AI Can’t Write Like a Human, Even if You Say Please

This is an unusual blog post because it's coming from one of our Bright Orange Thread employees. Sophia Healy has been a copywriter and digital marketer with BOT for a year. I’m passing the mic to her for this email so she can give some insight into her experience using AI chatbots for writing.

AI chatbots are the shiny new toy.

Or rather, the shiny new money makers in the eyes of just about a thousand digital corps.

Just as ChatGPT hit the headlines, Google, Meta, Grammarly, and even Snapchat rushed the debut of new AI toys.

I, a professional copywriter, was tasked by my boss to play around and “see what ChatGPT could do” for a few months—which is a sentence I’d never thought I’d say.

Bad Writing or Badly Written 

I was supposed to feel threatened by the emergence of this tech.

And I was.

Until I asked it to write.

I needed it to write creative, detail-rich marketing emails, blog posts, homepage copy, and social media posts.

I gave it all the details—the topics, the argument, who the audience is, what the audience cares about, the tone.

I even specifically asked ChatGPT to frame it as a story.

It spat out a wordy, flat email starting with the dreaded line:
“I hope this email finds you well.”

All my years of watching my favorite artificial intelligence characters made me expect more. I watched Data question his humanity in Star Trek, and R2-D2 and C-3PO make their merry way, cracking jokes all the while.

I expected ChatGPT to be able to write.

Missing Element: Humanity

As you play and play and play with ChatGPT and try to get better at “prompting,” there’s still always something missing.

ChatGPT isn’t really funny; it recreates the corny jokes from listicles titled “The funniest birthday card sayings.”

Ask it to write something happy, and it will simply add exclamation points.

It doesn’t understand the ins and outs of your target audience. If you explain, they are small to mid-sized CEOs of a local, family-owned company.

It can’t copy a unique writing style, even if you give it a ton of examples.

It can’t write like a human, even if you say please.

AI is Getting Jobs Without the Qualifications

It will take you hours to actually get ChatGPT to write something, well, good.

And I know “good” is subjective. But ChatGPT’s writing is objectively bad.  

It’s just a collection of things others have already written.
This is infuriating.

Not just because this billion-dollar tool simply can’t help you write a series of creative and attention-grabbing emails faster but because it’s true that AI is threatening jobs.

It’s not just fear-mongering or bosses’ funny way of lighting a fire under employees’ butts.

Maybe it makes sense that those in tech jobs are being told to adopt AI skills to stay relevant in their fields. That’s part of the reason my boss pushed for an exploration of AI.

But even the jobs we thought a robot could never do are threatened, like screenwriting and acting, which is being fought by nearly 170,000 striking SAG-AFTRA and WAG members.

CEOs and executives are willing to accept a “good enough” job if it means paying less in salary.

The Unfortunate Fun of Generative AI

I’ll begrudgingly admit that I actually use ChatGPT a lot.

Ask it to write something like a 17th-century explorer or William Shakespeare, and you’ll see how it can be a genuinely fun and valuable tool for us writers.

It can be great for ideation, sparking creativity, exploring tone, and any other kind of brainstorming that comes with content creation.
But it took a while to figure out that it wasn’t going to be good for much more.

You can read about how we fiddled with, fought with, and finally found solid ground with ChatGPT in this blog post.

But a Tool and Nothing More

Despite the benefits, it does seem that if AI doesn’t remain “just a tool,” then we’re likely to find ourselves living out the saddest and bleakest of Philip K. Dick’s novels.

And that’s not coming from me; it’s coming from the “Godfather of AI” himself, who resigned from Google mainly so he could ring the alarm bells on AI.

In his strange premonition, he said, “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary…I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”

After months of “playing around” with AI and feeling a level of doom and gloom about the tech, I’ve decided:

AI chatbots are a tool in my writing arsenal, but nothing more.

Written by Sophia Healy