We used an AI robot to write this website (and you won’t be able to tell the difference)

Yes, a robot can write your marketing copy – are you scared yet, human? 

If you said to us a year ago that we’d be using Artificial Intelligence to write a client’s website we would have laughed in your face, probably while pointing a finger. 

It’s because we’ve always regarded AI as a bit of a joke. 

When we think of AI we think of Tay, the ill-fated Microsoft chatbot that became a laughing stock when she went from innocently playful tweets to shouting profanities and racist rants in just 24 hours. 

We think of those bots that were force fed thousands of hours worth of movies to then churn out somewhat unhinged fake scripts like this:

It wasn’t until we started seeing promotions for websites that used AI to help people write advertising copy, social media content, blog posts and more, that we started taking AI a bit more seriously. 

Our copywriters in particular – being humans who write, were interested. 

We began digging and realised that AI copywriting technology is evolving fast, and decided to test out the tools. 

The platform we used is called Copy.ai. Using their 7-day free trial, we decided to test it out on a real project of ours.

Yep. A genuine, real life, paying client let us use this tool to write their website. It was our spray painting professional friends over at AC 2Pak who were kind enough to trust us with this experimental study. Here’s how it went down. 

What happened when we used AI to help us write a website

First things first, we picked our tone: professional. 

Then, under ‘Website Copy’ we used their ‘Landing Page Hero Text’ and ‘Subheader Text’ generators to give us some headings and body copy for the home page of our website. 

We had to give the robot our brand name and a small description we put together based on our briefing meeting with the client.

Much to our surprise, the copy it spat out was pretty good. In fact, it was usable (see live site for proof).

We should note here that we had a plan for what we wanted the home page to say. We mostly ended up giving the AI the ‘meat’ of an idea to flesh out for us.

Sometimes it just wouldn’t give us what we wanted, and the tone would be a little…off.

Or it would kind of just make something up.

But for the most part, it worked!

Our final thoughts on using AI to generate copy (and why our copywriters can keep their jobs for now)

Is a tool like Copy.ai useful? 

In some cases, sure. 

The AI definitely pumped out some good ideas when it came to sales copy. The problem is knowing what to do with those ideas. Because it doesn’t generate fully formed sales pages ready for you to edit. 

We think tools like Copy.ai could be useful for say, a business owner who understands what good copy looks like and knows how to piece it together. Someone who struggles to actually get it done or doesn’t want to invest in a copywriter. Granted, this is a pretty narrow segment of the population. For us, it was a good tool for brainstorming ideas and playing around with phrasing. As well as providing the occasional comedic relief (check out their valentine’s day card writing feature).

All in all, our copywriters are happy to report that their jobs are safe for a few more years. That’s not to say that they aren’t impressed with how far the technology has come. 

With investment in AI start-ups continuing to increase year upon year, we’re confident that an even more sophisticated version of this tool lies in the not so distant future. 

Until then, we’ll continue to write our own damn copy, thank you very much! 

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This article was written by Artificial Intelligence Copy & Co.

Just kidding, it was written by a real human copywriter, me (Indy), from Sonder. ✌️