I’m getting old, I fear. Earlier today I said the year “2025” out loud and it felt like I was reading the opening crawl to a sci-fi film.
2025 - a quarter-century into the new millennium – and as humanity sets its sights on worlds beyond our own galaxy, one question remains… Are skinny jeans fashionable again?
I dread to think what it means when the year that I’m currently living in sounds like a hypothetical distant future - but I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. It’s not like I expected driverless hovercars by now, but would the self-tying shoes from Back to the Future Part II be too much to ask for? Or at the very least, trans liberation and universal dental care.
So as another calendar gets tossed in the recycling bin of history, what can we expect as we crack the seal on our brand new yearly planners - empty pages sparkling with endless potential?
Well, when it comes to the copywriting industry, it seems increasingly clear that AI language tools aren’t going away any time soon. Talk about not living up to the expectations set by science fiction. Some of our greatest thinkers predicted Artificial Intelligence taking over the mundane busywork necessary to keep our civilisation going, leaving more time for humans to pursue art, science, exploration and leisure. Sure, it’d often end up trying to kill or enslave us, but you can’t argue the original intent was noble. What did we get instead? We’re now recruiting AI to handle multiple forms of creative expression while keeping the boring jobs for ourselves. Move aside, artists and graphic designers! Take a hike, musicians and producers! Get lost, writers and poets! We’ve built a search engine that can chunder an infinite stream of bland slurry – and all it costs is 0.26% of the Amazon rainforest every second. If you’re lucky, you'll get a job tending the furnace deep in the bowels of the supercomputer’s torture mines!
And yes, while I do object to the current uses of Artificial Intelligence on an ethical and environmental level (I’m not thrilled by the prospect of losing my job to one in the next few years either), the copy it spits out is also just... not good. See my previous blog Is ChatGPT Better At My Job Than Me? for further evidence of that. I saw a listing on a property website the other day that was so obviously written by a robot, the Turing test could be conducted by a dead herring gull and it'd still fail. The convenience of AI is obviously too tempting for some to resist - but the moment someone realises what they're reading wasn't written by a human, they engage with it in a totally different way. They know in their heart that nobody actually cared about the words, and thus, neither do they.
I don't think it helps that these AI language models are badly in need of an editor. No matter what prompt you give it, an AI will always churn out something seven times longer than necessary. In my opinion, this goes against one of the key copywriting rules: keep things punchy. I don't see this changing in 2025 - as the average attention span plummets we need to accept that most of our precious content isn't going to be read, it's going to be skimmed. The way you adapt is to keep everything to the point, and add at least one really catchy line per paragraph - something that stands out like a grizzly bear in a ball pit.
To wrap up these meandering musings - despite doing nothing but complain for this entire blog, I am trying to be optimistic for the year ahead. While the world of copywriting may have one or two rotten blueberries in the basket, it’s nothing compared to the state of global politics. Holy cow. There aren’t even any blueberries left in that dumpster fire – just a damp, pulsating fungus that feeds on human joy and farts fascism. But I suppose my main hope is that more people start to realise the pitfalls of AI, and if it’s going to stick around, that they start to hire real humans to turn its robotic copy into something readable.
And while I’m dreaming, I’d also like a billion pounds and a giant Ferrero Rocher in the shape of my head.
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