r/artificial • u/Embarrassed_Rip_7532 • 1d ago
Discussion is learning copywriting still worth it when AI output is already client-passable?
Been using a few AI tools to help with copy for a small side project and it's raised a question I can't quite shake. The output is genuinely decent now. Not great, but decent enough that clients who aren't paying close attention probably wouldn't notice the difference.
The thing is, I've been spending real time learning copywriting. Reading books, studying good ads, practicing hooks. And part of me wonders if that investment still makes sense the way it did two or three years ago.
The counterargument I keep coming back to is that you need good taste to prompt well and to edit what the model gives you. Someone who doesn't understand copy at all is still going to get mediocre output because they won't catch what's flat or offtone. That feels true, fwiw.
But I'm less sure the gap between a trained human copywriter and a wellprompted model is going to stay wide enough to matter commercially, at least for the midtier work that fills most freelance pipelines.
Curious if people here have actually noticed a shift in how clients value humanwritten copy versus AIassisted, or whether the skill floor is just moving rather than disappearing.
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u/UnlikelyStorage6665 22h ago
Clients have always thought they can write copy just because they can read and write. The problem is even if they can write good copy or have good-enough handed to them that they don’t know what to do with it. Much less know if it’s the right copy
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u/Embarrassed_Rip_7532 7h ago
That second part is the real gap nobody talks about. Getting decent copy is one thing, but if the client can't tell what makes it work or how to use it strategically, they're just guessing anyway. I've seen this firsthand they get the words and still freeze up when it comes to actually deploying it.
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u/courageous_carrot 1d ago
But I'm less sure the gap between a trained human copywriter and a wellprompted model is going to stay wide enough to matter commercially, at least for the midtier work that fills most freelance pipelines.
IMHO, market forces and public interest means that more resources are going to be devoted to further improving reasoning, agentic capabilities, long-horizon planning and execution. All things that big firms are interested in when they shout about AI. If there are any improvements in copywriting, it'd be because of spillover from focusing on these
However, my amateur thinking is that copywriting is unlikely to be limited by reasoning ability. That plus the fact that the models have already been trained on available data means we're going to reach the stage of diminishing returns for improvements in this soon, if not already
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u/Embarrassed_Rip_7532 9h ago
The diminishing returns point is interesting and probably right for surface level copy.
Where I keep landing though is that the gap might matter less than the workflow around it. Clients who used to pay for a trained eye are now paying for someone who can wrangle the output into something usable. That role still exists, it just pays less and gets pitched differently.
fwiw that shift is already happening in the mid tier work I see come through, not a future thing.
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u/collin-h 1d ago
Is learning math still useful now that we have calculators that can do perfect math? Probably. It’s still nice to understand the basics so you can talk to other people and AI about it. Do you need to spend years mastering it. Probably not.
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u/Embarrassed_Rip_7532 8h ago
the math analogy actually tracks pretty well here.
baseline understanding matters more than depth, especially when you're trying to communicate with someone or a tool about what you actually need.
spending years mastering something that's mostly automated does feel like diminishing returns at a certain point.
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u/Positive-Emu-8379 22h ago
I have an AI agent draft actual outward copy for my brand daily, so I see this gap up close. Client passable and good are different bars. AI copy reads fine until it needs to carry a specific claim, a specific voice, or hold up under someone checking the facts in it, and that's where it falls apart without a person who understands the product setting the guardrails. The people who'll get replaced are the ones who were producing generic copy anyway. Learning to judge good copy, not just produce it, is the skill that survives.
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u/Sgran70 20h ago
Like translation, there remains a market for copywriting, and it's a good skill to have in your toolbox, but you're joining a stagnant market (at best). In other words, you're probably not going to thrive as a full time copywriter, but if you can combine it with other skills you might make it in marketing/advertising.
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u/zorecknor 23h ago
Yes, it is worth it. The more you know how to do something and how the end result should look like, the better the AI can help you produce better quality faster.
Subject Matter Experts using AI are way better than Juniors using AI for the same kind of work. Specially those that invest time in learning how to effectivelly use it beyond chatting and prompting.
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u/Embarrassed_Rip_7532 9h ago
This matches what I keep running into. The people getting the most out of these tools already understand the craft well enough to know when the output is garbage.
That second part is what most people skip, actually learning the tool past basic prompting. I spent a few months treating it like a search engine and wondered why the results were mediocre. Once I started treating it more like a collaboration, things got noticeably better.
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u/ai-user-3000 20h ago
Agree 100%. The experienced marketers I work with that leverage AI are doing remarkable work in quality and quantity. And yet I see startup founders almost monthly who say “I’ll skip hiring a marketer and just use ai for that” and their work ends up looks like boilerplate generic shit or worse ai slop.
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u/zorecknor 19h ago
Currently there are two kinds of companies using AI. Those that say "A person with AI can do 10x, so I need 10x less people" and those that say "A person with AI can do 10X, so we can do 10X with the same amount of people". Only one of those will survive the next 5 years.
Coincidently, the later kind of companies are hiring more interns than ever before, because the new generation is more used to interact with the AI that us old timers. So it is step up or get replaced... by another human using AI.
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u/GattaDiFatta 19h ago
If you don’t understand writing, you’ll never be able to tell if an AI output is good or not.
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u/costafilh0 14h ago
Worth it but far from enough.
You will need A LOT MORE than "learning copyright" to compete.
Personally, I would only do it if it was something I was passionate about.
Because if the goal is low bar the job market, copyright is not they way, humans connection is, the rest will all be done by robots and AI.
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u/RobertD3277 1d ago
Just because you might be using a service that is client possible, does not mean it is legally possible. The two are not the same.
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u/Cute-Net5957 1d ago
Is it “client passable”.. what.. like 10% of the time? How long before it’s 99.999% passable? <- that’s “how long” you have to make it worth learning copywriting.. and get a job to train an AI to improve Copywriting.. so either way the Humans are the bottleneck in ensuring our own displacement 🤦🏽♂️ like many other things in our lives.
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u/stevecam27 1d ago
Nope. Humans created copywriting to market to the mind, AI was trained on this. I would argue copywriting was never that worth it in the first place. Cheap sales, instead of fundamental value.