How many of you writers use ChatGPT to assist you? I was chastised for using it as a thesaurus and for running social copy through it to meet character limits. Yet all the art directors have company-funded MidJourney accounts and are encouraged to use them as much as possible. What gives?

Never let them know how you cook, just deliver

What about the environmental implications of using AI? Polluting our world big time.

trying not to be a hater here but y'all thesaurus dot com is free and doesn't destroy a lake every time you use it

How did they know you use it? Did you tell them?

I use it frequently as a writer’s assistant. Like I tell it what to do and write an unedited first draft. Then, it quickly cleans it up. Then, I edit it, again.

They keep giving us more work and less time to do it. ChatGPT has helped me immensely. Now I can handle being on four projects at once without working until 1:00AM. Now, it’s like 9:00PM-10:00PM. lol

As long as you’re not having it do the original thinking and writing for you, or the final editing. I don’t see a problem.

Of course you should use it - it’s a tool to help you do more and do better.

It's great for when you've got that angle or that perfect word/phrase that you just can't fit into the line. After writing 30 versions, I occasionally run my lines through GPT and it helps me get that one missing piece.

And since our jr writer quit I'm doing all her social copy. I don't have time to do two jobs when one of them takes hours of editing hundreds of instagram captions on a word-count website

And I know there's writers here who use it way more. Meanwhile our ADs present mockups with f'd up fingers because they spent 2 seconds on a midjourney prompt, and everyone is cool with that

Everybody uses it, and sometimes you can’t tell if you remove the em dashes. I wouldn’t just copy and paste from it without changing a few basic words.

I heard someone say recently that artificial intelligence is not going to take a job away from a copywriter. Another copywriter who uses AI is going to take a job away from a copywriter.

I’ve used a different tool than chatgpt. Saved me a bunch of headaches synthesizing content from 9 hours worth of transcripts. It still required my skill and judgement and experience to craft the final product.

Adapt or die.

Have you raised your points with your CD?

I mean it’s a tool and to your point, it’s efficient for that type of work. I personally don’t use it but can legitimately understand your need for it. Surely they’d want you working on bigger campaigns and concepts instead of churning out daily posts?

There’s another method you could try, it’s not glamorous, but in excel there is the LEN formula that does character counts. Especially to compare multiple lines. There are online counters but that’s one at a time.

=len(cell)

Good luck and hopefully they understand and agree with your rationale.

It might be because your writing sounds like ChatGPT or lacks an idea. If you want to compare it to how ADs work in midjourney, you’d come up with an idea and then use ChatGPT to give you different ways to say it—and then edit it accordingly. I don’t know about the art directors at your agency, but when I generate an image with midjourney, a lot goes into thinking of the prompt and the concept of the image I want to generate. And I almost always have to edit the image in photoshop to make the comp work.

Use it. It’s a tool. It’s the future.

If they poo poo it, then they dont get it, so don’t tell anyone you’re using it.

They all use it where I work. You are clever to find ways and tools to improve your workflow. What matters is the outcome. We can all tell how trash ChatGPT default answers are when it comes to creative writing. Prompting to get anything slightly useful is a real skill.

But for your uses, it's much simpler and functional.

It’s hypocritical for the design/art team to be given access to AI tools to assist in their creative process while writers are being chastised for doing the same. It’s a tool. And using ChatGPT as a thesaurus (although as mentioned there are more environmentally friendly resources for a thesaurus) is hardly plagiarism.

We DO need industry-standards set for AI usage that are realistic/fair to creatives and that won’t put creatives out of a job in 5-10 years. I’m just not sure it’s happening, it feels like a free for all. I think it can be used for comp work and then if we like a concept we then hire the creatives needed to execute it themselves, we shouldn’t be using AI-generated art as final/main campaign elements—but I get why ADs now need AI to retouch art using AI because agencies don’t have Retouching/Imaging teams anymore 🫠—but that isn’t the same as having AI-illustrated art and copy dominating a campaign.

It’s a tool, but if we continue to misuse it it’s going to literally destroy humanity AND our planet. I think you should raise this with your ECD and propose ways that you think the agency can ethically use AI within their creative teams

My gut says it will work against juniors later. If early in my career I hadn’t had to write hundreds of lines to get all the garbage out and learn to identify the lines that worked and why, it wouldn’t be as easy to sit down and crank out a dozen decent options in an hour now. But idk they also aren’t paying us enough so… also wordcounter.net is super helpful for character counts.

I’m well skilled, enjoy doing the work, and not lazy, so no.

I’m annoyed you were chastised for this. Using it as a thesaurus and to help with character count are perfectly legitimate (and smart) uses for it. Just make sure you’re reviewing and refining, as others have said. It’s a tool, not a ghost writer. But it sounds like you already get that.