AI Copywriting Tools – Why I Just Say No

Have you seen these tools that use AI (artificial intelligence) to “write” content for you?

One of the big ones making the rounds lately is called Jasper. They call it an “AI copywriting assistant”. And their website makes promises like “Your AI sidekick is trained to produce high-converting marketing copy.”

I’ve seen other similar tools like this. And I’ve even seen people recently on Twitter sharing things that AI has “written”. And, to be clear… it can be impressive that software produced that.

And, listen…. I get it.

I get that writer’s block is common. I get that people feel they need to create a lot of content in order to even be on the radar of Google these days. So, these tools are catering to that problem.

But, I don’t think these AI copywriting tools will make anything better.

Using a bot to “write” content would be like trying to call a plant-based hamburger a real hamburger. It just isn’t. Plant-based fake burgers are still fake and usually heavily processed and quite unhealthy. Because, it isn’t real.

You wouldn’t value a print or replica of a painting the same as you would the original painting.

And that’s what bot-written content is, too.

The way these tools work is that you feed it some ideas. You seed it with your topic and, perhaps, some bullet points. Then, you hit a button and it sits there and generates content for you. You then either copy/paste that thing or you massage it to your liking.

Many months back, I signed up for Jasper just to see what it was like on the inside. I ended up cancelling it pretty shortly thereafter. I felt it actually got in my way. Slowed me down. Of course, I’ve been writing for a long time so I definitely have a bias toward doing it myself. But, let me just say this…

AI Copywriting Tools Lead To Content Inflation

The idea of “content” has already suffered from massive inflation. Some may even think…. hyperinflation.

Too much supply and it cheapens it.

It reminds me of article spinners back in the day. People would write some dumb article, run it through a spinner to change the words around, then SPAM the internet with them. The idea was to flood the internet with their stuff, build backlinks, and be everywhere.

Purely from an SEO perspective, it worked for awhile. Until Google grew up and changed things around to weed out all the trash. And that’s what it was…. trash.

But now, we don’t just spin the articles. People are using AI to “write” the whole thing.

There’s no actual communication there. No human-to-human communication. No real intention. No addition of value and insights.

Because a bot cannot do that.

A bot cannot originate anything. It has no intention, no emotion, nothing that actually makes content engaging. All it does is uses an algorithm to mathematically replicate the word combinations that have been programmed into it. They’re based on GPT-3, the language generator from OpenAI.

Can these AI copywriting tools be used as…. tools? Something to speed up the process of writing?

Sure, they can.

In an ideal world, AI copywriting tools would simply be seen as aids. It would be a tool used to simply speed up the writing process, but the person knows full well the limits of it. And surely… many understand this and use the tools with that in mind.

However, the marketing clearly caters to the desire for people to just have the thing spit out content. And I’m probably safe in saying that the target market for Jasper is not a person who truly wants to put out quality stuff worth communicating to other humans, but instead is primarily interested in finding a shortcut to being everywhere online and giving Google stuff to chomp on.

For me, Jasper didn’t help at all. But, I’m a good writer. And if I don’t have something to say, I just don’t post anything new. The last thing I’ll ever do is use a bot to create artificial garbage just to fill up a blog.

I don’t like the idea of “content” being cheapened more than it already has. The value of it decreases even more when people are publishing things they didn’t even really create.

These days, AI has gotten to a point where it can “write” content. It can produce videos. It can talk. Heck, it won’t be long before calling some company on the phone and you won’t even know if you’re talking to a real human being or an AI-powered bot.

All this to say…

I have nothing really against AI copywriter tools. I understand their place in the market. And I can see a legitimate viewpoint of these tools being there to speed things up.

It could be said that Jasper is to content creation what, say, Elementor would be to web design. I totally get that. I’m not naive.

The one difference is…

With Elementor, or Thrive Architect, or some other page builder, you can all but alleviate the need to hand code HTML. In fact, you could not even know HTML and create a great site. Content creation is not the same. There is no innate human intention and communication value to hand-coding HTML, but there is to learning how to devise and communicate your knowledge and ideas.

My concern is that AI content tools will disconnect people from that fact.

It could help disconnect people from what’s real. From each other.

That it will cheapen the idea of “content” by putting out bot stuff. That people will focus on the numbers and the quotas and not the WHY behind their content to begin with.

I will not be promoting or advocating any AI copywriting tools for this reason. I don’t use any.

I might be the old man yelling “get off my lawn!” here while others just pass around me with their AI. I dunno. But, the way I see it, this is a people business. Real people. And the more the world tries to de-humanize and prop up artificial “intelligence”, I think more and more people will come to resent that and seek out real human beings Just like when you call some company with a phone menu, all you want to do is relentlessly smash the “0” button to try to talk to a human.

Maybe it’s just me.