Your AI copy looks just like everyone else’s – and might even contain inaccuracies. A professional edit makes it more engaging, so you benefit from conversions, not just visits. Add a sense check to ensure everything is correct, relevant and up to date, and you’re better protected from eye-rolls and solicitors’ letters.

Copywriting has been an early victim of large language models. And that doesn’t just mean copywriters. The quality of content everywhere has taken a nosedive, because it’s easy to generate quick, passable blocks of text and publish them online. The search spiders pick it up and it’s job done. Who cares if it’s unreadable, devoid of emotion and filled with factual errors?

LLMs have a place in the creative process

In the right hands, of course, AI is a marvellous copywriting tool. It can speed up research, create logical outlines and summaries, and draft copy that covers all the main points. But people are getting wise to the clichés, rhythms and tones of voice that unfiltered AI copy keeps spitting out. They also notice that it’s prone to waffling on, repeating the same points in slightly different ways throughout the text. They don’t like it, and resistance to “AI slop” is growing.

All your dull copy needs is the intervention from a time-served copywriter and editor – of the human variety. Fixing bad copy is second nature to me, not least because I do it to my own work, as the first draft rarely gets sent. When you’ve been editing words for more than 20 years, you get a feel for what makes good copy. You know how to trim the fat without losing meaning. How to spark life into uninspiring writing. How to pace the work so the reader either gets their payoff or clicks the Find Out More button.

And let’s not ignore the most important point. LLMs are impressive, but are prone to hallucinations, a weird eagerness to please, and repeating the same arguments in slightly different ways throughout the text. You could say that the better they get are imitating humans, the less human they become.

How to fix AI copy to make it sizzle

Send me your AI-generated text, and we’ll give it a workout, reading it from the human perspective and returning content that sounds like a conversation, not an instruction manual. If you’ve been tempted to compromise by instructing the model to speak with a certain tone of voice, you’ll have noticed it usually descends into self-parody pretty quickly. And its attempts at humour or other emotional output always has a “How do you do, fellow kids” vibe to it. It’s much better to have a professional writer work on it.

So whether you’re writing product descriptions, lifestyle articles, SEO content, blogs, short stories or long, serious pieces, don’t just copy and paste your ChatGPT results. Let my brain take the strain.