How I’m Using AI As a Copywriter

I know what you’re thinking. The answer should be ‘I’m not’. After all, why would I, a professional writer, need help?

But here’s the thing. Everyone needs help with some things. Everyone has weak points, or areas they just need some extra support in. And like any tool, AI can be used to enhance any service if it’s used in the right ways.

To be clear, I’ve been experimenting with AI writers for a long time now, and for the most part I wasn’t impressed. In fact, before ChatGPT swaggered onto the scene, they were pretty poor. Their ‘research’ was highly questionable, the ‘writing’ was clunky and horrible to read and it didn’t understand why it was writing. Post ChatGPT, I’m a bit more impressed. AI is a completely different animal now, and the technology is evolving to do much more. But it still has its limits, and areas where it really can’t be trusted.

Now, I know that if you’re looking to hire a human copywriter you might be worried about AI sneaking its way in. But since one of my core values is transparency, I wanted to share how I use AI in my process, and how I definitely don’t.

How I Use AI

Generating ideas: Idea generation is one of my favourite things to do and 99% of the time I don’t need any help doing it. But that 1% of the time I hit a brick wall, usually at a really inconvenient time. Tools like ChatGPT are great at just collating topic ideas, scouring the internet for things that match your prompt and presenting it in a different way. I’ll be honest, I’ve used it to generate about 20 ideas, and I’ve used about 2 of those. But it’s a great springboard for thinking up better ideas on my own.

SEO comparison: The SEO work I do is very small (just optimising content for SEO really), but even that is done with a keyword research tool and a lot of other research and experience. But if a blog post needs to rank for a competitive keyword, then AI is a really good tool to help me figure out if I’m close. I can essentially use AI to compare what I’ve written against the competition, and then I’ll tweak my blog so that it’s more competitive. It’s not an automated process – it’s something I’ll do myself, using the data AI provides.

Headline workshopping: Everyone has their weak spots, and headlines are mine. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time working on as a copywriter, but I know it’s the place my skills are weakest, and where I will always second-guess myself. Using AI to workshop headlines helps me to develop new headline angles. Again, all final decisions are made by me, but AI can help me work the bad ideas out of my head.

Getting past the blank page: The blank page is daunting for anyone. If I have a topic in my head but I’m stuck at the blank page phase, I will sometimes ask ChatGPT to write me a paragraph on the topic. Just one. And then I rip it to pieces and rewrite it, which gets rid of the blank page and gets me on my way. It doesn’t happen often, but having a reliable way around the blank page problem is really handy when your job is to write!

How I Won’t Use AI

To do any research: I say this all the time, and I’ll say it here. AI is BAD at research. And great content relies on truly excellent research. Research is one of the biggest parts of my job, and I frequently find myself falling down rabbit holes looking for information, credible sources, the other sides of arguments and tracking down the original source for a quote. But AI can’t distinguish credible sources from non-credible ones, and has even proven to make up information all by itself, making it a scary-powerful tool for spreading misinformation.

So no. AI will not now, nor will it ever go near my research work. I’ll be doing it all the old-fashioned way.

To do any writing: This is my literal job, so if I outsourced it to AI I would feel like a complete fraud. Plus, it’s the thing I really love doing, so why on earth would I? I’ve been a copywriter for 11 years now, so it’s safe to say that I:

  1. Enjoy writing, and;
  2. Have created a process that works well for me.

Not to mention the facts that AI just can’t write that well. Yes it can churn out content, but it needs a lot of guidance, correction on research, and then editing afterwards to make it readable. By which point I could have written it all anyway! AI will never be able to sound like you or replicate your tone of voice like a human can, and it always leaves people with that weird ‘uncanny valley’ experience because it just isn’t human.

To do editing: My experiments in this area have shown me that AI tools like ChatGPT really aren’t reliable for editing. It’s not great at reading and understanding what other people have written, so there’s no way I would trust it to edit my own work, or yours. Even the machine learning tools I’ve been using for years to help me proofread (step up Grammarly) can go astray, so I always take their suggestions with a big pinch of salt and do my own proofing with my human eyes.

So, if that’s all cool with you and you still need a very human copywriter, give me a call.