Don’t hire me – use an AI storyteller instead.

Are you riddled with anxiety over the idea that AI could do your job better than you? A pretty reasonable fear, tbh. And one I’m learning to lean into. Because I don’t think it’s anxiety that your fleshy little brain should be flooded with, it’s excitement.

AI isn’t as modern as you might think. 

The slightly uncomfortable idea that a non-human intelligence may one day rise up to compete with humans has plagued mankind for a very, very long time. Consider the heartless Tin Man. Look beyond him and you’ll spot Frankenstein’s monster lurking in the shadows. Peer a little further through the murk to see bronze-badboy Talos of Crete, and, if you squint, you might be able to see the anthropomorphic beings that Prometheus (or possibly Ninhursag, Obatala, Ahura Mazda, Tane Mahuta, Allah, Nüwa, Enlil, Enki, Khnum, God, Viracocha, Ulgen, Woyengi, Zanahary, Tane, Sombov or Nhialac depending on which book you read) carved from clay. 

To cut a prehistorically timeless narrative short, once you begin looking for tales of artificial intelligence, you can spot them everywhere. 

The 2022 understanding of AI – the kind of AI I’m currently geeking out about – has been in development since the mid-20th century, with each fresh innovation nudging fantasy ever closer to fact. We’re now so used to seeing AI doing stuff like this…

• scanning aerial footage to evaluate natural disaster damage

• diagnosing and monitoring medical conditions like sepsis and diabetes and assisting with delicate surgeries

• pollinating in place of dwindling bee numbers – which is so depressing that we’ll skip right over it

• AI avatar-led life and professional coaching 

…that these genuinely incredible technological leaps are downright yawn worthy. 

As well as backing up some pretty nifty practical inventions, AI is bounding straight over the creative roadblocks that the naysayers thought it’d balk at. Some career creatives – probably the ones already riddled with imposter syndrome – see this as a negative. 

But I think they’re looking at it all wrong. AI has the potential to become a very cool tool in any creative arsenal if you can just learn how best to deploy it. Which means getting intimate with the crafty mechanics behind the creative machinations. 

How does AI writing actually work?

I’m a storyteller at heart, not a software aficionado, so I’m sorry if this isn’t very scientific. But, basically, AI writing tools use smartypants algorithms to find and absorb info. For example, OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) – and no, I don’t know what that means – uses 1.76 trillion data points to analyse language, story structure, narrative logic, syntax and semantics, and loads of other groovy stuff to create content that mirrors human writing.  

And it does a spookily good job of certain tasks. I’ve tried out loads of different AI tools, but OpenAI is one I’ve been courting most closely. Because it is honestly SO much fun. It’s a Musk-owned non-profit AI research organisation, and its API is free for anybody to use and explore. It’s supremely entertaining, for word-nerds at least, and a dead simple way to flex the writing capabilities of AI. And the prose it puts out is astonishingly unterrible. 

Those 1.76 trillion parameters serve to create an elaborate ruse of near-human understanding. The AI “learns” how to talk more gooderly, until it sounds just like a real people do, by finding and digesting patterns within the massive bank of data it consumes.

What writing jobs could AI take off your plate?

AI tools have the potential to help with any writing task you can think of. “Help” is the operative word here, because the systems we’ve seen aren’t at the point where you could send AI-created copy off into the world without at the very least a thorough sense check. 

So, now you’re looking at AI through the right lens of helpful robot assistant instead of replacement writer, you can begin playing. All you need to get started using AI to beef up your words is a well-written prompt. The computer will take that prompt and use its algorithms to complete whatever instruction you’ve given it. The copy it spits out could easily be absurd and totally unfit for purpose, but it could also be one lateral – read: human – step away from perfect. 

The prompts you use will be totally unique to you, but to get you thinking on the right track, here are some examples we played with.

One. You could write a few bullet points describing your business offering and instruct the programme to generate you a new value proposition, like we’ve done here. 

Two. If you’re struggling to find the direction your brand tagline should move in, you could write a brief description of your business and ask the AI to give you a selection to choose from. Instant inspiration. 

Three. Or, if you fancy really crash testing the creative capabilities of the software, the prompt could be something like the opening line of your next novel, and the instruction could be to finish the chapter, introduce a series of rapscallion characters and set the scene on the rough streets of Victorian-era Liverpool. 

I wrote the prompt, and the first line, but the rest was crafted by computers. And I honestly can’t believe how not shit it is. Which is very cool. I’ve studied creative writing up to a postgraduate level, and I’m being totally honest when I say I’ve read worse copy as part of those seminar groups than GPT produces in a few short seconds.

Like I mentioned earlier, none of these bits of AI-generated copy are perfect, but they’re all good enough to stimulate some real human creativity and provide a handy, and speedy, springboard into your final draft. 

Is AI actually going to change copywriting?

Yep. I think so, anyway. I predict a shift away from the current reliance on skilled, solo content creators towards a culture of collaboration with an AI partner. Speaking as a skilled solo content creators, I don’t think this is something to be alarmed by, I think it’s something that should be embraced. 

Because, the truth is, AI-augmented content creation is already doing shitloads for the 12% of companies using it already. And it hasn’t cast whole teams of creatives out onto the streets as some Twitter-twitchy worrywarts are wont to wail. Instead, once AI is incorporated into creative practices, it picks up the slack for the more predictable, basic tasks – product descriptions, formulaic listicles, tl:dr summaries, simple translations – in short, all the rubbish bits of writing that nobody really likes doing. And offloading that weight onto cold robot shoulders will free up real, human people to do more interesting, more creative stuff.

How can you incorporate AI into your presentations though?

AI has been incorporated into PowerPoint for ages through things like the Designer tool, automatic alt-text creation, live captions and subtitling features, and their – actually kind of handy – Presenter Coach. If you ignore spell checkers, there aren’t currently any AI copywriting tools built into the PowerPoint programme. But you can use one of many purpose-built AI tools online to create copy as you need it. 

It's a handy way to transform a dry bullet-point list into an engaging script. Or you can use it to cobble together a compelling CTA if you can’t quite think of the right words. If you can’t help but clog your copy up with complex language, you could use an AI tool to ungild that lily. It could even create a brand new analogy from a single line prompt, or transform speaker notes into a properly formatted summary.

A word of warning (i.e. why you still need your Storyteller)

You might come away from this blog post thinking that there’s no point even filling in my lovely little contact form for that next piece of create work you’ve got squelching around in your Extremely Human Brain – just hoof that info to your AI ally and you’ll be crafting copy like a pro in no time. 

But I do still serve some purpose. Going into an AI endeavour looking to use these swanky tools as a means of skipping copywriting entirely means you’ll probably come away disappointed. But if you use AI as a tool for endlessly iterated inspiration, as a way to skip blank-page anxiety and get the creative ball rolling, you’ll probably come away buzzing with ideas and full of childish glee. That’s how I feel, anyway.

Tools I think are fun to play with

Wordy stuff

• CopyAI

• OpenAI

• Jasper 

• Rytr

Visual stuff

• Stable Diffusion

• Midjourney

• Dall-E 2