AI Copywriting

AI copywriting tools have emerged to help human copywriters create copy faster and cheaper; they have also been used by businesses in place of human copywriters. These tools have also been used by bloggers, copywriters, and content marketers for writing web content, blog posts, emails, and social media ads. Generally, these tools use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to take a few instructions and create copy intended to be engaging.

AI-based writing assistants have existed for a while and have included applications capable of checking grammar and spelling, suggesting or auto-completing sentences, and checking for plagiarism. There are tools that are capable of being utilized for entire articles. Although many of these tools work well for simple text generation, such as writing a headline or a product description, but often struggle with proper grammar and continuity in long-form articles. Often the quality of the copy depends on the quality of the tool itself.

The artificial intelligence in AI Copywriting works using artificial narrow intelligence, which focuses on narrow problem-solving applications, which are able of performing specific types of task or function. As well, they combine the narrow artificial intelligence with natural language processing, which works to make sense of language in a way that makes sense. Natural language processing provides an opportunity for writers to produce content that sounds natural and engaging.

As well, the AI used works to simulate how the brain works, and content is generated by reading, learning, and understanding all of the text that has been written on a topic before it outputs its own ideas. These ideas can be further fine-tuned to a target audience, and the originality of the AI can be increased through the tuning of variables.

While human copywriters have specific areas in which they may excel, and others in which they struggle, so to can AI copywriters have these areas. In the case of AI copywriters, this struggle tends to be with copy produced in terms of length and complexity, rather than the content of the copy. Generally, AI copywriters are best used to generate copy and content that can be edited and cleaned up by a human copywriter and allow businesses to develop copy much faster. Or they will enable a business to generate copy without an in-house copywriter. AI copywriting has been effectively used to generate ad copy, landing page copy, email copy, and chatbot copy.

When the purpose of ad copy is to create an emotional connection with consumers, the copy needs to be relevant, specific, and unique. Ad copy is generally written towards how a reader will feel or react to content, and as it is generally short-form content. An AI copywriter tends to thrive writing this quick copy, although AI copywriting tools do require relevant inputs in order to write better copy.

This content, used to promote a website or product, tends to be written in a conversational tone with simple language to entice visitors to complete a desired action. It tends to be many small pieces of text, which taken together make a full page of text. Similar to ad copy, it is when AI copywriting can be useful, especially in the case of writing multiple versions of the same copy. As with other types of copy AI copywriting can generate, the inputs given to the AI copywriting tool are important for the copy it generates.

Marketers use email copy to create messages that encourage customers and subscribers to perform specific actions. This is often used by marketers to reach their customers with compelling content, sell products and services, or generate leads. Similar to ad copy, this is when AI copywriting can thrive—especially as this email copy does not need to catch a person's eye in the same way a traditional ad does. And it can be integrated with other data sources to generate more suggestions based on a person's user or shopping habits, for example.

Artificial intelligence can help with chatbot copy, as the copy requires natural sounding language to be used when talking to potential customers, and often companies need to train their chatbots with the appropriate language and specific sentences. Companies can further speed the process up with the help of AI copywriters.

There are numerous benefits to the use of artificial intelligence in copywriting, with some explaining that AI copywriting can make the entire process of copywriting easier for businesses of all sizes and specialists of all levels. As well, AI can produce content at a faster rate than humans while scanning and reading through more data than a human copywriter can in a shorter period of time, and apply all of this in the generated copy. There are a variety of other advantages of AI copywriting:

• AI copywriting can help a user save time, as it can generate copy that can be edited and iterated on by a human user thereafter
• It can help a user focus on other tasks while the AI copywriter generates needed copy
• These tools can allow a user to generate copy quickly and in bulk, allowing a user to generate large amounts of copy faster than before, which can help handle repetitive tasks
• These tools can personalize copy and help a user to create more diverse copy, especially as these tools tend to be able to research and analyze faster than human copywriters
• AI copywriting can help human users brainstorm ideas as it generates more copy and can generate more diverse copy to help a human user discover other ideas
• It can be cheaper to use a handful of AI copywriting tools than paying multiple human copywriters to do the same job

With advantages come disadvantages, and these challenges need to be considered when applying AI copywriting, along with how AI copywriting is applied. Often, the disadvantages require a human to assist the AI copywriter, or vice versa, as the AI copywriter cannot generate interesting and entertaining copy as much as it generates informative copy, and in longer copy cannot always maintain continuity or proper grammar. Other disadvantages include the following:

• While AI copywriting can generate new ideas, this does not mean that it is generating original ideas, but rather analyzing existing content with a user's parameters to create new copy
• AI copywriting does not involve human emotions in the writing, nor can it use emotive writing in the way a human copywriter is able to
• Often AI copywriting, as it continues to learn, uses awkward wording and creates copy that sounds awkward, requiring proofreading and copyediting
• AI is not good at making small talk or understanding cultural nuances
• Automated content can be impersonal and alienating unless a human monitors it
• AI cannot use metaphors or analogies when writing copy, which are often used to draw attention to copy and make it interesting and engaging for readers
• The tools used for AI copywriting are yet to be a complete substitute for human copywriters, with some suggesting that until general artificial intelligence is developed, human copywriters will remain necessary

GPT-3, or generative pre-trained transformer, is a sophisticated language model developed by OpenAI, and the successor to its predecessor GPT-2. The new model uses deep learning, based on artificial neural networks, to generate human-like text. GPT-3 is capable of weighting 175 billion parameters, which makes it more accurate and effective at generating texts that are almost indistinguishable from their human-written counterpart. GPT-3 has also been shown to be more effective than Microsoft Research's Turing-NLG (Natural Language Generation) and has become one of the best generators of writing, similar to that of a human copywriter. Due to the capability of GPT-3, it has become one of the more popular models for developing AI copywriter tools.