Stop slagging of AI, you copy-bridge operators

I am not a fan of ChatGPT. When it writes a bit of copy, it feels like I'm eating a frozen pizza from the local Lidl. Bland and plastic, boring and unimaginative (yet, I keep eating those while watching utter crap like Dubai Bling). I feel that I can do much better than AI. Like many other creatives, I'd like to join the frontlines and shout denial at this copycat, this imposter-technology, this fraudulent thief of our hard labor (while this last one may be a valid point, I'm not going deeper than this bit)! And in this blog, I'm going to explain to you in detail, why I'm not planning to do anything about that at all.

Windmills

Yet, I'm also very aware of luddites who deny the unending progress of technology in our world. I've decided not to be at war with reality, because there is a scenario where your antagonism towards technology makes you into Don Quixote attacking windmills in the eyes of others (again, my metaphor doesn't go deeper into that than the appearance, the frayed mental state of the supposed knight-errant is a completely different topic).Again, I may feel that ChatGPT is a sucky copywriter, plenty of the colleagues in marketing do not see the same issues I do in what this generative bit of software spits out. And there's a reason for that, but... later.

See, this sort of annoying crap you wouldn't get from ChatGPT.

Badly trained AI's (we are)

Anyways, what started to vex me is so many copywriter colleagues raging about 'real' copy, original material, natural writing, and a lot of other sort-of-buzzwords for anything not generated. But, let's be very, very fucking honest: nothing we produce is truly original. We're all just generative forces, but functioning with limited datasets. We've not been trained as completely as ChatGPT, true. But my writing is definitely shaped by the data I did put in. That's my studies in culture science, my reading fantasy/scifi novels, my learning process as a copywriter and the people I consider my examples. My writing is a combination of all that data. In other words, we copywriters are just version 0.1 of ChatGPT and we suck.

But not entirely.

If you've stuck around, and you are still reading, then for some reason you think I'm still going to make a point, and you are absotively correct (again, suck it ChatGPT, that's not even a word!). How do we copy-write in a copywriterless future without claiming to be 'real organic, natural, artisinal copywriters', which is absolute bullshit as I've pointed out above.

Originality prevails (if such a thing exists)

Our massive defect in being under- and overtrained (which is when an AI sort of doesn't perform optimally) is what makes our copy funny, intense, exciting and sometimes hard to follow. All these are good traits when it comes to originality. ChatGPT or any other generative AI is confined by the rules of language and the the curse of average results. That, in turn, makes ChatGPT excellent at boring copy. Some stuff needs to be boring, yet concise, like the manual of my fridge. It's a document that I will never, ever read. Until my fridge breaks down...

And when my fridge breaks down, the last fucking thing I want is a fucking joke. I want concise, boring information, about my fridge. The same goes for other boring stuff, like reports, Wikipedia articles (I actually love jokes in Wikipedia articles, so this is up for debate), recipes (terrible place for jokes and twists), manuals, etc.

Factory work

So again, here generative AI is excellent for making bulky, slow work, that just needs to happen. You know what AI is also good at? Reading boring documents. So what if, for example. we can write very correct legal documents that no one ever really wants to read, but also make AI read them when we need to know something. We can't change the horrendous way in which legal works, but we can stop doing the dirty work ourselves.

Remember the bridge keepers of yesteryear? Why in the blue hell would we want to sit around, wait for a boat to show up, press a button, wait for the boat to pass, and press another button. There is no point in us humans doing work that we absolutely don't need to do. So, let's use AI for that kind of copywriting, and/or for analyzing and summarizing really boring stuff. And did you ever wonder that AI might write boring copy, because we are writing the profoundly boring copy that it's basing its writing on? Maybe we are the problem with our Buzzfeedisms.

And now we realize we can save ourselves a lot of time, we can finally read that book we've been telling people that we plan to read, because that is the next point.

Taste... is something we can definitely disagree on

Our unique dysfunctionality as bad early ChatGPT's means we develop unique flavours. We do that because we have the craft-knowledge that is the basis of what ChatGPT does. That makes us very useful in evaluating its work. When ChatGPT poops out a bland article on the value of eating carrots, we can add spice. We get that spice from our ability to create and read with emotions and a 'je ne sais quoi' of taste (I'll give you that much, you artificer-bridge-keepers on LinkedIn, there is something about your defectiveness that has unique value). In fact, a lot of the imperfections in our language are what creates uniquely subtle shades of meaning in our words.

The phrase 'Ich bin in Berliner' is a great example. It's become sort of a thing by itself, a catch phrase, which was weirdly translated for a Kennedy speech in Berlin. The long-running myth is that he actually expressed himself to be a Berliner pastry, but that's up for debate. Anyways... the point is, sometimes imperfect is perfect. I would not dream of putting this phrase in a speech myself, but we all have a brilliant slip-up now and then. Spoonerisms, Modegreens, Eggcorns, Freudian Slips, these are the things that make language brilliant. Language is full of beautiful ridiculousness. Accidental beauty, quirky mistakes, spontaneous nonsense. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Stop the grind

This is probably a nice article about AI, if you like that sort of thing. You might not. In that case, this is probably not a very great article about AI. It's very much written from the perspective of a biased human being, with a problematic sense of humor and a specific laziness. I used to love World of Warcraft, and I was not averse to a bit of 'grinding'. For those who don't know what that is, it means you repeatedly fight the same monsters for a specific bit of loot to drop endlessly. Sometimes hours and hours. I could never go back to that and now I know AI can do some stuff like that in minutes, I prefer AI. That's the kind of lazy.

Let me seguay back from that, so all that imperfection is in the end what makes any writer unique. I do think I still need to do it now and then to understand how things work. If I don't, I lose appreciation for it. Same goes for copy, but there's certain stuff I can just do better.

At least, if you like that sort of thing. If not, go read someone else's stuff.

This is what ChatGPT thought about this blog:

The article provides a thought-provoking perspective on AI-generated content, emphasizing the importance of human creativity and originality in writing. While acknowledging the efficiency of AI in certain tasks, the author argues that human writers bring unique flavours* and nuances to their work that cannot be replicated by machines. They suggest that AI-generated content may lack depth and emotion, and that human writers play a vital role in evaluating and enhancing such content. Overall, the article presents a balanced view of AI's capabilities while highlighting the irreplaceable aspects of human creativity in writing.

*I corrected ChatGPT here, as I wanted to be consistent in my spelling.