I don’t know much about wine. So I like to read the descriptions to give me a sense for what I’m getting myself into. I came across this one recently:
Dusty garnet color. Aromas and flavors of raspberries, red cassis, hints of tobacco, leather, and candied aniseed with a supple, crisp, dryish light body and a smooth, complex, medium-long finish that shows nuances of pine nut brittle, honey, and hints of cafe au lait. A tasty Tuscan Red that is sure to please; lovely balance.
I bought the bottle immediately, and it turned out to be as delicious as the description.
Could AI have written that label? I won’t say of course not, because you never know—but it seems highly unlikely. That description had to come from a human being. More specifically, a human being who knows wine—and who had actually tasted the product.
In other words, the copy on this label was a transfer of experience. One human to another. It demonstrated a depth of understanding that I as a consumer could feel. And isn’t that the point of copywriting, and marketing more broadly? To help someone imagine what it might be like to have a certain product or service in their life?
As marketers, we’re still learning just how deep AI writing can—or can’t—go. A client I was working with recently wanted to experiment with using AI to create rapid-fire first drafts that I could then edit, the idea being it would save boatloads of time. I was game. But in the end we found it took an unusually large amount of back-and-forth between myself and the SMEs to actually get the details right. AI had presented a very black-and-white picture of the topic when what was really required was far more nuanced. It needed the depth that can only come from a human touch.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is an amazing tool. I use it all the time to answer questions, find alternate phrasing, and as a general resource to break through creative blocks or just get information (that I later compare with more reliable sources, of course).
But when it comes to what people are truly looking for online, what really engages readers, it’s still a good old fashioned informed, human point of view. In fact, one of the leading voices in SEO found that human-written content outranked AI-created content 94.12% of the time.
When you think about it, that number actually makes a lot of sense. We live in an age of information overload. We race through our social feeds like fugitives on the run. We drown in our inboxes. We don’t need more; what we need is less. Less, but better. We want to go deep. But to achieve depth takes time. Care. Understanding. To think that for ages this has been the case and that now AI writing can achieve it in an instant is to kid ourselves.
Which brings me to Bill Bernbach and his team at DDB. Back in the 60s, they ushered in a creative revolution by producing more honest advertising, most famously for the Volkswagen Beetle. The agency freely admitted the car’s shortcomings, which made its many advantages all the more believable. It was a huge step forward for commercial communications. The ads felt real, rather than the glossy hype that typified auto promos of the day—and catapulted the product into a cultural staple. Bernbach spotted an opportunity to speak more deeply to the human experience, and it worked.
Maybe we’re on the verge of a similar revolution. As AI writing settles into the marketing landscape, I suspect audiences will learn to sniff out the brands that are somehow playing shallow. AI can certainly help. It can generate ideas, provide structures, refine your work. But it can’t go deep—not yet. For now, that part is still up to us.
