Will Chat GPT Replace copywriters?

“CHATGPT IS A STATE-OF-THE-ART NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING MODEL…DESIGNED TO GENERATE HUMAN-LIKE TEXT RESPONSES GIVEN A PROMPT OR INPUT”

- CHATGPT, WHEN ASKED ‘WHAT IS CHATGPT?’

ChatGPT’s full name is Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Born in 2O22, it’s now a household name.

A machine that reads and summarises every relevant Google result in seconds? Life-changing. A machine that actually understands the nuances of language — context, tone, even humour? Industry-changing. A machine that comes close to sentience? World-changing (or world-ending, according to recent claims that AI will kill us all in a decade).

But innovation usually goes hand-in-hand with elimination. Landlines killed letters, before mobile phones killed landlines. Uber is replacing the taxi and Netflix sent Blockbuster broke. Is ChatGPT coming for your job?

Copywriters certainly seem to think so. Many of us have spent the last four years both loudly defending our usefulness, and silently panicking inside. If people can get a robot to write for pennies, why would they pay us to do it? Are we obsolete, like milkmen and leech collectors?

Let us propose something a little more optimistic: ChatGPT won’t replace copywriters, or by extension other creatives. But it will change the nature of our work.

WHO IS CHAT GPT?

ChatGPT was trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet. Think websites, news articles, and social media posts. If it’s been written and uploaded online, ChatGPT’s probably read it.

During this pre-training phase, the AI learned to understand the structure and patterns of human language. What usually takes a human being decades, even an entire lifetime, took ChatGPT just under 1OO days.

The result is an ability to generate infinite responses to infinite prompts. To predict exactly what you want to hear, and how you want to hear it.

It can give you relationship advice, teach you to cook, explain science and philosophy. It’ll plan your holidays, your birthday party, and even your funeral. It writes poems, songs, and essays — before re-writing them a thousand times over until you’re happy.

It does this in every language, with an endless capacity for generation, never saying no and never asking for anything in return.

There’s no definite answer to the question “will ChatGPT steal my job”. It brings with it, like all technologies, a series of threats and opportunities.

WHAT THE ROBOT HAS GOING FOR IT

Human workers get sick, we travel to Europe, we need to sleep, and we love our weekends. Humans have morals, opinions, and prejudices that might dictate how willing we are to complete certain tasks.

ChatGPT isn’t impacted by any of those things. It’s available 24/7, just a click away, and obeys questionable requests without question. 

“SOMEONE ON TV HAS ONLY TO SAY, ‘ALEXA,’ AND SHE LIGHTS UP. SHE’S ALWAYS READY FOR ACTION…NEVER SAYS, ‘NOT TONIGHT, DEAR.’”

- SYBIL SAGE, NYT

The fact is, we can’t compete with a machine when it comes to speed and cost. Something that takes a copywriter an hour takes ChatGPT a second, and a week’s work is delivered in under a minute. This also comes cheap, or better than cheap if you use the free plan. While people need money to survive, technology doesn’t have to pay rent.

This all raises the question: will human workers need to re-define their boundaries to compete? If employers become used to the ubiquity and obedience of ChatGPT, will they expect the same compliance from their people?

Throughout all this, it’s important to remember that good employees ask questions. They challenge bad ideas, flag unrealistic expectations, and bring perspectives their employer may not have considered. Sometimes the most valuable contribution a person can make is saying, “Actually, I don’t think we should do that.”

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

AI is far from perfect. While it can’t be betrayed by human needs or inabilities, it does face a different kind of threat from within: bugs and glitches. Exhibit A SemRush’s AI tool generated this picture when we experimented and asked it to write an article for a client who installs concrete:

PICTURED: DEFINITELY NOT CONCRETE

Another major pitfall of generative AI is that it’s only as good as the prompt you give it. Have you ever written the same request five different ways and still failed to get the results you’re after? This has led to a practice known as Prompt Engineering, where people receive training on the best ways to ask ChatGPT questions. Some people even run paid courses or sell resources on prompt optimisation.

This is an area that actually provides room for copywriters to adapt and expand their skills. A basic knowledge of the technology coupled with professional writing skills means you can add Prompt Engineer to your resume. While businesses might be keen to use AI, they still need people to wield it.

On that note, for every ChatGPT answer, there needs to be someone on the other end who can verify that it’s actually the right one. If writing isn’t your strength, it can be difficult to recognise when AI-generated copy is generic, repetitive, awkward or simply missing the point. The same goes for any area of expertise. You need enough knowledge of the subject to question the output, identify what isn’t working and know how to make it better.

It’s easy to forget that ChatGPT doesn’t actually have its own brain. But it’s not sentient. It can only generate responses based on the sources it can find online. If there isn’t any existing inspiration to draw on, it can’t turn to lived experience like humans can.

This leads to the most important point of all: that you can’t turn someone into a copywriter simply by forcing them to read a bunch of books or articles (whether they’re a machine or not). Writers of any kind are always drawing from layers upon layers of real-life encounters, moments, and memories as well as our emotions and feelings.

ChatGPT probably won’t ever make the cut for brands in niche industries, brands with a very personal and unique identity, or brands with a tone of voice that can’t be easily described or condensed into an actionable prompt.

SOOOO WHAT’S THE WAY FORWARD?

Copywriters will not go extinct any time soon, but we’d be wise to consider a human-robot alliance.

It’s an unavoidable fact that automating certain tasks enhances productivity and even help writers focus more on creativity and strategy. The speed and availability of ChatGPT can be helpful when brainstorming ideas, outlining content, and reviewing work. It’s like if a dictionary, thesaurus, and Google had a baby. By streamlining the smaller tasks with lower stakes, we can focus on the bigger priorities — turning good results into something exceptional.

As AI continues to redefine the landscape of almost every industry, concerns about job security will persist. But the reality is a two-way relationship between human creativity and AI efficiency.

While ChatGPT won't replace copywriters (and other creatives) outright, it will reshape our professions and lead to a necessity for up-skilling.

We can never be as available, fast, or cheap; but we can seek comfort in our unique capacity for creativity and emotional depth. And in the simple fact that the uncreative people of the world will always need the creative ones to come up with the ideas worth copying in the first place.

Because generative AI needs human creativity to feed from. If it only ever feeds on its own output, we risk ending up in an endless feedback loop of recycled ideas, generic slop, and nothing new.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: In a not-so-distant future where AI workers might out-number people, will hiring humans become an obligation for Corporate Social Responsibility?