You know that thing where you’re working on a project and you need someone to write a bit for you, but you don’t have the time or money to hire a professional? And so you Google “copywriting services” and hope for the best? Yeah, we tried that. And it didn’t go great. But we did learn some things, which is what this blog post is all about. Stay with us! It’ll be worth it! (Promise!)
Ironically, that intro paragraph was written by the AI service Jasper (formerly Jarvis). I thought it would be funny to make an AI service write the intro for my blog about how AI writing services aren’t that great.
Point: Humans. Robots aren’t quite sophisticated enough to enjoy that level of irony (not yet, anyway).
Update, December 2023: It’s amazing how fast AI moves. This article was written at the beginning of the “AI Craze” and ChatGPT had not yet become ubiquitous. However, we think the heart of this article remains true: there’s still a very wide gap between emotional human-generated content and even the best AI-generated content. But it’s fun to look back and see where we were at this time.
Is an AI Copywriting Service Worth It?
It’s tempting to think that paying $30 a month for an AI copywriting service is the answer to all of your content problems. It’s inexpensive. You don’t have to deal with humans. No ethical issues to deal with from outsourcing content to the remote scribe mines of the world.
As a writer myself by trade, it’s really easy to say that AI copywriting services aren’t worth it. But the analytical person inside of me wants to know specifically why. Could an AI potentially write a dry research paper? Potentially, yes. Could they write short marketing copy for products? Sure can — whether you like the end result is up to you, but AI can do it.
Can AI write a truly creative story? You’ve likely seen the silly posts on social media about “I made an AI watch all 3 Back to the Future Movies, and this is the script it came up with.” But real AI writing is complicated, incomplete and still full of glitches.
The Pros and Cons of Robot Writing
Jasper as a service is kind of fun to play around with. And if you are already a decent writer, some of the tools that these AI services have to help inspire creativity are pretty cool. But will they ever replace real writers? Not for the foreseeable future. Will copywriting ever be fully automated? Probably not.
Here are some pros and cons of automated copywriting services to consider.
Cons
Learning Curve
As with all machine learning and AI-generated art, entertainment and software, there’s a learning curve. You have to learn how to interact with the AI to get the best results. This is a huge Con, simply because the time required to effectively use AI copywriting is probably more than it would take any writer just to write the thing.
Blog Content is Especially Lacking
You can get an outline, topic ideas, intro paragraphs, spell checks and a closing paragraph for your blog through Jasper. But, you’re still on your own to create the vast majority of the content. You can continue to prompt the AI throughout the blog post, but with the amount of effort involved, you might as well be writing these yourself.
Content That — in Many Cases — is Clearly Written by a Robot
As impressive as artificial intelligence is and how far it’s come, there are still so many glitches to work out. Refer to the “learning curve” above. If you don’t know how to prompt the AI properly, your content is going to be strange at best, incoherent at worst.
SEO Structure is Not a Consideration
While the content that the automated services provide are keyword-based, they still miss many of the strategies required for optimal blog SEO.
Pros
Somewhat Useful Writer Prompts
Unless you’ve already got a decent writer on staff, the writing prompts are probably useless. But you can come up with some interesting ideas and fun writing prompts using the AI copywriting services.
Here’s an example: I fed a very basic plot to the AI and had it spit out a story for me. This is what it wrote:
“Seth had always been a copywriter. He was good at it, and he enjoyed the work. But there was something inside of him that longed to do more. So when he saw an ad for a band looking for new members, he decided to audition.
To Seth’s surprise, he got in. The other members were impressed by his lack of musical talent, and they figured he would be good for marketing purposes. Seth was happy to be a part of the band and started practicing with them every day.
The old man who lived next door to the practice space took notice of Seth and started teaching him how to play the ukulele. At first, Seth was terrible at it. But with practice…”
And right there, the initial prompt cut off.
I assume the end of the story was “But with practice, Seth became the world’s foremost ukulele virtuoso, selling out stadiums across the world, until he retired to Bora Bora where lived on coconut milk and rum.”
Snippet Writing for Business Owners on the Run
Despite its long-form content inadequacies, Jasper has the ability to create product descriptions, Amazon product snippets, Google ad copy and more. Of course, this isn’t ever going to be as well thought-out as something a copywriter will come up with, but it’ll be serviceable in a pinch.
Call-to-Action Creation
If you have any experience writing website copy, you know what a pain it can be racking your brain trying to come up with new hero copy or CTAs. Getting a little bit of help when you have writer’s block is great (assuming there’s already a writer on staff to guide the robots for you).
Automated Copywriting: Conclusion
AI copywriting services like Jasper are fun and a novel idea. I personally love AI and think there are some cool (and terrifying) things that will come out of it. But now and through the foreseeable future, it’s not likely that copywriting will become fully automated. The main problem with an AI service is the learning curve. You need a good writer who’s fairly tech-savvy on staff. Otherwise, you won’t be able to really use the service properly. This definitely defeats the purpose if you were hoping to use a service for all of your content needs.
Even though there are some pros, ultimately we’re human beings trying to evoke a response out of other human beings. You still need humans for that. Software has come a long way in regard to how it interacts with humans, but it’s still just not enough.
