Hey robot, write me an article for Manitoba Inc. magazine about the benefits of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write advertising copy.
If I were to type this prompt into an AI program like ChatGPT it would do my work for me as a writer, shouldn’t it? The answer is simply no, but I might be able to use AI to help make it a little easier.
AI Tools can write a screenplay about a downtrodden woman finding herself in the big city, create a poster for a film festival, construct a simple automation program in python, and even create a convincing video of a political opponent giving malicious and untrue statements. It might seem like a scary new existence for humanity, but we can find some comfort in the fact that these tools are
still far from perfect.
While AI is getting more sophisticated with each iteration, it still lacks the ability to emulate the most important aspects of a human mind: creativity, common sense and empathy. The output of AI programs can sound very uniform and boring, as they’re pulling from a large collective database of existing writings. The information being pulled is often incorrect, and in the case of sensitive subjects such as medical or safety issues it can be extremely dangerous.
Plagiarism is also a massive concern. The AI programs try to break up and construct a unique sentence from the examples it will pull from, but there are a large number of cases where there are sections of writing that are extracted in their entirety from existing writings. In the case of Google analyzing your website and determining your placement in search rankings, this will lead to devastating consequences such as a long term or even permanent delisting from the search engine.
Using AI tools to supplement your work can be beneficial, especially if you’re inexperienced with copywriting. You may be limited in your vocabulary and find it difficult to not repeat words or sentence structures. A few tweaks and passes in an AI program can give you different variations to choose something that reads better. Perhaps your writing is too technical, or too verbose. You can use AI to adjust your copywriting to find the happy medium that conveys your message properly.
Advertising copy is more than words on a page. It’s a conversation that you’re having with your customers and clients. A warm invitation to engage with your brands, or to come experience the products and services you offer. You need to be able to read and understand the social needs of a person in order to be able to have an effective conversation. Using AI is a good way to start a dialogue, you need to be able to tailor the messaging to your audience.
The use of AI has been a huge point of contention, especially among creative industries. What people don’t understand is that we’ve already been integrating AI into our work with word processing software like Microsoft Word and Google Docs spell checking and adjusting our sentence structures for years.
Give AI tools a try. They’re fun to play around with and you might find some practical applications for it in your daily life. But if they start to talk about overthrowing humanity, please report it to the developers so we can prevent an AI uprising.
