Why the Copywriter Caved to AI

There was a time when “I can write” was enough.

Not quite enough to build a career, perhaps. But enough to get you through the door.

If you could write a decent website, knock out a few social posts, make a brochure sound less dreadful and turn a vague idea into something coherent, there was work for you.

Then AI got good.

And suddenly, a lot of the work that people used to pay copywriters to do could be produced in seconds.

I think that’s a good thing.

And, as a copywriter, I think it’s slightly terrifying.

I used to think the writing was the product

That was the mistake.

It’s an easy one to make when writing is your skill.

You spend years learning how to structure a sentence, remove unnecessary words, find a better opening, make something clearer, make something sound more interesting.

You start to think that the ability to write is what people are buying.

But AI has made the actual writing part remarkably cheap.

Give it a decent brief and it can produce a perfectly serviceable website section in seconds.

Give it a bad brief and it will produce 800 words of confident-sounding nonsense.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Because the problem was never really the words.

It was what the words had to work with.

AI isn’t the enemy

I’ve got no interest in pretending AI is ruining writing.

I use it myself.

I think businesses should use it.

If you’re a sole trader who needs five Instagram captions, an email tidied up or a first draft of a webpage, I’d much rather you had a tool that can help you do that in thirty seconds than spend three hours staring at a blank document.

The problem is that AI doesn’t know you.

It can make you sound professional, enthusiastic, reassuring, knowledgeable and passionate.

Unfortunately, so can everyone else.

And this is where the copywriter has a decision to make.

You can compete with AI.

Or you can give it something worth writing about.

What can I do that AI can’t do on its own?

I could spend my time trying to prove that I can write a better social media post than ChatGPT.

That’s becoming a harder argument to make.

Instead, I’ve started asking a different question:

What can I do that AI can’t do on its own?

The answer isn’t “write better”.

It’s listen.

Properly.

That’s where the good stuff is.

And it’s almost never in the first answer.

This is why I built Heard.

Heard. started as a copywriting service.

I interviewed people, found out what made their businesses interesting and wrote things for them.

But the more I did it, the more obvious something became.

The interview was the valuable bit.

The writing came afterwards.

And now that AI can do so much of the writing, that distinction matters more than ever.

So I’ve changed the way I work.

I interview the business owner.

I find the stories, experiences, opinions, language and details that make them them.

Then I turn that conversation into a short Brand Brief — something that captures what they do, what makes them different, who they’re talking to and, importantly, how they actually sound.

Then I create an AI Writing Prompt from it.

The idea isn’t to stop them using AI.

It’s the opposite.

I want to give AI better information.

That’s a much better starting point.

The copywriter didn’t disappear.

The copywriter just got a different job.

And perhaps that’s overdue.

There was always something slightly strange about paying someone to spend an hour writing 500 words when the person who actually owned the business had spent ten years living the 500 words.

They just don’t necessarily know how to turn all of that into something another person can understand.

That’s the bit I’m interested in.

Not writing instead of you.

Getting you into the writing.

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So yes. The copywriter caved to AI.

I did.

And I’m quite happy about it.

Because it forced me to stop selling something that was becoming increasingly easy to automate and start concentrating on the thing that was never really automated in the first place.

AI can write your content. It doesn’t know you. That’s the bit I think is worth paying for.