Can anything create genuinely bad copy as efficiently as a robot?
ChatGPT's shit in precisely the same way that a chug is shit.
The worst copy I’ve ever sent to clients was only mostly written by me.
Mostly, or partially. Either way, a bit of it was written by me. But not all of it.
The worst copy decks I’ve ever delivered were almost invisibly disjointed. Full of cracks you wouldn’t notice at first glance, but that were definitely there.
Ones that’d get into your head on a second read, or a third, until you couldn’t see the wood for the dogshit bags hanging off the trees.
Sentence structures that would change from page to page. Tonal flourishes that’d appear once and never again. Turns of phrase that didn’t quite fit. We’re talking a feeling of dissonant, disquieting background wrongness here.
All because the job had been divvied up, written piecemeal by three, or four, or five people, and then given a bit of spot-welding to try and pass it off as a consistent piece.
Even the best editor can’t always iron out all the eccentricities and oddball quirks from different writers. And when they can’t - or even worse there’s no editor and no iron - you end up with bad copy.
So why the fuck are writers scared of ChatGPT? And why the fuck would clients choose ChatGPT for creative work?
ChatGPT doesn’t create anything. It collates. You give it a prompt, it pulls in pre-existing content from dozens of sources, dozens of authors, briefly shows it an NFT of a trouser press in the hope it’ll smooth the most obvious creases and goes on to the next prompt.
What you get is barely homogenised, slightly lumpy cottage-cheese copy that just seems off. It won’t pass the reader’s inner Turing Test. And that’s neither terrifying nor desirable. It’s the opposite of those things. Like a chug.
Being scared of this is like being scared that a smart blender’s going to replace chefs. Sure, it pulls all the ingredients together and processes them. But who really wants to suck down a pint of slurry?
Something mint - this lube ad next to a pub I’ve not been in since the 2006 World Cup
Fair cop. If you follow Vikki Ross on Twitter you’re thinking “Andrew, I have seen this exact picture back when she shared it in January.”
It’s a billboard ad for KY lube, put together by a team at McCann, and it’s next to the Red Lion in Irlams o’th’ Height, Salford. That’s a genuine place name, Google it.
Pulling apart that single line of copy would be like dissecting a frog. We wouldn’t enjoy it, and the line wouldn’t survive the process.
But the reason I think it’s mint is that it’s genuinely surprising. You don’t expect to see personal lubricant advertised next to a notoriously shitty pub frequented by the desolate and the desperate. And you don’t expect it to be making a joke.
Which is why that isn’t the picture Vikki shared. It’s a picture my mate Dean stuck on our WhatsApp group because it made him snort, stop and snap a picture while out for a run.
Unexpected ads on the roadside, with three words powerful enough to stop an ultramarathon runner.
Good luck getting that from an AI.