In the age of digital communication, where words wield immense power, the role of a skilled copywriter has never been more crucial. While AI language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized content creation, there's a distinct advantage to enlisting the expertise of a human copywriter.
Did that opening paragraph pique your interest about this topic? I didn’t think so.
Those are the results of me asking ChatGPT to write the opening to this blog, and they fall short for several reasons that I’ll detail here. To be clear, I think ChatGPT and generative AI in general are amazing tools we should continue investigating (with caution). And I use ChatGPT myself from time to time (I’ll get to that later).
I also understand that you can tweak ChatGPT’s output by saying things like, “do it again, but make it more casual.” Here’s what happened when I tried just that:
Yikes. That’s not the best, is it?
On that note, here are five reasons why you still need a human copywriter to create your best advertising and marketing copy.
1. ChatGPT content may be unoriginal, misleading, or offensive
ChatGPT works by taking your prompt and picking apart the language to analyze its meaning and generate a response based on the data it was trained on. It’s incredibly skilled at answering questions and sounding confident about those answers, but whether or not those answers are correct is another story.
Researchers have tried to answer the question of ChatGPT’s veracity in several different ways, and it has gotten better with newer iterations, but the bottom line is it’s nowhere near 100% accurate. One frequently cited study showed 52% of software engineers’ questions produced inaccurate answers.
While it’s true that not every subject will be as complex as a coding query and other large language models (LLMs) produce differing levels of accuracy, the fact is none of them has yet been able to produce acceptably accurate results, topping out at just over 75% as of this writing. And yes, people make mistakes all the time, but it definitely gives you pause about how much to blindly trust the results of LLM prompts.
This is no secret; by its own admission, OpenAI says ChatGPT “may occasionally generate incorrect information” and “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.” What would cause this to happen? For starters, ChatGPT’s content is unoriginal by design; its output is compiled from previously written content.
While this is also what copywriters do when they write blogs and white papers that cite sources, a good copywriter should know what constitutes a credible source and what should stay hidden in some dark corner of the internet. And they will provide original ideas based on their own experience and knowledge that an AI model cannot.
2. Copywriters understand the art of persuasion
ChatGPT will create content based on statistical patterns and previously provided data, but copywriters are skilled in the art of persuasion. ChatGPT can take the basics of language to try to convince readers to take action, but it doesn’t know the nuances of everyday language and culture. It doesn’t have a niche it’s particularly skilled at. It doesn’t know that nobody cares if you end a sentence with a preposition anymore. It has no real sense of humor.
There haven’t yet been extensive studies comparing how persuasive ChatGPT is compared with a human copywriter, but anecdotally, it’s been shown that AI still struggles to understand a specific audience and create messaging that speaks to them. When you need specific knowledge, storytelling, and emotional appeals that can drive conversions, it’s best to rely on an actual person instead of expecting it from a large language model.
3. Copywriters can tailor their writing to your brand’s voice, tone, and needs
You can feed ChatGPT documents and ask it to write content in your voice, and it can deliver content that’s part of the way there faster than any person could. What’s missing is nuance.
When someone reviews your existing content, interviews your execs, sits in on meetings, and tries out your products and services, they’ll “get it.” A large language model can’t do that.
In addition, a human copywriter can take that voice and apply it to different mediums, such as print ads, social media posts, and email campaigns. All of these channels require slightly different tones and follow different standards, which a seasoned copywriter can accommodate.
4. Copywriters can save you time and effort
Anyone who’s used ChatGPT can tell you that it generates text quickly, but editing that content into something usable takes time. You’ll likely have to tweak your prompt, ask for variations in tone, edit for style, and expand upon the content delivered (meeting word counts is not ChatGPT’s forté, nor is citing current, always-credible sources).
Hiring a copywriter can save you the time and effort it would take to do these tasks yourself (sometimes the same amount of time it would’ve taken someone to just write it from scratch). This allows you and the rest of your team to focus on other business.
It should also be noted that most copywriters are now familiar with these tools, incorporating them into their work and training themselves on how to write better prompts. So, a copywriter can save you the trouble of contracting a ChatGPT expert and help you get good results from this tool.
5. A copywriter will help you escape the curse of bland content
Look, you could go to a fast food joint and get a burger and fries in the time it took you to read this blog. And that burger and fries might be perfectly serviceable. But it wouldn’t be particularly memorable (unless it gives you indigestion).
My point is, you can get perfectly fine copy from ChatGPT and the like, but the copy it generates is more like an equation than anything else—it lacks a true understanding of the language it produces. It can save you time when it comes to drafting that email you don’t feel like writing, getting the ball rolling when you have writer’s block, giving you an outline to start with, doing research, and brainstorming, among other things. In fact, I used it to help me start this blog.
Here’s what I did: First, I used it to research some of the points I made. Then I threw out a few of them, did my own research, replaced those points with those I thought made more sense, and reworded anything ChatGPT wrote. I estimate it saved me 15-20 minutes. And that’s great! Who doesn’t want to save time?
What it didn’t do—what it can’t do—is write something that really connects with your audience. And when you’re spending possibly millions to bring a product or service to market, that isn’t something you want to skimp on.
Need some help with content strategy, making the most of ChatGPT, or just writing and editing for your B2B audience in general? Book some time to chat.