Cancelling a flight to Thailand at the last minute. Leaving London. Placing a bet on myself. The stresses and tensions that come with this. And for why?
I've had my head down, grinding out development in areas that I have never explored before. Using AI to help me work out how to take a website from WordPress into VS Code where I can make edits and design it exactly how I want. No lovable restrictions halting workflow.
I've dived into the world of API keys, n8n and automation, moving from local hosting to online servers. Cloudflare. GitHub Repos. Pushing updates through the Mac terminal. Going back and forth with Claude to resolve issues, develop ideas and help me create something that actually provides real-world solutions to business owners; allowing them to scale and develop their reach.
But, why? Why would I as a copywriter spend so much time on the technical side of things? I remember back in 2024, when I first set off to develop this freelance thing called ‘copywriting’, and when AI was beginning to emerge, a nice Serbian guy travelling with his girlfriend (both in the field of psychology) asked me… but don’t you think that AI will just do this? Aren’t you afraid of it essentially making this goal redundant.
I would answer back that I didn’t think it would ever be able to replicate the human touch, or to resonate in a way that held the unique style of a writer. I mean, think of authors such as Hunter S Thompson and his novel ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’. It’s impossible not to be in awe of his prose. His completely unique way of piecing together a story, of creating a pacing that matches the absurdity and degeneracy described in the narrative. Work like this simply cannot be replicated by an AI. Why? Because it isn’t built upon data. It isn’t constructed through analysis of the most popular texts of the last 100 years, and the common tropes and language patterns used.
It’s a wild expressionistic text, written by someone who tapped into their feelings, who unleashed their manic mind onto the page. A writer who experimented with substances, and wasn’t afraid to let his pen cast wildly across the paper, creating descriptions and phrases that could come from nothing other than a human who was simply in the flow state of creating.
Whilst I tout the power of automation, and AI written emails within the engine that I have built, I do not overlook the very element that allows for actual connection. The words themselves. This system is about getting your foot in the door. Opening up the conversation. But once the conversation begins, that’s where the writing really begins to matter.
As my quote says, a copywriter is a combination of a poet and an assassin. The machine is the assassin: efficient, tireless, and emotionally detached from who and how it targets. The poet, well, that’s the one who wields the pen in such a way that a reader loses themselves inside the words. It doesn’t matter if this is a newsletter, a website, a blog post, or a book. And they know which words to cut, ruthlessly and instinctively.
This is what I meant when I said that I didn’t think AI could do such a thing. Or at least, at the same level of an elite writer. The same level as someone who can let words flow through their fingertips and decorate a page, diving deeper into a space that didn’t exist before. And that’s the essential caveat in creation. It is a process of carving out a void and filling it with something that has never existed. An AI is incredibly powerful, but it is unable to create without reflecting upon data.
I asked Claude one time why it is able to do such complex tasks, but it can’t get something as simple as the date or time correct. Its response was that it doesn’t distinguish between complexity of tasks. All requests are just tokens in its mind. It does not see things in the same way that we as humans do, it does not perceive challenges comparatively, rather it addresses a token and moves on. It doesn’t think, ‘Oh boy, they’re asking a lot of me.’ It just does what it thinks it should do. It provides the output that seems most logical based upon its reasoning power.
That’s not what a writer does. A writer doesn’t follow logic. They follow emotion. They explore the world within themselves, and within others. They know what it’s like to live, the struggles of being alive. The pains of loss, the beauty of love, the difficulties of everyday life, the gnawing feelings of not being enough, or wasting their time on this planet. An AI does not. It doesn’t matter to it whether it makes good use of its time, since it has no consistent concept of what time is. This is both its greatest strength, and its downfall.
And it may not seem relevant to sales, to marketing, to business, but I assure you it is. Whilst we focus on money, on revenue, on whether we’re succeeding or failing, we’re ultimately acting upon emotions, responding to feelings, and chasing something to justify our existence.
A consumer isn’t sold by what is technically the best, they are sold on what something makes them feel. They buy into the vision of how something will allow them to move closer towards their idea of a dream life. The idea of who they could become, if they only had X.
I’m not sure that AI can truly understand this, and that’s why I don’t think it can ever truly connect to a human to the degree that is required to build trust, to develop and nurture a relationship; ultimately curating a desired outcome.
It certainly can assist, and help us create powerful tools that allow us to move faster, and act more efficiently, but it will never know what it is like for you or I to be alive in this world.
It doesn’t know pain. It knows data. Thus, as a copywriter, I use AI to leverage data in a far more intelligent and optimised manner than I ever could, whilst I leverage the words to connect with a reader in a way that AI simply can’t.
I am a human. I feel stress, I feel sadness, I doubt myself. I was planning on going to Thailand so I would have less overheads to develop this business, but realised that in the end, the person who booked that flight was someone looking to escape. And that the person the day before the flight took off was not that same person.
I know what it’s like to feel weak when it seems like everyone around you is strong. What it’s like to fail. And I know what it’s like to feel alone. To feel lost.
I don’t need to try to be a writer, it’s who I am. But to do this at scale, that’s what I need AI for.
I am not a machine operator who used to write, I’m a copywriter who built a machine.
— Fynn
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