In the past week or two, I’ve heard of 3-4 business owners who had to find new marketers. The reason why? They realized that the people who had previously been doing their marketing were using chatgpt or another version of AI to write their copy and content. Passing it off as their own, of course.

I hate generative ai with a passion. I usually shy away from strong statements on the internet because they usually come back to bite you at some point, but this one I’m not shying away from. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if I see evidence to the contrary, but so far all I’ve seen convinces me more and more and more. Generative AI seems like a shortcut but is actually damaging to businesses and reputations! If you hire me to write for you, will it be generated by a machine? Absolutely not.

I’m a human who works differently on different days, is slower than I prefer, reads a wide variety of books and articles, and is trying to expand my vocabulary. If you’re a photographer inspired by old fashioned artifacts and 1920’s NYC, I will most definitely be listening to some old jazz while I write for you. If you’re a chef that is enthralled by how the table draws various cultures and people together, I will watch The Hundred Foot Journey movie with my husband to dive all the way into the heart of your project.

My point is, AI is a machine. It doesn’t have feelings. It can imitate feelings, mimic them, try to write with “feeling”. But it absolutely cannot capture nuance of human experience and emotion in your copy.

And let me just tell you? As AI rises, the market is increasingly drawn to companies that they can tell are actually ran by humans. We thought authentic was a thing in 2018— it is REALLY a thing now. AI itself prioritizes content that it can tell is not AI generated. Gen Z can smell AI a mile away, sometimes even when it’s not there.

Sure, we might not care if some rote tasks are performed by a machine. Basic skills like transcribing, sending the next email in line, or other such tasks that simply check a box can perhaps be helped by AI. But creative work that needs to read the room, read the market, write thoughtfully? That’s not a skill that can be replaced by mechanical programming.

Your copy is the foundation of your brand, spilling over into so many important pillars of your client experience and marketing. I will not be handing that important, nuanced, non-formulaic act of creativity over to a robot. And neither should you.

But wouldn’t I say all this, obviously, because my job is “threatened by AI”? On the contrary, if I hadn’t lived in the marketing world for the past almost six years, I might think AI COULD be helpful for a “boring” task like writing copy. But since I’ve been deeply immersed since 2020, I know for a fact that marketing requires holding so many different things—brand values, client values, demographics, readability, intrigue, reliability—SO MANY THINGS all at the same time, and writing for the sweet spot that frames all of them. The more time I spend writing copy, the more I see that what is written by AI (and the brands that use it to write for them) genuinely falls flat.

Okayyy, you might say, but they’re saying that AI CAN imitate human emotion, capture nuance, hold many different things together all at the same time and write with them in mind.

So let’s imagine it does. (I still argue that it doesn’t, I haven’t seen it, you’ll have to prove it to me).

Two things:

1. You have to have the absolute perfect prompts to put in it (which in my experience are almost the same as writing the copy yourself lol).
2. You also shortcut very necessary work for your business if you simply feed some ideas into a machine and run with some versions that it spits back out for you.

Would you trust a brand that promises grandiose things, but when you pin them on it can’t exactly say what those things do or what they mean?

Using AI derails THE MOST CRUCIAL part of the copywriting process that dives into the heart of your brand—knowing what questions to ask you. What questions will draw out the things you care about. The very likely narrow line that your business balances on, the specific gap in the market, and context of what is being said and what is popular or not in your industry and to your various potential clients.

AI will generate fluffy filler that makes assumptions, pats you on the back, and promises things to your clients that they either don’t need, or don’t want.

I have no perfect summary to close this. Using generative AI to write your copy (whether it’s me doing it, or you) will only ever be a vague, soulless* copy of what your brand could be. Clearing your schedule to actually do the hard work of figuring. it. out. can give you a message that lasts for years. Your message should be able to flex, but not fade. Human-written copy will give you that deep, long-lasting versatility in a way that ai never will.

*This is not my original word. I’ve heard several people use it or similar concepts in relation to generative ai, but unfortunately none that I can recollect to cite.