Let me tell you a story about fapGPT:
Several months ago on Twitter, everyone was yapping about AI this, and fapGPT that, and it’s going to change the game, and if you aren’t using AI in your sales copy you’re going to be left behind (or, as the broccoli headed ones like to say: “NGMI”), and a bunch of other nonsense many times most aggressively spread by people selling offers about AI, from what I could tell.
Well guess what?
Almost a year later I hardly see any of these people singing this tune anymore.
Even the ones whose only reply whenever I questioned it was:
“give it two years, bro.”
It’s almost like even a lot of them have given up on their predictions of becoming junior masters of the universe using fapGPT in all its glory. In fact, around that time I publicly asked, several times, for someone to show me just one example of competent AI-written sales copy that didn’t read like a robot randomly cutting & pasting from multiple swipe file ads.
I assumed these guys knew something I don’t.
Only one person answered my request.
I won’t name him (he’s an Email Players subscriber, but I don’t want to give up his “cover” — as he sent it to me in confidence, from a private membership site he probably was not supposed to share info from. And so it goes with my righteous Spy Network. Daddy has eyes on a lot of places he’s not supposed to…)
And what happened was this:
He sent me a private email where he copied and pasted some AI-generated sales copy from this private membership site where copywriters were all fapping to AI.
The offer was for dog owners.
And it sounded like you’d expect machine-generated copy to sound:
awkward, choppy, totally not human.
Which, admittedly, whoever the guy was who shared it came clean to, and said a good copywriter could smooth it out, etc. Just like I keep hearing other copywriters fapping in the AI sock saying, as well as email platforms all hopping in the AI game talking about.
Back to the copy:
It just listed a bunch of benefits, awkwardly, while trying to sound fancy. But really, it sounded like Data from Star Trek reading off a bunch swipe file copy from random ads in the same niche, without context or depth or humanity, from his memory banks.
That is the best description I can think of for it.
Realize, I was quite connected to that market at the time, as I had just lost my own dog a couple months earlier after 15+ years having her, with her last year being extremely difficult watching her waste away day-by-day, cleaning up poops tracked all over since she was blind and walked in it, and the smell of “sickness” all over the downstairs wing of the house (which she had all to herself the last 9 months of her life). I spent several months trying like hell to give her as good a quality of life as I possibly could after giving me 15+ years of the best times I have ever had in my entire life, before putting her down.
And I can tell you:
That AI-generated copy sounded not just stupid and cold — but had zero empathy.
And even borderline insulting in some ways.
My Email Players subscriber showed me a few paragraphs from a discussion about the copy.
And they all thought it was “cool!”
One guy said it made him cry about his dog.
Which I call bull sheee-yat on.
No real dog owner who loves their dog, has a bond with their dog, and has a strong relationship with their dog would think that copy was anything but nonsensical. And that is what I told my Email Players subscriber: it was “functionally” correct with benefits, certain words dog owners use (although awkwardly stated), no doubt pulled from dog related sources.
But it was also clearly not written by a dog owner.
Or, at least, not with one with more than a shallow, cartoonish relationship with his pet.
And no “smoothing” it over would change that. Back when I would do “rewrites” of ads it was clear it was very rarely easy to “smooth” out shyt copy. It always required a total rewrite, as it goes beyond words and stacking benefit. It’s about relationships, connecting with another human, and solving that person’s problems. AI is just a tool — a machine — and a tool/machine cannot create a relationship with another human being for you any more than your calculator can help you create a relationship with your accountant.
AI is probably going to be a very powerful tool for some things.
(I agree with the AI crowd that in 5 years, for example, it will do all the menial ticky-tac stuff like balancing checkbooks, etc and save people loads of time).
But it won’t build, strengthen, or solidify relationships in a vacuum.
It won’t solve serious customer service problems.
It won’t conduct important negotiations where the stakes are high.
And it won’t “write” copy that connects with people with humanity.
That’s my opinion.
And you know what?
So far I’ve been proven correct on this..
More on the Email Players newsletter here:
Ben Settle
