Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. It has a ton of fantastic use cases and can take care of a lot of the grunt work in many, many industries. But what about copywriting? Is GenAI really suitable to take care of all of our text production?
DISCLAIMER: This article was written in January 2025. It might be that some of the capabilities of AI as outlined in this article have changed if you’re reading it later than that.
Considering that AIs such as Claude, ChatGPT and their friends are essentially chatbots, it doesn’t surprise that a lot of people think AI would be great at copywriting – after all, most of us have talked to the chatbots by now and were impressed with their skills.
And when a machine seems to show empathy or humour, can answer our questions and explain a difficult concept to us, it’s hard to keep in mind that there’s really nothing smart about it. It can’t think, it can’t reason, it can’t count. It simply doesn’t understand.
Because what we all call AI, is in reality Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) – which in most cases is nothing but a Large Language Model (LLM) after a rebranding. The reality is that all the AIs we know have been trained on tons and tons and tons of text (much of it from the internet) and use all of that data to count probabilities.
So when you tell ChatGPT you’re sad because you lost a beloved pet, they have many reference points that tell the model that the appropriate (aka most likely) response is to tell you that they’re sorry for your loss.
I won’t go into more detail on the background of AI here, but if you’re interested in that, check out my blog article on what AI is and how it’s currently used in the language industry.
Why you shouldn’t let AI do your copywriting
Since AI is technically capable of creating all kinds of content, can’t we just tell it to write our blog articles, our website content, our social media posts for us? Well, you could. But you wouldn’t get the results you’d like – especially not in the long term.
AI is heavily biased. It has trouble with reasoning. It contradicts itself frequently. It’s terrible for the environment. The “facts” are wrong half of the time. And that’s just some of the problems with letting AI do your copywriting – but for me, there’s one that stands out even more (especially in the context of marketing content). With AI, everything sounds the same.
If you let Claude, ChatGPT or any of their friends do the copywriting for your marketing material, you’ll most likely end up with something that sounds good at first glance, but really isn’t.
The problem is that AI models can only repeat what they already know. Being based on statistical analysis of text that has already been written, how could it come up with something new? How could it think up a scenario that really resonates with your target audience? How could it create copy that’s unique to YOUR company?
- If you let AI create your new slogan, you’ll end up with something that’s neither new, nor unique.
- If you let AI create your new blog post, you’ll end up with something that’s contradictory, factually incorrect and boring to read.
- If you let AI create the copy for your new flyer, you’ll end up with meaningless phrases that don’t really tell the target audience anything – perfect for bullshit bingo, terrible for marketing.
So how can AI support your copywriting?
Please believe me when I say that AI isn’t any good at writing your marketing copy, no matter if it’s slogans, ads, flyers, social media posts, blog articles or your website copy. Nevertheless, there are things AI can help you with when you’re creating content.
Some things Claude, ChatGPT and Co can help you with when you’re working on a copywriting task could be:
- Ideation: You are looking to create a new marketing campaign and are stuck? Don’t worry, AI can help you with some ideas to get the ball rolling.
- Structuring: You have a messy mind map you wanna convert into a helpful outline for your upcoming presentation? AI’s right for the job.
- Research: You’re writing a blog post about something and aren’t sure you covered all the points that might be relevant to your target audience? No problem – ask AI what they’d put in the article and see if it comes up with something you missed.
- Grammar check: You’re done with your new website copy but want to make sure it’s actually 100% free of errors? AI’s got your back!
- Summarisation: You need an abstract or a summary of your article or presentation? AI’s happy to help and will do a great job.
As you can see, AI is a great sidekick – but you’re still the star of the show. You’re Batman, AI is Robin.
Always remember that AI is just a machine. All it does is crunch numbers to evaluate what’s most likely to come next. It’s a tool to support you, not a thinking, feeling entity capable of replacing you.
So, whenever you do use AI (also for other things than copywriting), keep that in mind and remember to check the output for factual correctness, logic and grammar (in German, for example, AI often starts a sentence with singular and then finishes it with plural).
And if you just can’t be bothered, why not ask a professional to take care of your copywriting task? They’d love to help, they are experts on the matter and they know where it makes sense to include AI in the process.
