Does A.I Write Electric Copy?

Many moons ago, I wrote a master’s thesis about Artificial Intelligence titled “Artificial Intelligence is Neither Artificial Nor Intelligence.”

Jaques Derrida was an advisor.

I’ll spare you the hyperbole, but I’m not a believer.

Most of it focuses on the fact that the word “artificial” proceeds the word “intelligence.”

For example:

We all know that the real advertisement for Saatchi LA’s Watson Toyota ads was the fact they used Watson to write Toyota ads.

Not the ads themselves.

It was a stunt.

If it sold more cars, we’d have heard about it by now.

Apparently, Watson now offers a self-service conversational ad builder that lets marketers “utilize natural language tech.”

Or in other words, design display ads featuring chatbots.

And if anyone has ever talked to Chatbot, you know that that is exactly what we need less of.

Then there’s Wordsmith, an automated writing tool made by a company called “Automated Insights.”

It sounds like an oxymoron.

Anyway, with my job on the line, I visited their webpage.

Here’s what Wordsmith has to say about itself.

“Wordsmith is a natural language generation platform that transforms your data into insightful narrative.”

I’m not worried.

To be fair, I’m not sure if Wordsmith wrote that about itself or not.

But it proves my point.

Computers can never be copywriters.

But some copywriters can sure sound a lot like them.