Save Our Writers: One Caption's Plea

Captions. We've lived the greater part of our extremely short lives in our writers' minds. We've been slowly turned from side to side like pieces of meat, some slowly simmering, others left to char.

We hope to see the light of day... to progress from a tiny pendant idea to taking center stage on a client's laptop screen somewhere—possibly on the other side of the world. We look forward to that special moment when we can dazzle them and leave them awestruck by how beautifully we have been woven together. We fantasize about that moment when our eyes meet and we just click. (Our writers fantasize about this more than we do.)

The truth is, we rarely just click. The first meeting is often a dress rehearsal, an audition, with several other captions or Ad copies waiting in line to be "tried out." It's difficult to pinpoint why we don't always fit perfectly. It can be a number of things.

If the client opens his email too early in the day, he or she just might be too optimistic that the caption warehouse called "our writers" still has better versions of us tucked away and so will ask for a rewrite just because he or she can.?

Alternatively, if we arrive at the client's email too late in the day and they see the email on their way to their favorite rumba class, well, let's just say they might be in a hurry to close things off, and so we just might get a lucky-break approval.

There are other clients, however, who will not want to rush things and will push the approval over until the next morning. And we all know how mornings are. Between the Starbucks accidentally spilling over the keypad and the production guys delivering a launch video three days late and with a glaring typo, well, let's just say mornings can be rough in the world of captions and Ad copies. Best case scenario: we get skimmed over. Worst case scenario: we have to be stripped down to the bare bones as our writers start from scratch.?

Often times, though, the client decides to write us themselves—and by "themselves" they mean they'll "outsource" it to chat.openai and associates. Yeah, in our world, that's like nails on chalkboards on JBL speakers.

In this day and age anyone can claim they can write a good piece of Ad copy. But we can tell the real captions from the fakes. We can tell the ones that ooze charisma and heart—the ones that fell off the lap of a writer who's spent three days straight wearing the same dirty clothes thinking up word combinations.

We also know the AI types. The suave, swanky looking, nose-in-the-air pieces of copy that are the very spittle of some artificial intelligence that smokes Cuban cigars in Elon Musk's garage.(Did he move out of that tiny house, by the way?)

Those AI types think they are the real deal. But one thing that separates us from them? They can never have soul. They can never really connect with humans the way a real caption written by a real human can.

And hey, my best friend was generated by AI, but once he wasn't sounding right, and when they tried to get a more fluent version of him, the AI said it had "reached its maximum capacity" and couldn't generate any more. That was the end of that friendship. Death by an overwhelmed artificial intelligence—the irony is not lost on me.

And yes, writers get a semblance of this too when they hit Writer's block but it's not the same. At least with writer's block, the hand that holds the pen still has warmth in it despite the lull in creativity. With these AI types, it's all cold from the get go.?

The world has been feeling colder since they arrived, I tell you. They pay no respect to us real captions. Without us, the world wouldn't even know they needed them. The best of us captions were so deeply envied that someone somewhere decided, "Hey, let's just clone these suckers!" -

and who's to tell what's a human-generated piece of copy and what's not anymore?

Now, as I stare into the distance and wonder how long before my kind goes extinct—when the day will arrive when even the best of writers will become too lazy to bother trying to outdo the machines—I have to give it up to the client who had started to rewrite my writer's captions (with AI) but stopped themselves saying, "Surely the copywriter knows best—I'll ask them to tweak this for me." That seemingly insignificant decision is what will cause my hungry and tired writer to look up from their desk and forget that they just churned out 45 Pinterest captions, 15 newsletters, 14 Google Search Ad sets, and countless giddy adhocs all in a very few days' work, even hours, on some days.

That decision will give them reason to feel needed, reason to put on their creative armor once again, and valiantly march into the media and marketing battlefield. A place not for the faint of heart, where terrible copy given the green light by marketing experts who have lost all passion for their brands roams free.

Only human writers—yes, the ones with real blood in their veins—know how to defend the honour of brands, one trembling punch at the keyboard at a time.

We REAL captions and Ad Copy pieces salute them. May they never feel weird about carrying around notebooks, even if the only thing written in them may be Death to chat.openai and associates!