I Tried Writing with Copy.AI So You Don’t Have To
AI Copywriting Services are gaining traction, but what’s the real deal behind robot wordsmithing?
I’ve been a content writer now for about 3 years. Anytime you begin monetizing something, there’s that very human urge to see if there’s some way you can make the process quicker, more effective, or painless. Sure, I’ve learned some good tips and tricks along the way, but recently I stumbled upon Copy.AI and decided to give it a whirl. Sure, I don’t want robots to take over the world, but I also want to be able to produce content on days when I’m not feeling well or don’t have that creative spark. While I hoped Copy.AI could help me out, it turns out that wasn’t the case.
What is it like writing with a robot?
Copy.AI is just one of a bunch of AI copywriting services out there, but the reason why I picked this one is it’s mostly free. When you first start “writing”, you provide the program with the topic you’ll be writing about and a relevant website. From there, you get writing. Technology can’t create something from nothing, so you have to give it some information.
For this example, I decided to get meta about it and told Copy.AI that I was going to write an article about how much I hate writing with them. Somehow this didn’t royally piss off the robots, and I’m still living to tell the tale.
From there, you add in some text so they have something to work with. For this charming article, I provided the following:
Writing with AI is unethical and doesn’t have the power of a real genuine human voice. When you use robots to write, you lose an authentic human experience. Real writing is more powerful than an algorithm splattering back word junk to you in a predictable format.
The algorithm then eats that up, chews it up, and spits back to me a multitude of other things I could say that sound like they belong in the same article. Most are around 3–4 sentences and I get to choose whether I want “more like this” or if I just want to copy them over to my own article. For this piece I got the following pieces of AI-created garbage spit back at me:
The world is moving fast. It’s too fast for us to keep up with. We need machines to help us. But we don’t want AI writing like robots. We want an authentic human experience from our machines, which means there can’t be any technology in between you and your audience.
So in this one, we get a generic starter sentence that provides literally nothing of value. Lame. We also get an ultimatum from a machine that “it’s too fast to keep up with”. Perhaps even more disturbingly after the fact, we get “we need machines to help us.” which sounds a bit like the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi novel if I’m being honest. The whole chunk ends with a sentence that claims that “there can’t be any technology between you and your audience” which literally just doesn’t make sense at all.
Another:
Any algorithm can be easily manipulated, creating fake and untrue stories. Robots cannot express their opinions or feelings, but only rely on the knowledge they have been given. These robots are not able to create a story that you would relate to or help you grow as an individual.
This one doesn’t entirely suck. I appreciate that it brought a different perspective to the situation by bringing up the point that an algorithm can be easily manipulated. However, the fun stops after this great potential thesis. In fact, the rest of the chunk doesn’t give any examples of how algorithms could be manipulative or how untrue stories have detrimental impacts on our world. It effectively makes a cool point and then runs in the opposite direction with more word garbage.
And another:
Robots can’t write.
This one just tickled my fancy. Yes, this was the entirety of the chunk it provided. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. All in all, 10/10 on this AI garbage.
What’s next?
So from there, it’s still up to you to curate these writing blurbs to your liking. In this situation, the only real piece of value I got was that I could dig into the interesting idea about algorithms and how ethical they are. There was nothing else of value provided, and I’d still have to do a substantial amount of research to prove that point in a successful article. I guess I could also keep “Robots can’t write” but I don’t think I exactly needed Copy.AI to tell me that much.
So if the AI copywriting service still requires you to edit, research, read, revise, and add value… you have to ask yourself is it even easier than just doing it yourself? And if it is easier, does your finished product benefit from having used the service. I’m a former English teacher and I can tell you that to me, it seems like Copy.AI essentially just provides you the fluff writing that I would cross out in a red pen.
My 2 Cents
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend using an AI copywriting service. You’re going to have to read around my bias as a paid content writer on that one though. I just think the value of an actual writer far exceeds the mumbo jumbo you get from one of these services. I also think that if you think that you can use them as a shortcut to great writing, you’ll be disappointed. There’s still a ton of work to make the content it provides useable or even undetected as AI copywriting.
I will say, to be my own devil’s advocate, there are some occasions where it could be useful. If I’m having a low energy day or if ideas are running dry, it could be useful to plug in some of your existing writing and see what it has to say. Sometimes it is nice to see your words and thoughts reflected back to you in some capacity. But for what it’s worth, I also think going outside, taking a walk, and drinking a cup of tea has the same impact.
I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this one. What do you think about AI copywriting? Do you trust robots to write for you?
