The more I read about the use of AI and LLMs in writing, particularly copywriting, the more convinced I am that writing skills are going to be in demand in the not-too-distant future.

Until now, copywriters (at least the good ones) have studied the “art” of copywriting and the psychology of sales. They understand how to get into your ideal client's mind and create messages that resonate.

Now we have AI, fewer people are investing in their copywriting skills. They aren’t learning the fundamentals. Why bother learning how to write copy when AI can do it for you in seconds? All you need is a few good prompts.

But that attitude is exactly why copywriting skills will be in demand soon enough. Fewer people will have the knowledge, experience and skills required to write copy that actually works because so many people will have become completely reliant on AI to write for them.

Using LLMs to write is like junk food. It’s ok to indulge now and then, but too much of it is detrimental to your health. In the case of using LLMs, it’s detrimental to your cognition - your brain health.

Research is already showing that dependence on LLMs is impacting creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, working memory, and intuitive reasoning.

But there’s another reason you shouldn’t rely on LLMs to write sales copy for you.

LLMs don’t understand the fundamentals of copywriting, and they never will.

I recently delivered a talk about copywriting in the age of AI. I opened my talk by explaining that copywriting isn’t all that different to copywriting before the age of AI: your message needs to resonate with the reader.

And that really is the crux of good copy. You need to know who your ideal reader is and then figure out how to create a connection with them.

As part of my talk (and to prove my point), I asked Copilot whether LLMs understood the fundamentals of good copywriting. Here’s what it said:

This summary is pretty much bang on: LLMs can’t replace the strategic judgement, audience insight, or commercial intuition that makes copy actually work.

LLMs have been trained to recognise common patterns, writing devices, and structures. But they don’t have real experiences to draw on. They don’t understand how your target audience thinks. They don’t understand how to tap into a buyer’s motivation or how to use emotion to inspire action. And they never will because they aren’t human.

That’s not to say you can’t use AI to assist in your writing, but if you don’t understand what makes good copy - copy that will get you the results you want - how do you know if what AI has created for you is fit for purpose?

Even if you can tell the copy it has produced is rubbish, you won’t know how to fix it if you don’t understand the fundamentals of good copy.

There’s no shortage of people claiming they can spot AI-generated content a mile off. This isn’t strictly true.

They might be able to tell when something has been generated using a vague prompt and then copied and pasted without any editing. But if the author has done most of the work themselves, only using AI to assist with some elements, most people can’t tell.

And the idea that there are “obvious AI tells” is ludicrous.

The poor old em-dash has had its reputation destroyed by AI, despite the fact that writers were using it long before AI (and even the internet) existed.

I’ve seen these apparent AI detectives claim all sorts of common devices and phrases are AI tells, including “listing things in threes”, using the phrase “it’s not X, but it’s Y” and even starting sentences with certain words.

It’s complete crap.

AI was trained on the work of hundreds of the best writers in history. Its job was to look for common patterns, writing devices, techniques, and structures that it could then mimic.

All of those “obvious tells” and “sure-fire signs” are being used by AI because they have been used hundreds of times over by some of the best writers and copywriters that ever existed.

I was teaching the “rule of three” in my copywriting workshops way back in 2017, before LLMs were even a thing. And I learnt it from people who were teaching it long before I even knew what copywriting was.

The difference between a human doing it and AI doing it is that human copywriters (the good ones) know how and when to use certain tropes, devices and techniques effectively. LLMs use them purely because they were built to mimic human writers. Human writers use these things, so LLMs do as well.

That’s why they often sound so jarring, unnatural or overused in AI-generated content. It’s not because they aren’t effective - it’s because AI doesn’t understand how to use them effectively (or sparingly). AI doesn’t know how to use them for impact or to improve the flow or rhythm of the copy. Good writers do.

Unfortunately, these self-proclaimed AI detectives are essentially accusing good writers of using AI when they aren’t. I’ve even seen people claim they won’t read something if they see an em-dash in it (which is absolutely moronic).

This anti-AI crusade is causing good writers to second-guess themselves, change their writing style, or even add typos or use bad grammar in an attempt not to sound like AI. And the maddening part is that they don’t sound like AI. AI sounds like them because AI was trained using their work.

There is no specific punctuation mark or phrase that indicates something is written by AI. The real indicator is how lacking in soul and substance a piece of copy or content is. LLMS can’t inject personality or add personal opinions or come up with a fun analogy or include a real-life experience. A human can.

And that’s the real reason people don’t like AI slop.

But if we’re being honest, humans are just as capable of creating soulless content.

And if copy is bland and boring, who really cares whether it was written by a human or a robot? Bland copy is bland copy either way.

So I don’t think the focus should be on whether you should use AI or not, whether you can tell something is written by AI or not, or whether someone sounds like AI or not.

I think the focus should be on understanding how to create messages that resonate with your readers, how to give your readers value, and how to inspire action.

I offer online copywriting courses, one-on-one copywriting training and mentoring, and in-person copywriting training for teams. If you’d like to develop key skills that your competitors are blindly outsourcing to AI, drop me a message at [email protected].

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