TL;DR:Businesses that need superior writing will continue to need the services of talented copywriters. Businesses that need basic, competent writing may be able to use AI-written copy as-is.

Generative AI technologies now possess the ability to produce copywriting and graphic design. This is prompting marketing professionals to consider the implications of AI on various marketing career roles.

As someone who has tracked the advancements in AI and natural language processing since my graduate studies in Romance Linguistics, I recognize the potential strengths and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as those developed by OpenAI. The analysis of AI’s applicability to copywriting I share below is applicable for now. But given the rapid and sometimes daily progress in the sophistication and capabilities of AI technologies, my analysis will likely change often.

AI-generated copy can be useful in some cases. It is typically grammatically sound, devoid of typographical and stylistic errors, and follows a logical flow of thought. It may contain errors of fact, but so can human-authored copy. AI-produced copy is suitable for use as-is in 75% to 80% of cases, corresponding to the 80/20 rule.

Note: By referring to “copy produced by default” I aim to differentiate it from AI-generated copy resulting from advanced prompt engineering. Skillful prompt engineering can significantly enhance the relevance and utility of AI-created copy, a topic I will address in a future article.

Currently, AI-written copy is limited to being simply competent. It does not rise above basic competence to produce content that is engaging, compelling, insightful, or novel. For this reason, the copy AI produces is inadequate for organizations that have discerning target audiences. Such audiences require inspired copywriting that is beyond the capability of AI.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss generative AI, LLMs, prompt engineering, or similar topics, I invite you to contact me.

In fact, I thought that sentience would arise as an emergent phenomenon only when the hardware was complex enough to support something other than binary processing. That is to say that I did not expect sentience or self-awareness until we had achieved a new processing hardware model such as quantum computing.

I now think I underestimated the level of complexity we can achieve today. I am now beginning to suspect that the emergent phenomenon of sentience or self-awareness could arise in significant degrees (viewing sentience or self-awareness as a continuum rather than an all or nothing state) from simply applying enough data and enough processing power to existing technologies, without the need for advances such as quantum computing.

While I have readily dismissed the possibility of sentient AI in the absence of quantum computing or a paradigm-shifting processing equivalent, I now think we could almost be there. In a future post I will walk through my working definition of sentience/ self-awareness/ consciousness with respect to AI.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss generative AI, LLMs, prompt engineering, or similar topics, I invite you to contact me.

A growing number of us live at the center of a technological web. Strands radiate out connecting us to our smart home, enabling us to do things such as turn lights on and off or lock doors. Other strands connects us to our vehicle, allowing us, for example, to start it remotely and then turn on the heater so that it is warm when we get into it.

Some very short strands connect us to our wearables. Watches, bracelets, articles of clothing and other devices track our vital statistics, location, level of activity, and other data that is of interest to us. Longer strands connect us to our workplace, allowing us to access the data and the systems we need to be productive at a distance and after hours.

And a complex tangle of strands connect us to our social identity across numerous social media sites and services that helped keep others aware of what we are doing and connect us to those we care about.

Earlier I said that we live at the center of a web, but that description is imprecise. It is more accurate to say that each of us possesses a nexus that is the center of a technology web, and we take that nexus with us wherever we go.

Through this single nexus, which is usually in our pockets, we connect to and control our homes, our vehicles, are wearable devices, our work, and our social universe. The nexus is our smartphone.

Because we prize convenience, we give our smartphones unquestioned access to every aspect of our lives. Once we have opened our smartphone by entering a code or allowing it to recognize our face or touching it with our finger so that it can read our fingerprint, we want no further barriers. Our smartphones store passwords that we would have to enter elsewhere. If we forget a password our smartphone is the medium of choice for two-factor authentication, so that with our smartphone we can change any password that we have forgotten.

In short, our smartphones are a universal entry point to anything and everything of value to us, both physical and digital.

Suppose that, at some point in the past, we lost a house key. Someone finding that key, and either knowing or able to learn where we live, would then have access to our homes. On the other hand, they would not get anywhere with our vehicle or our social presence, for example.

Suppose that someone hacked into our connected vehicle. They could control it remotely in all the same ways that we do. Even so, this would in no way help them compromise the security of our wearable devices or grin to them any access to our job resources.

Suppose that someone intercepted data passed along by your wearables. They could gain access to data about our location, our health, our habits and anything else that we allow our device to track. But of course, this would not help them gain access to our smart home or to our smart vehicle.

Suppose that someone successfully guest or fished our username and password allowing us to access the network and resources at our job, or our work email. They would have access not only to data important to us but potentially to data important to our employer. But we would have nothing to here with respect to the security of our homes or our vehicles or our social presence.

Suppose that someone cracked or hacked any of our many social media accounts. They would gain access to all the personal and private exchanges we so often have with friends and family and others in are virtual social settings, including digital data in the form of photos and videos and audio recordings and anything else that is part of our social media universe. But this would not help them gain access to our Network account at work.

Finally, suppose that someone hacked our smartphone and gained elevated privileges. In that case, we would by dramatically vulnerable. The bad actor would effectively have an open path to our home, our vehicle, our wearable devices, our job resources, and our entire social presence.

By simply hacking our poorly protected smartphone, a bad actor can gain access to our entire universe, bypassing the countless diverse security measures designed to protect each aspect of our digital and physical world.

This is the nexus effect. By cracking a single point at the center of our connected web, hackers open countless doors all in one single swoop.

If you work at a marketing department or an ad agency, you’ve been there. You’ve shown your boss, or your co-worker, or your client a proposed blog topic or tweet or direct mail piece or headline or concept or WHATEVER, and gotten from them a blank stare and the comment “I don’t get it.”

Well here’s some good news: they don’t have to get it.

Really, they don’t. If your boss or your client doesn’t get the message you are sending in your material, it doesn’t matter in the least.

What matters is that your target audience gets it. For example, if you are selling to…

-Girls ages 12 to 14 attending private schools on the east coast

-System administrators responsible for 1,000 to 4,999 Windows-based laptops or tablets

-Paralegals with more than four years of experience and at least one professional certification

…and the message you have created catches that target’s attention and motivates them to take the specific action you desire then it matters NOT ONE IOTA if anyone else “gets it.”

Sure, the real world beats up on this idea every day. If your boss or client doesn’t “get” the message they might not approve it. And sometimes your boss or client is actually inside the mind of the target audience, so that when they say they don’t get it that fact is meaningful.

But too often, the fact that someone who does not need to “get it” doesn’t, in fact, “get it”, leads to the demise of a damned good piece of work.

Well, here’s some bad news: when that happens, it’s your fault.

Because if you work in a marketing department or an ad agency and in your role you present proposed materials to people for feedback or approval, it is your job to defend messages that work. If a message would truly have worked, you absolutely, unequivocally should have been able to defend it. You should have been able to clearly articulate and demonstrate how and why the message would have worked.

So the next time you hear “I don’t get it,” or think you’re going to hear it, be ready. Know how and why the message you are presenting will succeed. And don’t be shy. Tell your boss or your client in plain language: You don’t have to get it. Your customer will get it.

To that end, there are three kinds of things that I do to add value: I model, I game, and I create.

Modeling is the easiest. There are some business processes and structures that are industry-specific and some that are fairly universal. To model is to understand what the goal of a given task is, envision the process or structure that has been demonstrated to most effectively achieve that goal—the model—and compare the model to what is at hand. I am able to model complex scenarios in my head accurately and instantaneously. When my company wants to add a capability I can rapidly prototype that capability. When my company finds that something is going wrong I can see the ways in which we differ from the standard model and determine if that difference is the cause. More importantly, I can determine whether emulating the model would be a solution.

This leads me to the second thing that I do, which is gaming. To game is to foresee the consequences of a given course of action. Gaming for me can be overwhelming at times. When someone proposes a change to our company or our products it sets off a gaming sequence in my head. I take into account the peculiarities of our company within our competitive landscape, apply market forces, human factors, and technology considerations, and spin the whole thing into a probable future. And I really mean “spin”; while the gaming is going on in my head I can seem distracted, unfocused, and inattentive; sometimes I get dizzy. I recognize the incongruity of describing business processes and personal quirks in the same breath, but that incongruity, I think, is at the heart of substantive change.

The most difficult of the things I do is to create, because it is the process over which I have the least conscious control, yet it is the one that provides the most significant benefits. The process of creation, for me, is to take a set of data, complete or otherwise, and consider not what it is or what it means, but to imagine what it could be or what it could mean. It is asking, and answering, the question: “What if?”

Because I am in marketing my creativity most often expresses itself in terms of market positioning, product positioning, concepts, and messages. But over time I have found that the creativity is extending into diverse areas such as corporate structure and infrastructure, hiring and growth strategies, and alliance strategies.

I do not doubt that I am finding new ways to add value as I find new paths to walk within my head. I do not yet know if these directions will provide the level of job satisfaction I had when I was a creative director, and dealt mainly in flashy, engaging conceptual work. But I do know that they are exercising different parts of my brain, and that in itself is an experience I enjoy.

You take your idea and put it down on paper. In a memo. Great memo. Brilliant memo. Show it to your boss. Boss loves it. Gets excited. Starts to wiggle. Sends several emails. Calls a meeting for the next day. Wants you to present the idea to the team.

You put the idea into PowerPoint. Make some slides. Informative slides. Clear slides. Put in some sales projections. Show it at the meeting. Smash hit. Salivation all around. Revolutionary idea; sales will go through the roof; bonuses to be had by all; promotion coming your way. Boss whispers “VP material” as you leave the room.

Sitting in your cube. IT guy walks by. Call him over, show him the slides. Explain the idea. Explain the potential. Explain how this idea is going to put your company on the map.

IT guy looks. Blinks once. Twice. Asks some questions. Distracted by cricket in the corner of cubicle. What do you think, you ask. Can we do it, you ask. IT guy gets dodgy. Difficult to implement, he explains. Complicated technology. Problems galore.

Cold shiver down your spine. What kind of problems, you ask? Something I need to change in the plan? I can change it. I’ll do anything. Want to make this idea work.

No, no, much too difficult, IT guy says, getting warmed up. Not practical. Don’t want to mess with .NET. Likely to be ODBC problems, he says delightedly. SSL needed, sensitive data. PCI DSS concerns. Starts to turn red. Getting agitated. Completely impossible. Bad idea. Too much work. Pie in the sky. Forget about it. IT guy wanders on down the aisle.

You slump in your chair. Open up PowerPoint. Review your notes. Reflect on your idea. A sound idea. A compelling idea. As of this moment, a dead idea.