Words: Belinda Connolly
One area where AI has boomed is in content creation; specifically, generating quick-fire copy for everything from email newsletters to blog articles. And while we love a productivity hack as much as the next person, it’s important to realise that tools like ChatGPT aren’t a one-stop shop for creating the perfect writing for your business.
While AI is good for generating the ‘bones’ of a piece of copy, here are three things it can’t help you with – and a human writer can!
Sounding authentic and unique
AI is just that – artificial. It doesn’t understand nuances or tone in the way humans naturally do when communicating. Language may be overly formal or casual, or just feel a bit ‘off’. And it is so easy to misinterpret text without visual clues or context.
When a professional copywriter creates content, they take time to get know the target audience and the tone of voice required to authentically engage with them. Is the audience primarily technical people who just want the facts in a clear way? Are they a younger audience who enjoys a play on words and love an emoji or two throughout the copy? A good copywriter doesn’t just copy/paste – they create bespoke content for each client.
Copywriters also understand the brand’s reason for creating the copy. Is it to drive traffic to their website? Improve SEO? Educate consumers on their offerings?
AI applications like ChatGPT lack these subtleties and often end up sounding robotic – which, is no surprise given it was written by a robot. Authenticity involves a unique style that can adapt and evolve based on feedback, cultural shifts and new trends—something AI can replicate only to a certain extent but not originate.
Generating fresh insights
AI tools can synthesise information at a fast pace, which is helpful for digital marketers! However, these tools lack the ability to generate new insights that come from unique human perspectives and experiences.
Humans can draw on their personal anecdotes, cultural context, and creative thinking to formulate arguments that are persuasive because they are fresh and unexpected. This ability to connect seemingly unrelated dots to create a new point of view is something AI can’t do, as it can only generate insights based on pre-existing data.
AI doesn’t have personal experiences and can’t engage in reflective thinking. As the tools learn and they may improve in this area, but the human ability to create, empathise and innovate in unpredictable ways remains unique to people and is what makes human-created copywriting irreplaceable.
Creating client case studies
Having case studies on your website is standard practice for many industries. They are a great way to allow your work and experience to shine through the eyes of your clients, and prospective clients will rely on these examples when making the decision to work with you.
Other reasons to include case studies on your site:
- Build credibility and trust: In much the same way users trust reviews when searching for a new cafe or plumber, clients seek evidence to see exactly how your team has applied their skills in real situations.
- Showcase versatility: If your product or service has multiple applications, case studies can highlight this, appealing to a broader audience.
A good case study should tell a story that engages the reader and have a beginning (the client’s challenge or problem), a middle (the implemented solution) and an end (the results and benefits). An experienced copywriter is needed to be able to ask the right questions of the client to compile that story in a way that AI tools simply can’t. Any journalist will tell you that asking the right questions at the right time results in the most interesting piece of writing.
That said, there are some ways that AI can make your copywriting and content creation more efficient
- Generating topic/theme ideas. AI algorithms can identify trending subjects, consumer interests and emerging conversations across various digital platforms, including social media, forums and news outlets.
- Creating a structure or content framework to build on.
- Transcribing real-time conversation and identifying key insights after a conversation ends. This is particularly helpful during interviews for case studies and blogs.
- Synthesising huge volumes of information into more digestible pieces to work from. AI tools can do the groundwork on reports or whitepapers (which can make for rather dull reading sometimes!) and condense that information into more digestible parts from which a writer can work.
When all is said and done, AI is here to stay, and it’s important to be working with content specialists who know how to harness the tools to their best of their capabilities, while being able to humanise your messaging so that it stays on-brand and engaging.
