Polishing the Tech Turd: The AI Copywriting Conundrum

Created with ChatGPT and a sense of irony

I’ve read plenty of articles on working with ChatGPT, why it’s innocuous, marvellous, evil, and even how to avoid getting caught using it. But none touch on what bothers me most—something that’s nagged me throughout my career in copywriting and creative direction.

AI copywriting is built on a delusion

It’s the idea that you can brief a piece of software that’s been trained with a galaxy of mediocre crap from the Internet (and the small percentage of stolen nuggets) that is the internet and expect it to spew out something valuable is, frankly delusional.

The obsession with speed and cost over originality

Sure, a lot of people—including some executive producers and procurement personnel (and even clients, sadly) don’t care much about quality, creative excellence, or originality. These cost-conscious value-blind gatekeepers are quite happy to opt for the cheapest, fastest output from the most willing and malleable supplier and call it a job well done. They probably laud Chat GPT as the greatest invention since sliced bread (cliché intended).

Ripping out the financial filter every time they make a marketing decision doesn’t mean they’re doing the right thing. Quite the opposite.

Mediocrity has always been the enemy

Having said that, the misery of mediocrity has pained the corporate and creative and communications industry for as long as I can remember. It takes an extraordinary amount of passion (and sometimes professional sacrifice) to constantly insist on and fight for creative excellence in the face of dead-eyed indifference. The walls of agencies and the portfolios of creatives are cluttered with fantastic ideas that didn’t sell because some other team came up with something nearly as good but much cheaper to produce.

Garbage in, garbage out applies to AI too

And this is where we get back to Chat GPT and it’s associated LLMs. The lazy brief (crappy prompt) with minimal clarity, scant information and zero strategic insights will lead an abused creative to deliver an okay result at best.

This is the concept of—to put it politely— crap in, crap out, and it applies to every LLM AI ‘copywriter’ or content creating app is going to rattle off. After you get over the technological miracle of how it can rapidly spit out the most cliched and formulaic output of the most average writer with perfect grammar, you begin to yearn for the odd spelling mistake and misplaced semi-colon.

Human creativity is fuelled by randomness

When I lead brainstorms I am acutely aware that the combined human experience of this team individuals, at this point in their personal and professional lives, is combining to work on this particular brief, at this precise moment. We are all influenced and infused by the unique chemistry of this communal zeitgeist. Therefore, the more diverse the team, the richer it is and more deeply we can mine it. The more original and surprising will be the ideas we come up with.

The weird headline one of us read this morning on the way to work. The overheard comment in the traffic. The last thing any of us read or saw or watched that made an impact. A personal anecdote shared over coffee. A million other splinters of fractured experience. All of it somehow feeding into the brainstorm.

Great ideas start as collective chaos

Because in the quest for original thought, it’s all random until it becomes the promise of a pattern that gets built up into the spark of a strategy with the tiny heartbeat of a potential concept awakening in the corner of the group mind.

AI is a tool but it is not a thinker

Which all goes some way to explaining why, as a writer, I happily but cautiously use Chat GPT as a skilled researcher prone to hallucinating and an over-eager junior copywriter to do some heavy-lifting.

But even then, I call on its services as an overbearing creative director and obnoxious senior copywriter who takes its mundane, mediocre, first-level outputs and puts in some serious sweat to turn it into something I’d happily present as my own. Something a fellow human wouldn’t mind spending a tiny portion of their precious life consuming.

AI-generated content is “good enough”. If you want sharp, original copy that connects with humans, you know where to find me.