Could your dull as ditchwater copy pass the Reverse Turing Test?
Please just make the AInfluencer nonsense stop.
One of the benefits of following Dave Harland on LinkedIn is that you save time. He’s already clocked the scammers, spammers and soulless clagfluencers and given them the needling comment you wish you had the spare ten minutes to angrily hammer out.
The drawback is he’s so bloody prolific at it that you end up seeing more of the tossbags than is entirely healthy.
Like some dead-eyed bullshit artist last month.
He’d written a how-to-guide for using AI to churn out “personal stories” on LinkedIn to help you reach out to more people and grow your network.
To be fair, the AI did a decent job. Because I couldn’t distinguish between the roboguff and the heartfelt insights of our paradigm-shifting patron of the pointless post.
That’s not a compliment to the robot.
And it got me thinking about a conversation I’d had a week before. In a meeting room, over pizza, where I chatted to a client I’ve worked with for about a decade and two of her colleagues. A proper human conversation, where we all breathed air and ingested food and told jokes between the business talk. Like real people.
Conversation turned to AI, and one of the people there, Luke, had the sort of sensible take I like.
There’s a space for AI in marketing, in copywriting, in the creative process.
And not just for generating images for a substack so you don’t have to piss around finding a picture of a robot with a pen that’s available under creative commons.
You use the computer to do all the boring work. It’ll do your desk research (to a point), create outlines (to a point) and provide basically a checklist of what your copy should be doing.
Using that tool can make your job easier. If you’re smart, you’ll be experimenting to see just how.
But actually doing the job?
Can’t do it.
A robot can tell you to use emotion. It can probably drop in an emotive film reference that’ll affect readers of a certain age. But it cannot really know now why you cry, because that it something it can never do… *sniff*
A robot can’t empathise.
And empathy is 90% of a copywriter’s job. The rest is just typing.
Which brings us back to Dave’s LinkedIn loser of the day.
I couldn’t tell the difference between his dead-eyed soulless bullshit, and the bullshit turned out by a soulless, dead-eyed robot.
The robot didn’t pass the Turing Test, that benchmark for fooling organic fluid sacs into thinking your silicon brain rock is actually glistening brain meat.
It’s just that the alleged human filling the seas of LinkedIn with poorly chopped chum couldn’t pass the Reverse Turing Test and convince me he wasn’t some sort of clockwork automaton that diced up Gary Vee content and glued the words together in a different order.
If your copy can’t convince the reader that you are not acually an artificial intelligence, then there’s no real downside to getting an AI to write all your content.
But that’s just outsourcing the problem. Not solving it.
And to solve it, you can’t ever beat - or replace - the emotional, empathetic, creative capacity of the human brain.
Something mint - all these Hiscox ads
Friend of mine’s a teacher.
She reads this newsletter for some reason.
But she’s a teacher. Not a copywriter. Not a marketer. Not a robotic wannabe LinkedIn influencer.
Not the target audience for business insurance, either.
And she so impressed by Hiscox’s latest run of print ads that she went to take a picture of the billboard near her house. Then forgot to, didn’t send it, and apologised once it’d been replaced.
Thanks Samantha.
Luckily, copywriting ace Chloe Marshall knows better, so she’s tagged one of them on her Insta.
Brilliant. Hiscox’s message is simple. It’s the same as every insurer really, reassurance. Peace of mind. But they’re canny with it. The whole campaign is telling the story of your business, with that Hiscox peace of mind.
Something bad might happen. But that’s not the end of the story. Because here’s Hiscox.
Yes, there’ll always be water damage. But Hiscox will save the waterworks.
And this one, about protecting you from mistakes? I can’t tell if Uncommon (for ‘tis they who wrote it) are being self-indulgent or not, but it really, really lands for me. Probably because I’m not a great proofreader and Ben constantly pulls me up for missing his typos.
Clear message? Peace of mind. Check.
Distinctive tone of voice. Straight-talking and a little irreverently warm. Check.
Campaign concept that ties it all together? The story of your business. Check.
You just love to see it.