I’ve been using AI for a while now at work, and one of the tasks I have tried to use it for is to help me with website descriptions for our construction products.
And if I’m honest… it keeps missing the mark.
It gets close sometimes. The structure is there. The words are there. But it rarely feels like something that would actually make a customer stop, think, and buy ... and that’s when it clicked for me. AI doesn’t struggle because it’s slow or badly trained. It struggles because it simply isn’t human.
It has no empathy. No lived experience. No real sense of what it feels like to be the person reading the page and deciding whether to trust you or not!
So instead of sharp, persuasive copy, you get something else. Safe. Repetitive. A bit hollow.
You can throw better prompts at it. You can guide it, tweak it, refine it. I’ve tried all of that. But it still falls into the same patterns, because that’s what it’s built to do.
AI has been developed to spot patterns in data and leans into them. It writes in a rhythm that feels right on the surface, but it doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no intent or passion behind the words, and for me, thats the fundamental problem. Good copy isn’t just about sounding right. It’s about understanding people, then choosing words that nudge them to act.
That part still needs a human.
That said, I don’t think AI is useless. Far from it.
It’s great for getting started. It helps with structure, rough drafts, and getting ideas down quickly. It speeds things up, especially when you’re staring at a blank page.
But the real work still happens afterwards. That’s where tone, judgement, and experience come in. That’s where something average turns into something that actually works.
It’s also why proper copywriting still matters. Not just words on a page, but words that reflect your business, your brand, your customers, and the way you want to be seen. That kind of work is hard to fake.
If you’re interested in that side of things, there is more chat over at Yorkshire Writers. It’s just two of us, writing in a way that sounds like real people, because that’s what readers respond to.
AI has a place. I use it most day ... but writing copy that connects with people… that still comes down to people.
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