarily be worried about AI, but they should be prepared for the changes and opportunities that AI is bringing to [insert field].”

Each opening sentence was followed by three or four paragraphs covering:

• how “AI is already being used” in the field in question
• the possibility of relevant jobs being automated out of existence
• reassurance that “there will always be a need for human [insert profession]

The template-like repetition of structure quickly takes on an inhuman quality that is simultaneously unsettling and disappointing. This is particularly true of the sentences that seem designed to assuage human concerns over becoming obsolete. “There will always be a need for you” sounds hollow enough coming from another person. It rings even more false coming from a literal bot.

But as with AI-generated visuals, AI-based copywriting is too complex a topic to be wholeheartedly embraced or immediately dismissed. The more sensible position must lie somewhere in between.