Ethical Ways to Use AI for Copywriting

AI can enhance your work without sacrificing its humanity (really).

It’s the year 2122. An android named Ash attempts to kill a Warrant Office Ripley aboard the deep-space freight USS Nostromos. She’s discovered that Ash has been programmed to return to Earth with an alien that has killed multiple crew members. Ash is eventually decapitated and destroyed (but not before creating a meme), and Ripley succeeds in killing the alien. Fifty-seven years later, on a mission to confront these same aliens, Ripley is enraged when she discovers a newer model android named Bishop is part of the crew.

If you're like me, you’re like Ripley: when you see the letters a and i anywhere near the word "copywriting," it triggers an emotional reaction that starts with fear, veers to anger, and then settles into a disdain for humanity and the point in history to which it's led us. Are we really going to take the most human art form and hand it over to the bots? We don’t need them on this mission!

But, perhaps my love of ‘70s and ‘80s sci-fi has artificially inflated my skepticism of AI. Bishop does end up saving Ripley’s life on the mission, after all. So, I decided to take a deep dive into the benefits of AI for copywriting to determine if it’s on the verge of replacing human writers or is simply a benevolent tool that will help us improve our writing (and, perhaps, save an orphaned child from xenomorphs to boot).

What is AI Content Generation?

AI content-generating tools scour the web for relevant sources based on queries they receive. These “bots” use NLP (Natural Language Processing) to produce predictive language meant to mimic content produced by humans.

Like most robots, this tool can used for good (Bishop in Aliens) or evil (Ash in Alien). What follows are ways copywriters can use AI while keeping your soul.

Use AI as a Spelling and Grammar Check

We’ll start with the most straightforward and commonly employed AI writing tool—spellcheck. Unless you’re the quill and inkwell sort, you’ve used AI to check your writing for years. Microsoft introduced Word’s spellcheck feature in 2003 and its auto-correcting descendant in 2007. This is an ideal gateway into the benefits of AI writing tools. You know how spellcheck helps: it efficiently catches typos and ensures the accuracy of your spelling. It’s an accepted tool that doesn’t call into question the humanity of your writing.

AI tools like Grammarly take spellcheck to the next level. In addition to catching misspellings and typos, it checks your words against grammar rules. This serves as a good gateway into the ethics of AI tools. It’s possible to have zero education in the rules and grammar, write something, enter it into Grammarly, and then accept all its suggestions. Will you get a great piece of writing by doing this? Not likely. But you will get passable content. But… will it have a soul? And will other humans accept and respect this practice?

How to save your AI-using soul: Use spellcheck and grammar check tools as checks on, well, typos, spelling, and grammar. Don’t let Grammarly markedly rewrite your work. If the bots are repeatedly catching numerous grammatical mistakes, close the laptop and pick up a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

Use AI for Brainstorming and Research

Free AI tools like Chat GPT can save you valuable time in your content creation process by quickly serving up topic ideas and high-level summaries of those topics.

For instance, if you have a blog about gardening, you may ask an AI tool, “What are popular blog topics for gardeners?” Instead of spending an hour or two researching this, AI can serve up these ideas instantly.

Say you decide to write an article about the best way to grow radishes. A quick query like “best topics for a blog on growing radishes” will deliver the high-level points an article needs to cover. This can also serve as a rough outline for the article.

Now, the next step in the process is where the ethics gets murky, a true “Choose Your Own Adventure” moment. You can either A) research those topics and write the article yourself or B) ask AI to write the article for you.

How to save your AI-using soul: AI’s ability to quickly produce high-level summaries of topics can help your research efforts and inspire your content. However, using AI-generated content as your actual published content may be tempting. As we’ll see in the next section, using AI to generate content like blog articles may save time and resources, but it’s unlikely to deliver the quality of content necessary to achieve your goals. In fact, it’s likely to do more harm than good to your business and reputation.

Don’t Use AI to Fully Create Content

There are degrees of using AI in content creation, but let's tackle the big one: content fully created by AI. This means typing a prompt like “write a 1,000-word article on the dangers of sunbathing” into an AI content generation tool and then publishing the results as content on your site.

Due to its near-monopoly on web searches, Google is the de facto gatekeeper of content on the web. Today, it’s agnostic on the use of AI to generate content. It sees both Ashes and Bishops in the content creation world. As with all robots, it’s how humans employ them that matters. However, Google places a premium on content that is helpful to searchers.

To that point, Google’s guidelines on how to create helpful content lead with this question:

Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?

AI-generated content is produced by an NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithm that scrapes the Internet for relevant content and generates new content based on predictions of what the content should be based on the data points collected.

Let’s focus on the word “original.” This is the definition on Webster’s website:

2. not secondary, derivative, or imitative

Content solely created by AI is inherently derivative and imitative and is unlikely to be seen as helpful by Google. While Google says it doesn’t favor human-generated content over bot authorship, it does value expertise and authoritativeness, meaning author bylines and biography pages do influence ranking. Just don’t get caught creating fake bios, as Sports Illustrated did.

Even more powerful than Google’s standards are the values of human beings. To this date, people want content produced by people, not bots. Just look at the reaction to CNET’s now-aborted experiment in producing AI-generated blog posts.

How to save your AI-using soul: No matter how good AI becomes at creating content, fully AI-generated content will be seen as deficient because it does not come from a human. This is the Ash option. Corporate interests may see an opportunity for increased profits and ask you to “bring the alien back to Earth.” You must resist. Communication, including the written word, exists so that humans can share thoughts, ideas, and information with one another. Its humanness is essential to its mission. So, when using AI to generate content, use it as inspiration and a research tool, not as the final product.

Use AI for Product Descriptions

OK, maybe there’s one exception to that rule. I got my start as a copywriter writing product descriptions, so I am torn about this one. On one hand, my first position may not have existed if AI were employed to write those descriptions. On the other hand, the position was not much more than glorified data entry, turning product specs provided by the manufacturer into user-friendly content.

Since product descriptors aren’t expected to have the emotional depth of a Hemingway novel, you won’t lose much in quality by using AI to quickly turn product specifications into usable, SEO-optimized product descriptions. Prompt an AI tool with the product specifications and the keywords you want to use, and you’ll get a perfectly fine product description. If you’re not fine with perfectly fine, some are experimenting with adding positive customer reviews to prompts (along with the product specifications) to output more emotionally charged descriptions.

How to save your AI-using soul: Over the past 15 years, the number of employees a business devotes to content creation has reduced dramatically. I was part of a team of four when I wrote product descriptions. While this is the ideal state of things, today you’re lucky to have one person to oversee this process. Usually, it’s a task given to someone who is either A) not a writer, B) overwhelmed with other work, or C) both. Given that, AI tools are a way to quickly generate usable product descriptions. Just be sure a human reviews each description for errors and readability. AI, like humans, is fallible.

Use AI for Social Media Monitoring

Social media engagement is a critical part of any brand curation. The comment sections of social media posts are one of the few places in the e-commerce world where there is direct interaction between company and client.

Depending on the size of your social media following, monitoring replies and responding to the most critical ones can be a monumental task that requires significant human resources. This is why companies are increasingly employing reply bots. The benefits include:

Speed: Reply bots are on call 24/7. Their sole focus is replying to comments that trigger their algorithm. Unlike humans, their attentiveness is unlimited. They can find comments that need a reply and respond far quicker than any carbon-based life form.
Scalability: If your business has 100 followers, you can likely monitor comments yourself. But if you have 100,000 or a million, bots can monitor and reply with the same swiftness and consistency, regardless of your number of followers.
Cost savings: Ideally, you have a team of highly trained customer service reps monitoring your social accounts day and night and responding quickly with helpful and empathetic messages. But we live in the real world, and reply bots can serve as valuable tools for customers, represent your brand well, and save your business money.

How to save your AI-using soul: With advances in NPL and predictive algorithms, reply bots can provide helpful information and links to customers. But it’s important to understand their limitations. They lack empathy, relying solely on logic and deductive reasoning. Humans, as history has made all too clear, are irrational beings. Reply bots can’t empathize with this side of humanity, leaving them blind to needs that other humans can deduce.

How do you overcome this inherent flaw in AI? Identify your bots as bots. The abundance of AI reply bots has made them more acceptable to the general public, especially when they are helpful to customers. But if you try to pass a bot off as a human, customers are likely to tab it as a bot and feel they are being misled (think of the crew of the USS Nostromo in Alien discovering Ash is an android). When you clearly identify bots as bots, you can generate messages that point customers to a human representative if bot-human interactions hit a wall.

Use AI for keyword research and SEO optimization

Keyword research is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. The keywords that best fit your topic exist; you just need to sift through the data to find them. AI is not just helpful in this search but essential. Google itself uses AI; in fact, it’s the backbone of its functionality. The keywords you target would not exist or be useful without AI.

But how can AI help you find the best keywords to use? It can be beneficial in the following ways:

As a thought starter: Allen Ginsburg (or was it William Blake?) said the first thought is the best thought. But that was in reference to art. For keywords, volume is critical. It's the search that bears fruit. To find the right keywords, you must consider the many ways people may search for a specific topic. AI can help by offering suggestions for keywords on topics. Add these suggestions to your own. Then, think of more and check their search volume and other SEO metrics in tools like Moz and ahref to determine the best keywords for your topic.

Identifying the best keywords to use: As noted above, sites like Moz, SEMRush, and ahrefs, use AI tools as an integral part of their services. By analyzing data and trends in search queries, these sites help businesses determine which keywords represent the best opportunity to rank for specific topics on search results pages.

Keep Content Fresh and Relevant

Google prioritizes new content on the logical premise that outdated content is less relevant. People do this, too. If you’re like me, you look for a publish date when you click on an article to see how timely it is. A trick content creators have learned is to update content, even in small ways, so that, instead of an original publish date at the top of the piece, you’ll see the date the content was updated. It gives at least the impression that this content is the most up-to-date it can be.

But, the specifics of those updates are not usually disclosed. Technically, you can change one word in an article written a year ago and say it was updated today. Things get murkier when you use AI to make these types of SEO-gaming updates, as our old friend’s CNET found out in 2023 when they were caught using AI to rewrite intro paragraphs to blogs to keep the content fresh. These refreshes were akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They didn’t add any new information or benefit to the reader. They were solely meant to show the article had been updated to game Google’s algorithm.

However, as with all content creation, there are ways AI can help content stay up-to-date and relevant:

Use AI to check for broken links: Links to sites that no longer exist are one of the biggest signs that content is irrelevant. Clicking on every link in your blog posts can be time-consuming and tedious. Thankfully, there are free link-check sites that will scan your site for broken links in minutes.

Use AI for news alerts: This is one of the most useful ways AI can assist in keeping content up-to-date. Setting up news alerts using your keywords will help you stay abreast of the latest developments on the topic. When something newsworthy occurs, you can update your blog accordingly, keeping it fresh and relevant for people searching the topic.
Use AI identify new and emerging keywords: Once you update the content, it’s good to double-check if your keywords are still relevant. Check your keywords' search volume metrics in Moz or ahrefs to see if other keywords have become more relevant to your article. If so, update your article appropriately.

How to save your AI-using soul: When it comes to saving your soul, always fall back on your humanness. Updating content so that it’s more relevant to the needs of searchers requires a human. There’s no getting around that. But, like with most content creation, AI is a very useful assistant.

The Future is Unwritten

As Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten, so there is a non-zero chance AI pens it. But this Skynet scenario is unlikely for a simple reason: humans value content created by humans. And that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon, leaving AI as a tool copywriters can use to enhance their writing and work more efficiently. Like it or not, the AI genie is out of the bottle, and its tools are practical writing aids. You'll fall behind in the industry if you're not using them. However, that industry faces pressing questions on the best and most ethical uses of AI in the future. If we collectively demand that humans generate content—if we show our preference for Bishops over Ashes—then we’ll continue to be aided by the bots, not replaced by them.