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 2022, 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 forms its own original ideas, coming impressively close to sentience? World-changing.

But innovation usually goes hand-in-hand with elimination. Landlines killed letter writing, before mobile phones killed landlines. Uber is replacing taxis and Netflix sent Blockbuster broke. ChatGPT is coming for your jobs (or so everyone keeps saying).

Copywriters in particular have spent the last two years both ferociously defending our usefulness, and silently panicking inside. If people can get a robot to write things for them for free, why would they pay us to do it? In five years we’ll be obsolete, like milkmen and leech collectors.

Let us propose something a little more optimistic: ChatGPT won’t replace copywriters, but will just change the nature of our work.

Who is ChatGPT?

To figure out if it’s a friend or foe, we need to understand how it works.

First, ChatGPT was trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet. Think articles, books, and websites. 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 100 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 creation, 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 that we can choose to embrace or reject.

Threats To Humans

Something that humans just can’t compete with? AI is available 24/7. Human workers get sick, we travel to Europe, we need to sleep, and we love our weekends. ChatGPT doesn’t do any of those things. It’s always ready for duty, just a click away. Go one step further: humans have morals, opinions, and prejudices that may dictate how willing we are to complete certain tasks.

“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

This raises the question — will copywriters need to re-define their boundaries to compete? If employers become used to the ubiquity of ChatGPT, the ultimate yes man, will they expect the same compliance from their human employees? Think of those offices where 13 hour work days and 2-hour Saturday meetings are normalised because that’s the precedent. Any new employee has to live up to the standard or they’ll be replaced with someone who can, living or not living.

ChatGPT also wins 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 — at the moment, it’s free. If the choice is between paying a professional writer hundreds of dollars for a day’s work or getting a machine to do it for free in a near instant, you may as well try the machine first. If it fails, go hire the professional. But if it works, you’ve just saved a lot of money.

Opportunities For Humans

However, with all that being said, AI is far from perfect. While it can’t be betrayed by human needs or biases, it does face a different kind of threat from within: bugs and glitches. SemRush’s AI tool even 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 ChatGPT and other chat bots is that they’re only as good as the prompt you give them. I’ve often given ChatGPT the same prompt five different ways and still failed to get the results I’m 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 (at this stage).

Similarly, ChatGPT can only generate responses based on the sources it can find online. If there isn’t much inspiration on the internet 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. Until they figure out a way to make it sentient, AI can’t do this. For every ChatGPT answer, there needs to be a human who can fill in the gaps.

This also means that 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.

The Way Forward

Given all of the above, it’s safe to say that copywriters will not go extinct any time soon — but we’d be wise to consider a human-robot alliance.

While ChatGPT might not nail the polished final draft, automating certain tasks can enhance productivity and ultimately 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 refining the results from something good 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 outright, it will reshape our profession. Think of it as a doorway to refining our craft through enhanced productivity and up-skilling.

We can never be as available, fast, or cheap as a free online chatbot; but we can seek comfort in our unique capacity for creativity and emotional depth. While the tools may evolve, the essence of storytelling remains distinctly human.

A question for the reader: In a not-so-distant future where AI workers might out-number people, will hiring humans become an obligation for Corporate Social Responsibility?