Worried about AI comin for your job? READ THIS

Had an interesting experience working with AI last night. And since everybody’s worried about AI coming for our jobs and whatnot, I figured I’d talk about it.

Over at the agency, we’re having a little copy-off.

I’m one of 3 writers on the team. I’m the copy lead, there’s a junior copywriter, and there’s one more guy who spends most of his time working on internal projects and working with clients in our done-with-you coaching program.

So the big cheese wants to start running a Golden Ticket kind of offer as an upsell behind all our front end funnels.

It’s one of those “have everything in the vault for one ridiculous low price” kinds of things.

Great offer. I’d buy it myself if I didn’t already have access to everything.

So the guys and I are each working on our own versions of upsell copy for this thing, and we’re gonna run some traffic to it and see whose copy wins.

Winner gets a nice bonus, plus bragging rights.

But my competitors are both single males who don’t have kids, whereas I’ve had the week of all weeks.

So I’m a little behind where I wanted to be…

And the deadline’s today.

So last night, after thinking about it most of the afternoon, I decided to script a short VSL.

I personally don’t like VSLs and almost never watch them, honestly, but word on the street is they increase conversions.

So, fine. We’ll do a VSL.

(I really wish I could share this stuff with you, but the NDA prevents me from filming myself doing this stuff. Lame.)

So it’s time to write a VSL, but it was like 10:30pm last night after getting 4 hours of sleep the night previous.

So I turned to my trusty friend ChatGPT to get me started with this VSL script.

A while back I upgraded my GPT-4 with the plugin that lets you paste a link in and tell the robots to read it.

So I started with that — pasting in the link to my upsell copy, and then prompting it to write a brief VSL script to sell the offer.

And y’all.

I just about cried with the result.

Because at first glance, it looked…. surprisingly good.

Maybe the robots really ARE coming for our jobs.

panicpanicpanic

But then I put my eyeballs back in my head and started reading this thing.

And I mean… it was fine.

But, just like most AI-generated stuff…

It was vague and a little hypey.

Not specific.

So I went into clean-up mode.

And where I’d initially thought I’d end up keeping most of this script…

I ended up changing about 75% of it.

Which… if you’ve never done a lot of rewriting work… might seem like a lot of rewriting.

Like what’s even the point of starting with AI then?

But that’s what I wanted to talk about.

Because having that starting copy, which lets you drop into “improvement’ mode instead of the much more difficult “creation mode” is why AI can be a powerful assistant.

If I’d had to draft that VSL script from scratch, it would probably have taken me 45 minutes.

But instead, I took maybe 2 minutes to prompt the AI and then spent another 15 or 20 improving what came out.

See the time savings?

And you know what, if I were really gung-ho about this stuff, I could have put in a MUCH more detailed prompt.

But mine was literally like “read this page and then write a VSL script selling this offer.”

But I have neither the time nor the inclination to become a prompt wizard.

It’s easier just to improve what I can get quickly.

And that’s why I’m not worried about AI coming for my job.

I don’t want you to worry about AI coming for your job, either.

I want you to get so good at understanding WHY we write what we write… that no computer is gonna touch you.

When you have that confidence, AI is a TOOL, not a THREAT.

And I’m spending more time working out ways to use this tool for myself.

If you want to follow along, best thing you can do is get on my email list…

And you can do that right here:

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