As I wrote in one of the most-read articles on the Professional Copywriter's website – anyone can write stuff and everyone should. To write is human. But not everyone can be a copywriter.
And that includes AI.
Anyone who says a robot can do our job doesn’t understand what we actually do.
Yeah, AI can write. I use AI to write. But copywriting is never just writing. It’s a deeply human discipline that demands you be a writer whilst also being a:
Seer: An AI can listen to what has been said and repeat it word-for-word, but a copywriter is also listening for the unsaid—the intention, the intonation, the idea behind the idea.
Ambassador: Get a bunch of stakeholders around a table, and they’ll each have a different take and a different agenda. We’re a long way from trusting a robot to get everyone on the same page. And if you can’t do that, the page is gonna be a dog’s dinner.
Shapeshifter: There’s what the business wants to say and there’s what the customer cares about—often two different things. There’s an art in reconciling the two while simultaneously answering the customer’s inner thoughts in words that feel as if you’re talking to them out loud.
Storyteller: Good writing has rhythm. It paints you a picture. It sparks epiphanies. It gives you butterflies. Yet even if your sentence sings to the human ear, Grammarly will want to correct it.
Co-creator: Content is part of an ecosystem. It needs to sound right, but it also needs to look right. The shape of a paragraph matters. How content is designed and experienced in context matters. You need eyes to see it and live tweaking alongside designers to make it work.
Advocate: Everyone (and their other half) wants to put their stamp on copy. Everyone thinks that their word choice is better than yours. And sometimes is, and sometimes it isn’t. You need the wisdom to know the difference and the confidence to articulate why.
We all know that an AI cannot think or feel like we do.
It cannot walk the line between the heart and the head like we do.
It cannot read the room, bounce off one another or call each other out like we do.
It can write stuff and it can even write stuff well. But it cannot replace a copywriter.
