In the World of AI, a Writer Stands Out

Chat GPT and other AI engines have made it easy to efficiently create clear and concise copy — you should still hire a writer for your business’ communications. 

As an agency we put AI and machine learning tools to work all the time: for creating digital ad campaigns, keyword research, SEO, optimizing email campaigns, learning from our marketing strategies, analyzing advertising effectiveness — the list goes on. Yoast has robust AI features that we love. So does the Google Ads platform. We’re not luddites — if we thought ChatGPT made compelling materials without problems we would use it. We actually think ChatGPT has created opportunities for our craft to be even more effective for our clients. 

To understand this argument, let’s look at the mechanics of Chat GPT. When you feed a prompt to Chat GPT, the program uses a transformer algorithm based on a neural network designed to do two things: create sensical, grammatically correct text and respond coherently to a prompt inputted by a person. All to say, Chat GPT is designed to be like an instant message chat with a very well-read librarian, sort of. 

To make sense of any AI Chatbot as a tool, you must understand the dataset it uses. Chat GPT has been fed a massive (trillions of words) amalgam of articles, data, and text from the internet. There are several implications of cherry-picking phrases from this kind of grammatical soup. 

One of the first problems in the public arena came in December 2023 when The New York Times sued OpenAI, the creator of Chat GPT, for copyright infringement. The complaint of the ongoing litigation argues that of the trillions of words used to train OpenAI’s language models, a significant portion of them are in fact from copyrighted content from the Times. Regardless of the outcome of the case, the suit is an example of the legal precariousness of using the language tools at all. Is copyright infringement negated by stealing just a little bit from a huge pool of sources? Maybe. And maybe not, or maybe it depends, in the eyes of the law. It’s a brave new world of unsettled copyright case law. 

A second issue is accuracy. A recent study from Purdue University estimated that 52% of ChatGPT answers contain incorrect information. Perhaps surprisingly, they also found that their study participants still preferred the AI-generated responses 35% of the time because of their comprehensiveness. ChatGPT excels at delivering information synopsis in clear and generally easy-to-read ways but struggles to provide consistently accurate information. This leaves you with grammatically correct text that still needs to be extensively researched and fact-checked, at best. That’s because ChatGPT is not really intelligent, as many experts have pointed out. It’s a language tool that creates generally grammatically correct paragraphs, with slightly more-often-than-not incorrect information. 

Maybe those are good enough reasons to stay away, for now, on their own. But the most compelling case for hiring a professional writer instead of a chatbot comes from the syntax returned by language models. ChatGPT generally returns prompts with prose that is smooth, and without much variation in the length and structure of sentences. AI detectors use these factors — perplexity and burstiness — to attempt to tell the difference between a real person and a chat bot. 

The result of ChatGPT’s learning style, essentially reading a word document 3.7 billion pages long (much of which was written by professional writers and revised by expert editors), is text that is easy to read, flows well, and generally predictable. If you are not a writer by training, using ChatGPT may feel like an incredible tool to boost your writing. It is, after all, pulling data from professionals and returning a product that is better and more efficient than what most humans could create on their own. But it’s not better to read, and certainly less unique, and much less specific than content a great writer can provide. And it certainly will not help your brand stand out.

Think of it this way: would you rather have a cup of coffee made from beans produced by a single farmer, with all its uniqueness and terroir? Or would you like to take one bean each from a thousand farms in different countries and climates? They’re both going to be cups of coffee, sure, but the experience of the former is going to be much more memorable than the latter.

Our hand-crafted copy is squarely our client’s intellectual property. It’s well researched. Fact checked. Edited by experts. We have written copy that grows businesses for 30 years — if ChatGPT-generated work is the new norm for marketing, we’re excited about that. Our team of writers is ready to create colorful creative that pops against the drab.