What does writing copy mean in the time of AI?
Well, I’ll tell you a little story.
A client of ours, who we grew to know a great deal about, asked us to write a press release about some important information with some critical facts directed towards a certain audience that was very timely.
Our client happened to be attorneys who worked to get innocent people our of prison in foreign lands where people did not often get out of prison. It was in Iran. The person was an American.
The crime didn’t matter. Evidence was fabricated and made up and justice wasn’t really on the minds of the people who held power. What was on their minds was making an innocent human being suffer, greatly, inhumanely, disproportionately, for the crime of being an American in Iran.
What made the case interesting is the man didn’t travel to Iran of his own will. The man was taken from Dubai by men from Iran who didn’t really like or appreciate what the man had said and written about Iran.
What made the case interesting is the man’s life was on the line. What made the case interesting is that no one, not a single soul who worked in the media or who worked in the government of America really did anything or would do anything to help the man. His story was not told. His government didn’t want to listen anyway.
People get forgotten when it’s inconvenient. Or embarrassing.
But the people who loved the man contacted the attorneys who helped people like them. And the attorneys asked me to help them write a press release that told the story about the man who needed help.
What’s a press release you ask? Well, it once meant, an article or a story, written in a certain way, that shared the story with a person who worked in a newspaper or a television studio. Long ago, people worked to tell stories and share them with the world by editing and rewriting the story so they could publish it in their newspaper or television show.
So, I wrote the press release.
And then I copied and pasted the perfectly formatted press release, meant to get our story published in the media into a large language model, what people call AI, what people think is a sentient computer who exists to help them find information and solve problems, but is really, like word salad, or a thousand monkeys typing in a room trying to come up with a good Shakespeare play.
And the LLM spat out a decent rewriting of the press release.
I cleaned up the obvious formatting and then presented the attorneys with two versions of the press release. I shared that I wrote one and used AI on the second.
The attorneys chose the one that AI wrote. I published the press release on their website and sent it to a list of people who work in newspapers and television studios.
The point of the story is, copywriting is an art and a trade. Because I know how to write a good press release, AI was able to edit it and present it in a form that pleased the attorneys. If I did not bother to write the first one, the second one could not have been produced.
The man in prison was murdered there.
After arguing with other attorneys, they eventually sent the man’s body home, so the people who loved the man could bury him.
Moral of the story. People matter. Sometimes only to the ones who love them, but sometimes to other people who work to do good things.
A copywriter wrote this.
This is a story and an example of copywriting, a person writing copy for another person. If you would like to employ people to think, write, and edit for you, then we would love to opportunity to work with you, so we can pay our mortgage, eat, and support our families. Because we have people who love us.
