The Truth About AI and Marketing Writers: Why "Fake" is the Wrong Word

 

I used AI to help write this post.

I also used: My brain. My thirty-plus years of marketing experience. My judgment. My sense of humor (debatable). My vocabulary. My understanding of my audience. My ability to tell when something sounds like garbage. My knowledge of what makes people click, buy, and share.

Which part makes it "fake"?

Here's the thing about our industry: we love our sacred cows. We worship at the altar of "authenticity" while creating campaigns for products we've never used, for audiences we don't belong to, in voices that aren't our own. But the moment someone mentions AI, suddenly everyone's a purist.

It's ridiculous.

You know what I've been using for years without anyone questioning my authenticity? Autocorrect. Grammarly. Google. Wikipedia. That thing where you ask your creative partner to read something back to you because your brain is fried. Hell, I've been stealing ideas from other writers since I learned what a portfolio was.

But AI? That's where we draw the line?

The Real Power Move

The truth is that very soon, AI transparency is going to be the new power move. The writers who figure this out first are going to eat everyone else's lunch.

Think about it. While half the industry is clutching their pearls about the "integrity" of the craft, the smart ones are learning to wield this thing like a secret weapon. They're using it to generate ten headlines instead of three. To write copy in voices they've never tried. To research audiences they don't understand. To iterate faster than they ever thought possible.

And here's the kicker … their work is getting better, not worse.

The Skill Isn't Avoiding AI

The skill isn't avoiding AI. The skill is knowing how to use it well.

Any monkey can type "write me an ad for shoes" into ChatGPT and get something that looks like copy. Most monkeys do. That's why most AI copy sounds like it was written by a robot having a stroke.

But a real writer? A real writer knows how to prompt. How to refine. How to take what AI gives you and make it actually good. How to use AI to solve the blank page problem, then apply years of experience to make it sing.

The best AI-assisted copy doesn't sound like AI copy. It sounds like the writer, just faster and with more options.

We're Missing the Point

The handwringing about AI replacing writers is missing the point entirely. AI isn't replacing writers. It's replacing bad writers who think their job is just putting words in order.

Good writers have always been editors. We've always been idea machines. We've always been translators between what the client thinks they want and what will actually work. AI doesn't change any of that. It just gives us a research assistant who never sleeps and doesn't steal our lunch from the office fridge.

The New Reality

Here's what I think happens next: The writers who embrace AI now become unstoppable. They deliver better work, faster. They explore creative territories they never would have found on their own. They solve problems they couldn't solve before.

Meanwhile, the purists are still sitting in coffee shops, waiting for inspiration to strike, convinced they're preserving the integrity of the craft while their careers slowly bleed out.

Which group do you think clients are going to choose?

A Personal Note

I’ve been using AI for a while now. Not because I thought I needed help writing … I've been doing this long enough to know I'm pretty good at it. I started using it because I was curious. Because I'm not an idiot. Because when a tool this powerful shows up, you either learn to use it or you get left behind.

And you know what happened? My work got better. Not because AI made me a better writer, but because it made me a better thinker. It forced me to articulate what I wanted more clearly. It showed me angles I hadn't considered. It let me try a hundred bad ideas quickly so I could get to the good ones faster.

I'm still the one making the decisions. I'm still the one who knows what's good and what's garbage. I'm still the one who understands strategy and audience and brand voice.

AI is just helping me do all of that better.

The Bottom Line

The future belongs to the writers who figure out how to be human + AI, not human vs. AI.

Everything else is just fear disguised as principle.

And honestly? In an industry built on selling people things they don't need using emotions they barely understand, getting precious about "authenticity" is the most inauthentic thing of all.

So stop pretending you don't use it. Stop apologizing when you do. And for the love of whatever deity oversees failed banner ads, stop calling it fake.

It's a tool. Learn to use it.

Your career depends on it.

Spot the Bot

We've turned into digital bloodhounds, haven't we?

There's a whole cottage industry now devoted to sniffing out machine-generated content. Writer calling out other writers for their suspicious use of em-dashes. Editors scrutinizing submissions for telltale algorithmic fingerprints. Twitter warriors playing gotcha with suspiciously polished threads.

It's become our newest parlor game: Spot the Bot.

But here's the thing that keeps me up at night: while we're all playing AI detective, the rest of the world is quietly going cyborg.

Your photographer friend? She's using AI to remove power lines from landscapes. That brilliant article you shared? The writer used an assistant to clean up their first draft. The startup founder giving that killer presentation? Half those slides were generated, then tweaked by human hands.

We're chasing ghosts in a haunted house.

The binary we're desperately trying to preserve -- human versus machine -- is dissolving faster than we can draw the lines. Soon, asking "Is this AI?" will be like asking if a song is "digital" or if a photo is "Photoshopped." The question itself will seem quaint.

Maybe the real question isn't whether something was made by AI.

Maybe it's whether it's any good.

Because in six months, when your nephew's English teacher is using AI to grade papers that were written with AI assistance, and your marketing team is using AI to optimize campaigns for an audience that's increasingly AI-curated, the whole detection game starts to feel a bit... academic.

The lines aren't just blurring. They're disappearing entirely.

And we're all complicit in their erasure, one "enhance this email" and "help me brainstorm" at a time.

Welcome to the future. Population: all of us, plus our digital co-pilots.

Stop Talking About Your Process

I have a dry cleaner. Every Tuesday, I drop off a week's worth of wrinkled disasters. Every Friday, I pick up crisp, pressed perfection hanging in those satisfying plastic sleeves.

I don't need to know what chemicals they use. I don't care about their state-of-the-art pressing equipment or their eco-friendly cleaning process. I couldn't tell you how long they've been in business or whether the owner went to dry cleaning school (do they even have those?).

All I care about is this: I can walk into any meeting looking like I've got my shit together, even when I definitely don't. My shirts don't have mysterious stains from last Friday's lunch disaster. My pants have actual creases instead of looking like I slept in them.

It's one less thing I have to think about in my already overstuffed brain.

Your clients feel exactly the same way about your copy.

When a business owner lands on your website or reads your pitch, they're not hunting for your "proprietary 12-step messaging framework" or your certification from the International Academy of Words That Sell Good.

They don't care that you've been studying consumer psychology since the Clinton administration or that you use a special blend of neuroscience and ancient storytelling techniques passed down through generations of Mad Men.

Here's what they do care about:

• Their sales page converts visitors into buyers while they sleep. Their email campaigns actually get opened instead of banished to the spam folder. Their brand voice finally sounds like them instead of every other beige business in their industry.
  
  
• They want to stop lying awake at 2 AM wondering if their copy is the reason their launch flopped. They want to feel confident hitting "send" on that email campaign. They want their website to work as hard as they do.
  
  
• Most of all, they want to stop being their own copywriter.

See the difference?

One version is about you and your impressive toolkit. The other is about them and their real life getting measurably better.

Your process matters … to you. It should be bulletproof, battle-tested, and refined through years of trial and error. But your process is like the dry cleaner's industrial steamers: essential for getting the job done, invisible to the customer.

What your clients can see, feel, and desperately want is the outcome. The relief. The transformation.

So here's your homework: Go read your About page, your service descriptions, your LinkedIn summary. Count how many times you talk about your method versus how many times you talk about their life after working with you.

If you're like most copywriters, you'll find a lot more "how I work" and not nearly enough "how you'll feel."

Your clients don't want to hire your process.

They want to hire their better future.

Give them that instead.

21 Quotes About 1st Drafts

First drafts are the swamp monsters of writing. They smell weird, look worse, and if you stare too long, you’ll start questioning your career choices. But here’s the dirty little secret every writer knows (and tries to forget until deadline): you don’t get to the shiny stuff without trudging through the muck. 

Marketing copy, blog content, ad headlines ... it all starts as a mess. And that’s fine. Better than fine, actually. Because without that shaky, ugly first draft, there’s nothing to refine, polish, or sell.

So, in the spirit of celebrating the mess, here are 21 quotes to remind you that your first draft doesn’t have to be brilliant ... it just has to exist.

The first draft of everything is shit. – Ernest Hemingway

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles. – Shannon Hale

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. – Terry Pratchett

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist. – Jane Smiley

I just give myself permission to suck.
I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts…
so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day
I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will
stick in the minds of my readers forever,
because there’s a 90 percent chance
I’m just gonna delete whatever
I write anyway.
I find this hugely liberating.

John Green

Short copy actually takes longer to write. That’s why I go through so many drafts; because it’s a process of distillation. You start with 25 gallons of sour mash to produce a fifth of whiskey. – Jim Punkre

Sometimes my first drafts look like I was typing with hammers. – Scott Frothingham

The first draft is a skeleton. Just bare bones. The rest of the story comes later with revising. – Judy Bloom

Never create and edit at the same time.

Get all the sloppy, ugly roughs and first drafts out.

Quantity is more important than quality at the start.

Mess is more.

Brian Collins

Most times, I’ll just sit there, suffer, write shitty sentences, and hope I can make the next draft less putrid. – Daniel Pink

The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist. – Michael Lee

Get it all down. Let it pour out of you and onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many of the excesses as you can. – Anne Lamott

To become a proper writer, you have to forgive yourself the catastrophe of the first draft. – Alain de Botton

Because getting it all onto the page and not worrying about perfection is a super-important first step in many a creative process. You can redraft, edit and fine tune later (or ask somebody else to). Give yourself permission to write something imperfect, and then you’ve got something to work with. – Sophie de Albuquerque

Underthink. Overwrite.
The secret to a good first draft.

Joe Jeffries

When working on a first draft, go into the project knowing that 33% of what you write will be good “as is”, 33% of what you write could be good after editing, and 33% will be trash. – Soundarya Durgumahanthi 

With rare exceptions all early drafts are imperfect, but that imperfection is a gift — the raw material you need to make things better during revision. – Roy Peter Clark

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft…Until it exists, writing has not really begun. – John McPhee

Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix. – Dominick Dunne

Afraid you can’t write your first draft like
polished Hemingway prose?
Neither could Hemingway!

Daniel Parsons