ChatGPT can write copy (even if it can’t write very good copy), and it can write about copywriting.
How does it know how to write copy?
ChatGPT has been trained on 2/3 of the Internet (using Common Crawl), as well as Wikipedia, Reddit posts with at least three upvotes, and every book ever written (including mine – and yours, if you’ve written any).
How does it know what to write about copywriting?
I’ve been a copywriter since 1983 and have written posts about copywriting that have been published on the internet since 2007.
I didn’t opt out of Common Crawl.
That means I’ve possibly been one of the sources that has trained Open.ai – the power behind ChatGPT.
But Open.ai / ChatGPT didn’t ask me if I was happy to train it. Didn’t pay me for the training. Didn’t tell me it was using my content for its training.
I put my copywriting advice out there on the internet for human readers, free, for these reasons.
- To demonstrate my expertise
- To generate goodwill
- To make people aware that I might know more about about copywriting than they do, so they book me or recommend me to someone else
I didn’t put my content out there for AI to teach itself how to write copy. And certainly not so that ChatGPT can take my words and mix them with other sources in order to generate its own content about copywriting.
AI has no intention of paying me. In fact, if you believe what you read, AI is trying to put me out of business.
How to opt out of Common Crawl
I imagine people will soon start posting disclaimers saying: “I do not give ChatGPT permission to scrape my content” which AI will obviously ignore.
If you don’t want your content to be used to train AI tools, there is a way to opt out of Common Crawl in future. (It’s too late to change what AI has already crawled and learned.) It’s not 100% reliable, but this article includes the code you can add to your site.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-block-chatgpt-from-using-your-website-content/478384/
New bots you can block! Keep ChatGPT out of the loop when it comes to training on your content.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /— Myriam Jessier (Add me on LinkedIn just in case) (@myriamjessier) April 10, 2023
Note that I’m not threatened by AI. I write better copy than it does. It’s like the difference between a microwaveable ready-meal and one that’s been cooked by a top chef.
Some of my recent tweets about AI
- I don’t want AI to learn to “write like Jackie Barrie”. I’m Jackie Barrie. And I like writing. Something magical happens when I write. Not always, but sometimes. There’s no thrill in AI. Not the input. Not the output.
- AI generates words. Copywriting generates money (rankings, leads, clicks, signups, phone calls, whatever is your most wanted response).
- AI copy = predictable, regurgitated. It’s even more important for human copywriters to develop your own voice = unique, original. Like the difference between a ready-meal and one cooked from scratch. Which is more nutritious?
- AI may generate words. But it doesn’t generate ideas.
- It’s artificial. But is it ‘intelligent’?
- AI means all copywriters need to market themselves in a way that proves their worth to prospective clients who don’t know the difference.
- AI had no hand in writing this tweet. AI doesn’t have hands.
Some recent(ish) news reports about AI
OpenAI, the AI research firm behind ChatGPT, has released a new tool to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated text.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/openai-releases-tool-to-detect-ai-written-content/478085/
When tested on a set of English texts, the tool could correctly say if the text was written by AI 26% of the time. But it also wrongly thought that human-written text was written by AI 9% of the time. Ultimately, the AI Text Classifier can be a valuable resource for flagging potentially AI-generated text, but it shouldn’t be used as a definitive measure for making a verdict.
“The new Bing includes a chatbot that behaves similarly to ChatGPT, allowing users to interact with Bing in a natural language.”
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-announces-chatgpt-capabilities-coming-to-bing/478803/
When ChatGPT started sending ‘unhinged’ messages.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-ai-messages-microsoft-bing-b2282491.html
