I know some people hear the terms “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” and “copywriting” in the same sentence and have an existential crisis, thinking everyone is stealing from real writers because that’s what the AI is supposedly doing.
If that’s your first thought…have you actually tried it yourself? I mean, AI is not a 100% viable solution at this point—it used the word ‘Greetings!’ as an introduction in the below example for god’s sake. Who does that? Probably not Seth Godin.
In the end, we know it’s a robot, not a human, and that is easy to detect most of the time. BUT…there are benefits from AI: it can help to build structure, flow, and brainstorm nuggets of copy to use. It saves a lot of time for us untrained creative writers who need just that. And it’s especially useful when attempting to write about yourself (which is HARD for the majority of us).
Here’s how I used it to write the ‘About’ section for my LinkedIn profile. I started with the prompt, “write a linkedin 'about' section for a Fractional CMO in B2B tech that is confident, in the voice of Tom Fishburne”...btw he’s a really funny marketer—I admire his wit and cartoon skills. (I *think* I’m funny, too, so the thought was humor was going to come across). Here’s what I got:
I stopped it from going further because it was NOT in Tom’s voice, it was mundane…I was being too obscure. As it turns out, if your prompt asks for a tone of voice that's not in its database of voices, it will generalize and try to infer some things but still not get their 'voice.'
Next prompt: “Try it in the voice of Jay Baer:”
Okay, yeah…there’s some structure and nuggets. Let’s keep going.
Next prompt: “Now try it in the voice of Seth Godin”
Okay, ‘Greetings!’?? LOL no. However, there are some different nuggets to consider; structure is identical so that’s a bit lame.
Next prompt: “now try it in the voice of Guy Kawasaki”
Okay, again—same structure, but there are even more ways of saying some nuggets of details that are good.
Now go read my LinkedIn ‘About’ section and see what I did with it…I used my own voice but pulled some ideas from the prompts. Do you think it copies any of these options too much? Or does it feel like I authentically wrote it? Because I mostly did.
In the end, chatGPT gave me the bones, I replaced the relevant flesh, and finished it all inside of an hour instead of spinning my wheels trying to think of where to start. I used that saved time to write this post, which from a marketer’s content POV is a BIG. WIN.
Happy writing, friends.
- KR