Will professional copywriting be replaced by AI?

When ChatGPT – the most widely known form of generative AI – first launched in November 2022, it’s fair to say it caused a bit of a hoo-ha. Suddenly, nothing seemed certain any more, at least not in terms of the written word. How could we know if the article we were reading, the TV series we were watching, or the song we were listening to had been written by a living, breathing human and not some AI bot in heaven knows where? Suddenly, writers of anything from marketing materials to presidential speeches were worried that their livelihoods – not to mention the integrity of their professional copywriting – might be at risk. So, now some 18 months later, was their concern justified?

The short answer? Yes and no.

After a tsunami of articles predicting the end of (this professional copywriting) life as we know it, it seems that a more balanced view is prevailing. Currently, ChatGPT is great for producing first drafts of all sorts of content and documents. But it’s not yet quite good enough for the nuances that a human brings to copywriting. ChatGPT’s limitations make the wholesale ditching of humans as writers seem unlikely, for now anyway. The great benefit of AI is that it makes producing a first draft of almost any type of content so much quicker. You simply provide instructions, or copy and paste or upload examples of content that you want it to emulate. You can include your own notes or links to your website and ask it to draw on the tone and style of documents that you upload to your GPT or to your company’s website. This helps the output created by ChatGPT to reflect the ‘voice’ of your business. ChatGPT will draw on content available on the web to produce your content. And this is where you need to be careful. For real-time data to be included, you need a paid subscription. For the free versions, GPT-3.5 goes up to January 2022; GPT-4 goes up to December 2023 and GPT-4 is October 2023. In a LinkedIn article, FRACK Technologies summed up other disadvantages as including:

Inaccuracies and ambiguities

Closer inspection of many texts that at first glance seem plausible are in fact incorrect and/or riddled with nonsensical content – apparently a common problem in language models and referred to as ‘hallucination’.

Plagiarism

Anything generated by ChatGPT runs the risk of plagiarising someone else’s writing or research.

Ethics

Is it right to use AI such as ChatGPT at all? What about copyright infringement? And should it ever be used as a substitute for services requiring human interaction, like customer service?

What does ChatGPT get right?

The same LinkedIn post balanced the negatives with some positives, including:

Time savings

ChatGPT is certainly fast, writing in seconds what a human could take hours to conjure up.

Advanced technology

Subscription-based ChatGPT produces text of superior quality, making it difficult to know that AI was involved at all.

Great way to learn

You can ask ChatGPT about something you’ve written and then compare the differences. Likewise, you can ask it to translate something very technical into something easy to understand and rewrite, making learning faster and more enjoyable.

Improve quality

ChatGPT can improve overall language or content. You supply the basic text and ChatGPT can zhoosh it up.

Open to change

Users can give feedback about responses, helping to improve results. And, as newer versions are released, ChatGPT will become even more sophisticated.

A single viewpoint 

Of course, the positives and negatives described above are but one viewpoint. However, it is a balanced look at a new tool that, for a while there, looked to be something the introduction of which could only end in tears. The article concludes by encouraging writers to ‘use it wisely’ and not rely on ChatGPT as the be all and end all. Well, at least, not yet. Others contributors to the debate agree. One participant advocates, ‘Just be ahead of the curve and learn how to write prompts that generate increasingly better results.’  Another forum contributor sees ChatGPT in almost Darwinian terms. ‘It’s inevitable that bad and mediocre copywriters will be replaced. Solution? Don’t be bad or mediocre. Stay relevant and embrace AI.’ The same contributor ends by declaring, ‘This is the beginning of a major technological inflection point. Time to learn to drive a car, so to speak, because soon the horse and carriage will become irrelevant.’  That’s us told, then.

Collaborate with AI 

It’s clear that ChatGPT and other similar AI tools are here to stay, so it’s time to think of their advent as not so much of a threat but as a new opportunity. ChatGPT can do a lot of the heavy lifting for a writer, leaving them free to spend more time focusing on honing their message to be exactly what the client needs, adding in the oh-so-important human element and making the piece unique. So, will professional copywriting be replaced by AI? No, in fact, it may be just the push many copywriters need to make the transition from good to great.

How are we using AI at Proof Communications?

Proof Communications put ChatGPT through its paces to see if it posed a threat to the fine art of proofreading. You can read about the very interesting results here. We also use it to prepare first drafts of some documents now, such as some business award entries for clients. It is still vitally important that we interview each client to obtain the information we need first, however. Once we’ve got the detail we need, we run it through ChatGPT to produce a first draft. Then our expert business award entry writers apply their immense experience to the first draft to bring it up to our standards so that our clients receive an outstanding draft to review. The benefits are cost savings for our clients and time savings for us.

Get in touch with us today

If you’d like to discuss your professional copywriting needs, we’d love to hear from you. The team at Proof Communications has more than 24 years’ experience in assisting businesses with expert copy writing and we’d like to help you too. Call us today on 02 8036 5532 or 0448 566 377 or head to our contact page.