Tried ChatGPT to write your website copy? You're not alone – lots of people think it'll save them time, money, and get that content box well and truly ticked. As long as it's 'good enough', right? And the grammar's good, so why bother with hiring a human?
The problem is, as a company offering professional copywriting services, we can often tell when a website has used AI to write its copy based on tone, sentence structure and specific words that we know ChatGPT loves to throw in on repeat. Remember that while AI can write, it doesn't have a brain. It'll only churn out content based on what it's been trained on. And sometimes, as we saw recently from Elon Musk's Grok Chatbot, that stuff isn't always factually accurate and can even lean into the highly controversial, outrageous or pretty damn stupid.
AI doesn't have a brain, so let's not pretend that it does
If your goal is to turn out articles at speed (and quantity is better than quality in your book), then an AI like ChatGPT will be the best fit. But remember that it doesn’t know your audience, your goals, or the little details that turn a sentence into a conversation. It doesn’t care about clarity or connection – it just wants to sound plausible, and you just need your content to get over the line and possibly pass AI bot checks.
Real copywriting, on the other hand, starts with asking the question 'why?' Why are we saying this? What do we need this copy to do? Does it need to convince someone to buy something? Does it need to give them information? Does it need to onboard them in an app? What does your customer need to hear next? What tone feels right for this product, this industry, this moment?
AI can’t decide all of that. But a good copywriter can, and will. What you're paying for when you drop that day rate is solid experience of crafting copy for many different brands, being able to understand a brand's unique tone of voice, market position and standing, and creating lines of copy that speak directly to your audience. In turn, your audience will connect with your products and services. All of this requires an actual human brain. Let's not try and convince ourselves that anything ChatGPT can come up with can be as complex, nuanced and imaginative as the power of the human mind. The two just aren't in the same league.
Why producing vast volumes of content won't cut it
Maybe you filled an entire blog archive in a week thanks to AI. Maybe you pushed 50 product pages live. Maybe you even saved a few quid. What many people fail to realise though is that AI content that doesn’t work is actually worse than no content at all. Bounce rates go up, conversions go down, and eventually, because AI does have a hard time capturing a specific tone of voice – your brand just sounds like everyone else. That means going to a copywriter to fix the original content.
There's a pretty growing trend for this now, with more copywriters being hired to fix AI mistakes or transform dull content that doesn't connect with an audience. When AI content doesn't perform how you'd like it to, you're forced to either scrap it or spend more time patching it up. Over time, it's a false economy.
✍️ What a human copywriter actually does
We're not here to bash AI – it’s a useful tool. But if you're serious about quality, clarity and your brand having a unique voice, there's still no substitute for an actual human being creating your writing. When you work with a real copywriter, you get content that really clicks with your audience. It has a clear purpose, and is written to feel natural, not overly clunky or robotic. You have an expert in creating content at your fingertips, who can turn words into powerful tools for selling, persuading and converting.
A good copywriter should also be able to turn their hand to literally anything. Whether that's a whitepaper for a specific area of research, or some button copy for a user flow in an app. They should understand the power of good research, take the time to understand your market and competitors, and they should have the capability of spotting a typo at a thousand paces.
You know it's time to bring in a human being when you've used AI to generate your content, but have noticed that users aren't engaging with it. Also, if you read copy on your website and wince or think it just doesn't sound right, that's probably because it could sound better. There are humanising tools around that claim to add a human touch to AI content for free, but these tools often still fail at bringing true life and character to your paragraphs. Why? Because they're also AI tools! You're not working with a proper human brain.
The takeaway
AI is a great starting point. It’s a tool, but smart tools don't replace creative talent. Anyone can pick up a pen and call themselves a writer, but a professional has qualifications, experience, happy clients and accolades to back them up. If you want your content to sound smart, sharp and human – let a human write it. Or at the very least, rewrite it.
