Boarding the 6am train from Leeds to London for Fix Fest 2.0 (without doubt the weirdest and wonderfullest event for copywriters everywhere), I had two goals.

The primary one was to make sure I didn’t fall asleep on the train back home, miss my changeover at Doncaster, and end up stranded in Newcastle. 

Before that, I hoped to learn what the unstoppable rise of AI means for copywriters (and businesses that hire them). Every bugger’s tried it. Every bugger’s got their opinion. So much noise. Is it going to be an essential tool that 10xes our income? Or are we, as the final line of Natalie Moores’s live AI poetry social experiment lamented, ‘watching our craft slip through our hands’? 

To borrow ChatGPT’s favourite line, let’s dive in.

Hit them in the gut

John Forde is a zen master of copywriting. Among the many valuable lessons and resources he shared with us was this quote by a famous ad man named Bill Bernbach: “You’ve got to say things in such a way that it hits people in the gut. If they don’t feel it, nothing will happen. The more intellectual you grow, the more you lose the great intuitive skills that really touch and move people.” 

Dave Harland and Eddie Shleyner are cool dudes. Much cooler than me. And they delivered plenty of gut punches in their talks. Dave first, then Eddie. No waffly intros, they just strolled onto the stage and got straight into their stories. Both of them masters of their craft, speaking slowly, pausing often, timing impeccable. They kept us all leaning in, waiting for the gut punches. 

Dave’s were in fact directly related to his gut. While each of the speakers had us chuckling now and then, the riotous laughter as Dave told the story of an unfortunate ‘squelch fest’ he experienced as a child was another level entirely. 

Eddie hit us with plenty of gut punches in his raw account of the birth of his first child. He didn’t bother with hyperbolic adjectives and cliches. Just simple recollections of what happened, what was said and how he reacted. Every person was mesmerised. Many suddenly seemed to get something in their eye. 

Both Dave and Eddie commissioned AI to rewrite their work. In doing so, they masterfully showed how AI can’t get near the things that make us human. Like laughter. Like the unfathomable spectrum of feelings when you meet your first child. It doesn’t have the unique points of reference that come from lived experience. And therefore it tries to do too much. Tries to fill every gap. And that is the opposite of what we should be doing as copywriters, as another speaker explained…

Beautiful mysteries

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” A quote by Nick O’Connor, co-host of Fix Fest. Not really by him though. Einstein said it, apparently. Nick just opened his talk with it. 

The mysterious is beautiful because curiosity is more powerful than the emotions that most people think drive us – fear and greed. In essence, curiosity is a combination of the two. When we don’t know something, we don’t like it. When we figure it out, we get a big hit of dopamine, the same feel-good chemical we get from sex, drugs and in my case, a mouthful of garlic naan and chicken jalfrezi. 

Therefore our job as copywriters is to sustain that feeling of curiosity. To pose those questions and open those situations that the reader must find answers for, like an itch they need to scratch.

Nick doesn’t approach copywriting by saying ‘What information do I want to convey?’. He does it by saying ‘What question can I get the reader to ask themselves?’ The magic of copywriting is that a single sentence – a single word, even – can throw up several of these questions.

And therein lies the weakness of AI. It’s like a smart-arse college kid who wants to show off their vast intellect by telling you everything they know. But in doing so, it kills the mystery. It shuts down the information-seeking urge within us all. Once we know all the answers, we stop paying attention.

Glenn Fisher, Nick’s co-host, makes people feel this urge through what he calls ‘unexpected juxtapositions’. These cause things to appear absurd on the surface. They force us to ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ But AI cannot, by its very nature, be unexpected. ChatGPT and the like are designed to pick the most predictable word based on previous words. That’s literally how it works. And so only a human can truly imagine and portray an unexpected juxtaposition.

Shit in, shit out

This became the unofficial tagline of Fix Fest. I suppose it’s a universal truth that applies to everything, but it’s especially pertinent to AI on two levels.

The first way comes down to what you actually prompt an AI generator to do. A couple of vague sentences ain’t gonna do the job if you want anything useful. Shit in, shit out. 

Heather Murray, founder of AI for Non-Techies, pulled back the curtain on how generative AI works. Since ChatGPT and the like only work by predicting the next word based on previous data, you need to feed it lots and lots of detailed, specific and clear information so it can produce something with any sort of depth. How much information? Well, Heather mentioned that she’s fed her AI writing tool 5,000 LinkedIn posts to educate it on the way she wants it to write. So that gives you an idea.

Of course, she also gave us loads of tips on how to create prompts that lead to effective copy. But I’m not going to share them here because Heather has an online community where you can learn it all from her. OK, I’ll tell you one quick tip. Keep a list of ‘banned words’ handy whenever you prompt. Copy it into ChatGPT and it won’t use those annoying giveaway words that everyone’s sick of seeing, like ‘delve’, ‘pivotal’ and one I particularly despise, ‘It’s important to note’.

The more interesting way ‘shit in, shit out’ applies to AI is as follows. As a Large Language Model, ChatGPT has simply been given an enormous snapshot of the internet. And every time it updates, it absorbs more of whatever’s online. Now the thing is, the more AI-generated content that’s out there, the more these AI models are going to absorb. So they’re going to be trained on the shallow and generic content that they’ve already put out there. Therefore what they generate gets gradually diluted in a constant cycle. Shit in, shit out. John Forde explained this process and told us its name. Its wonderful name. ‘Enshitification’.

So is AI any good at all?

Despite the enshitification, everyone agreed that AI is a useful tool. It was quite reassuring to find out that I’ve already been using AI in similar ways to far more successful, rich and famous copywriters than me. Maybe I’m not a complete dunce after all. 

Without doubt the most useful and practical takeaways from my perspective were the custom GPTs John Forde shared with us. They’re designed to turbocharge the essential processes that go into creating good copy, such as analysing existing high-performing copy, understanding your prospect,  and editing and improving your work. And they’re all infused with his copywriting genius. It’s not about getting bots to do your job. It’s about adding the speed and efficiency of AI so you can focus on your ability to make human connections. If I had the spare cash lying around, I’d definitely have joined his mentoring programme.

No doubt AI has whipped all the charlatans out there into a frenzy. “All we need to do is push a few buttons and we can make shitloads of money getting this robot to do what copywriters have spent years mastering.” But I welcome these fraudsters. All they’ll do is make more marketers and business leaders realise that they need do in fact need humans crafting their messages. 

Heather Murray summed this up nicely. She said only a copywriter knows what ‘good’ looks like. Only someone who understands the craft and the human meaning within the words can decide if something will actually work. This has always been true, whether the words were generated by a human or a robot. 

Those who try to grab a quick buck using AI to write the finished product, without the knowledge to understand whether it’s any good or not, won’t last long.

The future of copywriting

The legend goes that when Socrates took hemlock after receiving his death sentence, it killed him from the ground up. First his feet and legs went dead, then his upper body, and finally the head. Nick O’Connor reckons that AI will do the same to copywriting. It’s already wiped out the lower rungs. The content mills that churn out shitty articles for the sole purpose of ranking on Google and plastering a load of ads across the page. The stuff you can hardly call copywriting. But it may impact those at a higher level at some point.

The only ones truly safe are the brains. The copywriters who go beyond words. Eddie Shleyner spoke of how great copy is a mirror you put in front of your audience. Imperfect, authentic and true. Copywriters who’ll thrive in an artificial world are the ones who understand people, recognise and create emotions, and form those deep connections. But this is nothing new. As Eddie reminded us, the principles of copywriting are the same as they were a century ago, when Claude Hopkins laid it all out in Scientific Advertising. It’s never been just about the words.

One other interesting point was that AI is making bad clients worse. Copywriters have always had to deal with bad clients. The ones who try to barter you down relentlessly, claim ‘it’ll only take an hour’, or insist that sounding like every other business in their market is the right way to go about things. 

AI has empowered these unsavoury types who see copywriters as no more than a scribe. Now they need us even less because ChatGPT can do it in seconds! 

Thankfully, there are still plenty of people out there who care about the messages their business puts out into the world, and know that human connection is still the key driver in finding, getting and keeping hold of customers.

Those are the people all of us copywriters need to seek out.

And if you’re one of those people, I’d love to hear from you.

P.S.I haven’t mentioned all of the FixFest speakers, simply because I’ve already taken up too much of people’s time.

So I’ll briefly mention them here, as they’re all very much worth following and listening to.

Lauren Ingram, founder of Next Big Thing podcast – she gave a call to arms to embrace and experiment with AI. She encouraged us to view it as a highly intelligent intern. A very apt description.

Natalie Moores, co-founder of Mac & Moore agency – her poetry classes are always a delight, and her live AI poetry experiment was fascinating and fun.

Sam Judge and Addison Clarke, founders of Scoops AI – they demonstrated how their powerful AI-driven tool provides supreme customer insights. Surely the future of customer research.