Welp. Here’s a post not written by ChatGPT. Or maybe it is and I’m so evolved I am merely reverse psychology-ing you to root for the underdog. Are machines even the underdog? Ba ha ha. I guess we’ll find out.

Here’s the thing. If you bought into ChatGPT or Jasper or whatever flash in the pan “AI can write” seat on the bandwagon to Hell you got sold, congratulations. I hope your NFTs are doing well and the folks at the local mall’s Glamour Shots really made you a model.

The reality is, you’re being sold something that is either never going to work for creative copy or, best case scenario, not going to be sophisticated enough for at least five years.

I say this with love. I started my career as a writer because of Ray Bradbury. The Matrix is one of my top five favorite films. No one wants to see truth become stranger than science fiction more than I do. But AI simply isn’t able to replace a creative writer. And I am going to tell you a bunch of reasons why. (Trust me there are many more. Ask ChatGPT.)

empty words don’t equal messaging.

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit. Human emotion. A thing, very overtly, a robot does not have.

Now, you may say, “so what.” Because you *may* be in the camp of people that truly believe front-loading the “right prompts” can offset this deficit. Okay. Clearly you have never tried to get an empathy-less Narcissist to respond the way you want and it shows. YOU CANNOT FAKE EMOTION.

“Okay, so what? Not every piece of content has to be the Notebook.”

You’re right. It doesn’t. But let me ask you this…Do you think if you tried to replace Taylor Swift’s songwriting with a robot’s that it would produce tracks to get Tay to the top of Spotify, Time Magazine and if we’re being honest, the planet? No. It would write lyrics that were “good enough.”

Is that what you want for your business? To set fire to creativity and deploy good enough?

If you think this will save money, spoiler alert: it will not. You will spend much more in the long run when your content doesn’t perform. A thing, it seems, most businesses are not thinking about in this “AI is all the rage” moment. Performance.

Budget wisely.

Song lyrics don’t sell the song. It’s what they evoke. The places and times and people the lyrics make you think about when you hear them. I have taught my teams for nearly ten years that relatability and familiarity always pull the conversion lever with people. You tap into the human psyche, you get a reaction.

You know what cannot tap into a human psyche? A non human.

So before every writer, designer, graphic artist, animator, art director, and otherwise creative gouges their f*cking eyes out listening to some idiot say that they “took a class on AI prompts” and can create now; let’s all take a beat. Would you allow someone who said they just took a few classes on cutting things perform brain surgery on you?

ai could never.

So here’s what I mean. Just caught in the wild today: two beautiful displays of AI Could Never. Because, how would it? Here you have humans tapping into the human psyche at it’s amygdala-rooted best. A childhood holiday movie staple and a 90s classic song. This takes the human mind, the human memory and the human ability to connect past experience to the current moment. Ads like Dove’s viral Sketches campaign or The Farmer’s Dog’s famous Super Bowl commercial hit for a reason. They cut deep.

Frankly, even if they don’t cut deep, there is still an “x” meets “y” intersection of writing content or ads or headlines or commercials or taglines that not only will AI not know…but a prompt writer doesn’t know what they don’t know.

Example

Here are 3 fake ads I just wrote:

Dunkin’ Fall Campaign: America Runs on Pumpkin

Bic New Razor Launch(Pete Davidson spokesperson): Big Bic Energy

Home Depot vs. Lowe’s Commercial: “Bigger Deck Contest”

Now I want you to tell me how AI or even a “prompt writer” just plugging in words, would get to any of these. There is something else that has to be drawn on here. In the ol’ repository. Hell, that’s what puns even are. Will AI know Dunkin’s tagline, B.D.E. or a “bigger d*ck contest” without you (the prompt writer) already coming up with it? No. And if you’re already coming up with it, then you wrote it, not AI.

Yes, AI can fill in some of the long-form yada yada informative content. But not the highly conceptual creative. Hence, this article.

what would don draper do?

If you think AI can replace an advertising creative then you truly have absolutely no idea what advertising creatives do. Full stop.

Is there anyone that honestly believes we all just sit down and throw words and art at the wall?

There is sometimes MONTHS of prep that can go into a single ad. There are full teams of data scientists (yes, that’s a thing), strategists, analytics experts and other humans making these ads work BY DESIGN. There are surveys being sent, algorithms being watched, competitors being stalked, data points being tracked then optimized and trends being followed in real time.

And when there weren’t? There were old school focus groups coming in to Madison f*cking Avenue offices to talk about a damn deodorant experience for two and a half hours.

We are not guessing.

In fact, I have spent ten years dedicated to message testing. Not just a/b split testing but building long game frameworks that are more like an a/b/c/d/e sentiment test that can dig into buyer psychology over time. Not just email subject lines to a retention audience to watch open rates and CTRs either. We’re talking 5-prong front end intention tests built covertly into Google Responsive or Meta and studied for a year. Across the entire funnel.

THIS IS WHAT YOUR AI WRITER CANNOT DO. This is what your “I took a class” guy is failing to recognize.

Writers don’t just write. Designers don’t just design. I have had a full year at companies where I didn’t write a single word. Where my “pen to paper” resembled more of an A Beautiful Mind-like math equation – tracking reactive patterns across platforms and a million possible copy permutations. Watching the “if this, then that” behavioral track of readers and dizzying consumer journeys until my eyes burned. What type of human reads a Google Responsive ad vs. Google Discovery vs. Meta vs. TikTok vs. Yahoo vs. Search? How old are they? How much money do they have? What are they buying? What are they not buying? What words are *too* committal and will turn them off? Where do I have an ESL market that won’t understand my idiom? Are they on a gaming app? Should we gamify the ad and lean into a fun lil’ gamble? Is the right play FOMO or sense of urgency? Are they couponers and chronic promo coders? Great, then let’s give ’em that quick drip of discount dopamine®.

It ALL matters in messaging.

Your robot doesn’t know jack. Because it doesn’t know it has to.

Now think about the fact that the majority of digital ads operate on machine learning. You send ads out into the wild and an algorithm plays mix-y match-y and sees what word spaghetti clicks. If AI is writing the words that means a machine is crafting the ads, then reading the ads and finally, picking the ads to use. Will they just buy the products soon, too? If so, it’s only a matter of time before humans are obsolete.