Poll Results: Copywriters’ Fears About AI in 2026

In an informal, unscientific poll, responders indicated that copywriters’ biggest fears about using AI cluster around losing work, losing value, and losing trust in their own (and others’) writing. Many see AI as both a useful tool and a direct threat to how they get paid and how their craft is judged.

1. Job and income security

• Fear that AI tools will replace human-written ad copy, blogs, emails, and social posts, shrinking demand and pushing rates down.​
• Anxiety that clients will switch to “cheap” AI output and only hire writers to lightly edit, devaluing deeper strategic and creative skills.​
• Worry that entry-level and junior roles will disappear, making it harder to build a career path toward senior creative or strategy roles.​

2. Being misjudged or distrusted

• Fear of being falsely accused of using AI when they did not, especially as AI detectors often flag human work as “machine-written.”​
• Concern that clients and managers will trust AI detectors over the writer’s word, damaging professional reputation and relationships.​
• Unease that audiences may assume polished, efficient copy is “just AI,” making it harder to prove the value of expert human craft.​

3. Loss of creative identity and craft

• Anxiety that AI will homogenize tone and style, flooding channels with same-sounding content and making original voices harder to spot.​
• Fear that writers will be pushed into prompt-tweaking and editing instead of concepting, storytelling, and big-idea development.​
• Worry that constant reliance on AI will dull skills like ideation, structural thinking, and nuanced phrasing over time.​

4. Ethical, legal, and IP concerns

• Fear that their past work has been scraped to train models without consent or credit, undermining ownership of original writing.​
• Concern about accidentally publishing AI-generated material that includes plagiarism, inaccuracies, or fabricated details, with legal or brand consequences.​
• Discomfort with being asked to “just run it through AI” when the underlying data, permissions, or attributions are unclear.​

5. Practical quality and workflow worries

• Worry that AI will confidently generate factual errors or made-up case studies that slip through and damage credibility.​
• Frustration that prompting, checking, and rewriting AI drafts can be time-consuming and sometimes slower than writing from scratch.​
• Concern that clients will overestimate AI’s capabilities, expecting instant, perfect copy and compressing timelines even further.
  
  
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