Most old school copywriters have no fear of AI being able to make a dent in their income yet many newbie copywriters are scared it will seriously damage their ability to have a lucrative copywriting career and there a several people who see AI as a miracle tool for writing better copy faster.
They are ALL right but if you understand AI’s current limitations and how to overcome them, you will not only be fine you can thrive in an industry seeing a lot of change and believe me when I say change is good if you look at it as an opportunity.
Before I get into the fatal flaws I want to make three things perfectly clear.
- I am not selling an AI course
- I believe AI is a great tool
- This post will show you exactly how to ensure AI helps and never hurts you
Fatal Flaw #1– AI is often inaccurate. Lawyers have been busted using AI to write briefs using AI which cited case law which didn’t exist. AI just made us stuff that sounded good.
More recently a Google AI summary said that Disney released a movie called Encanto 2 in 2024 and that never happened.
I myself having been told that all pickup trucks in California are considered commercial vehicles asked Google this question and in the AI summary of results it contradicted itself sayin this was false and true.
This won’t affect direct response sales copywriters as much as those who use AI to generate engagement posts on social media or content.
Clients and promotion writers spend more time vetting what is said but those who get lazy and let falsehoods slip through in their sales copy are taking a huge risk of triggering an FTC, FDA or other alphabet agency problem but this also causes another huge issue.
Once a prospect o follower sees you say something which is clearly false you lose credibility.
What do you think those judges do when they see those lawyers caught using AI which made up fake presidents? They lost all credibility.
I myself now skip every AI Google Search summary because I don’t want to embarrass myself by citing false info.
Also if anyone suspects posts or content is being generated by AI they will absolutely stop paying attention to the people using AI for content.
Even if you are sharing great tips and accurate data, anyone getting a whiff they are consuming AI generated content will unfollow.
To date, I have not found a single person who after finding out what they are reading is AI generated looks forward to more.
The fix is simple.
Double check every fact and do a search for and eliminate common terms AI uses normal humans don’t.
Michael Millman put a list of these words in The Gary Halbert Copy Club on Facebook and you can also search Google for similar lists.
Fatal Flaw #2– AI can only use different words to say what others have already said. AI cannot come up with some new way of looking at making a purchase. This is more of a problem for those who use it to do research and why top copywriters will never fear AI.
When you ask AI to give you the top ten pain points of a typical buyer or list all the benefits of a feature, it first seeks out what most people are saying and since it is not sentient or doesn’t actually have a consciousness, it can’t find that one brilliant or shocking statement in a sea of a thousand reviews you can use for your next hook.
AI will never write a headline like Wife of Hollywood Movie Star Swears Under Oath Her Perfume Contains An Illegal Sexual Stimulant!
Software won’t say Avis Is Only #2 In Car Rentals So We Try Harder!
AI would have never written the subject line Thank God My Dad Went To Prison
This doesn’t mean AI is not useful for research but if you don’t dig in and find a unique hook, selling point, or mind blowing way to rethink why your prospect must buy what you sell, you will be stuck with a promotion which again says what everyone else is saying just using different words.
I’ll give you a hot tip at the end of this to show how to use this post to refresh a dying campaign.
Anyway, the fix for this is to use AI to do the kind of research which reminds you of what you have to say to make a sale but dive in and read all the reviews, use the products, shop the competition, have real life conversations or online back in forth discussions with actual buyers and use your human gut to find out what really is refreshing to hear.
AI doesn’t have a human gut and that is your advantage.
Those who rely solely on AI to do sum up research the software finds will lose their jobs to AI operators and can make some money but will never rise above mediocrity.
Fatal Flaw #3– As I just stated AI has no gut so it can’t edit your copy to make the last part of every sentence sell the reader on reading the next sentence.
AI is great for the basic steps of reducing the vocabulary level of your copy, shortening paragraphs and sentences, and but as of right now, AI software can’t write complete sentences using incomplete thoughts.
Great editing injects hidden psychology and ends paragraphs on a note which makes the prospect feel incomplete or like there is more to gain by continuing to pay attention to your sales message.
The fix is become a better editor.
In my book The Halbert Copywriting Method Part III- How To Get Prospects To Read Every Word of Your Ads, I explain lots of tricks to get this job done and AI can only shorten and reduce the vocabulary of your copy.
You will once again need to use your gut to decide when to end a paragraph or restructure a sentence so the reader feels compelled to read the next.
Using AI for the broad and generalized research will save you some time and allow you to spend more time digging in to the granular comments and discussions where you find the gold overlooked by everyone else.
Once you have your unique hook and your story, selling arguments, features and benefits, risk reversal offer, and every other talking point you want to make in a promotion, you can load that into AI and it will spit out a great rough draft super fast.
Now for the good news about AI.
Regardless of the many different writing routines copywriters use, all great copywriting has three distinct phases.
The first is research and that is where all the power in your copy comes from. During this stage you find the unique things to say and the standard promises you need to make.
The second phase is writing a first draft and this is where AI rocks.
The trick is to input as many of your own points as possible.
Those who just say “write a landing page which sells an AI course written in the style of Gary Halbert” will fail.
Those who input 100 compelling reasons to buy will win.
You can use the time saved in writing the first draft to do a better job finding those unique thoughts and editing the copy to sound human and keep prospects paying attention.
Best of all, you can refresh a dying campaign by having AI rewrite it.
Once you are saying something your competition isn’t and have a winner, the ad will slowly get a lower ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). This has always been called ad fatigue but one way to extend the life of a campaign is to re-write and use different images while still sharing the same unique thoughts.
Hat tip to Ian Henman for proving this to me and my son Preston. Follow that guy.
Now, this doesn’t mean using AI to rewrite the wining campaigns of others will work.
Why?
Because they already have a head start.
How many times have you seen a Steal Our Winners type campaign?
Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits has already won that race and everyone else looks like a copycat.
Maybe he wasn’t the first to use that hook but by the time we all heard the words enough to think it’s working, it was too late to use the same line because people like to follow the leader not another follower but…
When you have a campaign on YouTube or other running in other media which is starting to become less profitable, rewriting your own promo can breath life into it extending the campaign’s profitability.
For those who fear Ai in 2025 I hope this has brought you some hope.
Bond Halbert
PS When AI copywriting hit its peak, companies were firing their copywriting teams and now they have begun hiring some for the exact same reasons I mentioned above.
PSS If anyone asks you why they shouldn’t just use AI instead of hiring a traditionally trained copywriter who can use AI, feel free to send them to read this.
I’m not for hire, so I’ll never be your competition.