12:31pm
East of the Mississippi
Not sure if you spend any time on LinkedIn, but there seems to be a lot of marketers there.
And of the marketers who post, they tend to fall into two camps:
One camp that posts plenty of AI content, often from other creators, and talks about how game-changing AI is––and maybe you want to buy their course.
And one camp that doesn’t want anything to do with AI.
I have a more nuanced take, which of course isn’t polarizing enough to gain much traction.
I think AI writing is crap.
But AI as a help-me-think tool? As a research tool?
Less crap.
Which is how I use it, when I use it, which isn’t very often to be honest.
And the reason AI isn’t good at generating written content––more than the “tells” of overused em-dashes and emojis and “it’s not X, it’s Y” structures––is because it lacks humanity.
No emotion.
None of the messiness that is real life.
People connect over common ideas. Something as simple as a shared local sports team is enough to make friends.
But AI doesn’t have a local team.
It doesn’t share any of your life experiences.
And even if you prompt it with your story, or your style, or took its output and added your own twist, it still lacks soul.
Perfection is boring.
I’m revisiting some top-performing sales letters in my goal to review various copywriting resources that I’ve bought over the years.
CopyHour. RC31. Stuff from Todd Brown. Recordings from Dan Kennedy. Years of Ben Settle’s Email Players newsletter.
And in most of these top-performing sales letters, the bulk of the content isn’t about the offer itself.
It’s about the people who discovered the offer. Their story. Their troubles and fears and successes.
That’s what builds trust.
Not hyped up promises of having something artificial do your work for you.
In Emerson’s essay Compensation, he writes:
“The law of nature is: Do the Thing, and you shall have power; but they who do not the thing, they do not have power.”
There is no personal growth, no power or knowledge gained over the world or of the self, when a machine does your work for you.
I’m off to this Market Eminence book launch party.
Love you,
Jeffrey G Thomas
Direct Response Copywriter
PS. Emotion is a powerful thing. It’s what connects us with one another.
I’ll be launching The Secrets of Emotional, Hot-Button Copywriting soon, filled with examples of the 7 emotions that drive humans to take action.
It’s not how to, but how to think.
Stay tuned.