Last night I did a very twentieth-century thing. I started writing a novel—manually.
Writers are familiar with little professional crises. We never manage to begin, let alone finish, even a tiny fraction of the ideas bouncing around in our heads. For every reader who likes our work, ten others think it’s junk. Some days the words just don’t come. Those are the days we do our laundry.
Today’s crisis is different. Artificial intelligence—specifically large language models like ChatGPT—has put the creative power of an experienced, trained professional writer in the hands of everyone.
The Robots Are Coming!
If you’re a writer and you’re thinking, “This is just hype,” I’m sorry to say the rock you’re living under is about to be lifted by a giant, unfriendly robot.
The threat from AI is not its talent as a writer. AI isn’t likely to come up with a turn of phrase like Samuel Beckett. Only a human being would write a sentence like this: “To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.” (If you haven’t read Watt, go read it.)
AI isn’t a world-class writer, but for most people—and most purposes—mediocrity is good enough. Unfortunately, large swaths of the marketing industry are dominated by people who aren’t interested in writerly craft. They just want lots of words, right away.
Drawn from a Poisoned Well
We writers only have ourselves to blame. For two decades our bad habits and lazy shortcuts have filled the web with middling prose. After all, marketing copy isn’t meant to be literature. It is practical writing meant to convey information and solicit interest in the marketplace.
AI has internalized those decades of poor habits. Over the last year, I’ve read a great deal of AI-generated writing. ChatGPT loves certain sentence structures. It overuses participial phrases. It adores awkward and illogical “from . . . to . . .” and “both . . . and . . .” structures. It repeats itself with long-winded passages, like a typical college essayist.
In short, in the right hands, AI is at least as proficient as the median-talent marketing copywriter. For many businesses, that is enough.
Not as Easy as It Sounds
The good news in all this is that AI-generated content still takes a fair bit of work.
CEOs of small companies around the world are learning that AI is not a substitute for a marketing department. Simply trusting an unedited AI to do the right thing is foolish. It only takes a few obvious factual errors to send your reputation to the graveyard.
Dispense with the magical thinking that AI eliminates the need for labor. It doesn’t eliminate it. It changes it.
Shifting Expectations, Rising Standards
In other words, writers shouldn’t reach for the comfort bonbons just yet. You’re still needed. But the nature of your work, and the expectations behind it, are changing quickly.
Here are a few ways AI is changing expectations of clients and marketing firms like Red Mallard:
- Efficient research. The ability to tackle any topic is one of the most valuable traits in a marketing copywriter. AI supercharges this part of the writing process. In a few seconds you can have a strong outline with concrete, mostly accurate ideas. A few more prompts will produce a solid foundation of information to build an article. Writers who earn most of their fees from research time will face rising expectations for efficiency.
- A higher bar for quality. AI output may be mediocre, but its mediocrity is superior to the work of many humans. Badly constructed sentences and paragraphs, weak opening lines, major stylistic mistakes, clunky titles—these are examples of issues that won’t be tolerated for much longer. Quite often such problems happen because the writer is suffering a creative block. A few minutes with AI can unstick the process. Writers will be expected to take advantage of it so their clients don’t have to.
- Certain tasks are losing commercial value. Certain narrowly focused forms of content are too easy to produce with AI for clients to continue paying for handcrafted versions. A custom GPT trained on a client’s style and platform best practices can generate a highly competent social media post in seconds. The same is true for email copy. Writers who want to continue handcrafting these narrow categories will have fewer opportunities.
- Optimized interviews. Strong interviewing skills are still in high demand. Many copywriters charge clients extra for transcription and analysis. AI tools make those services obsolete. AI also significantly raises standards for interview preparation. A few minutes of prompting for favorable, targeted questions is all it takes. A writer who shows up to an interview unprepared won’t be asked back.
- More words for the same price. Even before AI arrived, the hyper-focus on word count for SEO had pushed expectations for volume-per-hour to a high level. Now, producing a ton of words is much easier. For content marketing specifically, companies that want to compete in the SEO battlefield will need longer articles than ever before, but they won’t be willing to pay double the price for double the volume. Instead, they’ll expect writers to use AI to fluff out their SEO content.
Become the Right Hands
Professional writers who want to continue to work for clients in the marketing industry face a clear choice: incorporate AI into their work or expect to earn less per hour of effort. Talent at the top end of the marketplace should continue to thrive because exceptional writing continues to matter. For the rest of us, AI is not optional.
If you haven’t spent much time with AI and still have doubts about it, shake off your reluctance and get started.
Working with AI is a skill like any other. AI is a sandbox, and some people are better than others at building castles. Learning some best practices for the tools you use can save you time and supercharge your creative process.
Using AI requires a shift of emphasis from writing to editing. Few people understand what editors do. Writers often are completely unaware of their bad habits and blind spots. Most can benefit from learning the disciplines that distinguish a professional editor from an amateur one:
- A self-doubting attention to detail that knows to seek out confirmation rather than assume a given decision is correct on questions of style or syntax.
- Mastery of grammar, syntax, and structure. As writers, we often aren’t conscious of our weaknesses in these areas.
- Recognizing repetitive phrasing and empty language for what it is and knowing how to improve it.
It is very difficult to build these skills without a mentor who can point out gaps that need to be closed. Consider taking some classes. The Editorial Freelancers Association is a great place to start.
As a bonus, building some editorial skills also makes you into a better writer.
Which Tools?
The AI marketplace is extremely crowded. Writers who are just now learning AI should take time to explore the options. Every model has its strengths and weaknesses.
At Red Mallard, we use ChatGPT to build a library of custom GPTs, one for each of our clients. Along with client-specific style rules and business information, the custom GPTs are trained on a library of topical modules covering parameters for different content types, like LinkedIn posts and emails, so the user can quickly generate the launch point for whatever project they’re working on.
To access custom GPTs, a user needs a paid account for ChatGPT. In my opinion, having access to custom GPTs and OpenAI’s most advanced model are excellent reasons for a writer to justify the $20 per month expense.
We also use Google Gemini. Gemini is not as strong a writer as ChatGPT, but because it draws from the current web, it can be a more accurate and thorough research assistant in the planning stage.
Spending time with one tool is a reasonable idea. Learn its quirks and habits. Explore the advice others have curated about how to attain the most from it.
Change Is Not the End
Take heart, writers. Your work will continue to matter. Ours is not the first profession to face dramatic change because of technological innovation. Like others, we will find a fresh path forward.
And don’t forget to create for yourself. Writing for marketing is great, but nothing beats starting another novel as food for the soul.
