Why do copywriting written by AI always look like the editor's? It will be different if you add the four elements of role, mission, context and format.

✍️ This article was originally published in Economic Daily (opens in a new tab) and was supplemented when it was first published.

You’ve probably had this experience. If you want to change an article on hand into a post on three platforms, you open ChatGPT and type “Help me change this article into a social post.” After a few seconds, it replies to you with a piece of text: smooth and correct, and you can’t fault it at first glance, but your first thought after reading it is that it can’t be used because it looks like something that any editor could write.

So you change and rewrite, or you just do it yourself. After a long time, you come to the conclusion: AI can only write the first draft, the key still depends on people.

The conclusion was correct, but the diagnosis was wrong.

Mediocrity is the most reasonable output when there is insufficient information.

The problem is probably not that the AI is not smart enough, but the words you throw at it.

When you just say “Help me rewrite it as a social post,” you’re not really saying anything. The AI ​​doesn’t know whose account this post is going to be posted to, who it’s meant to see, what it’s trying to accomplish, and what it looks like. The only thing it can do is guess one for you using the safest and greatest common denominator method on the Internet.

You think it is mediocre, but mediocrity is the most reasonable output when there is insufficient information. If it were any intern who had just arrived and received the same assignment, the things he would hand over would look like this.

A usable instruction requires four things to support its skeleton: role, task, context, and format. If one item is missing, the AI ​​will have to guess one more time; only when all four items are present, it will be able to write something close to you.

Persona: Decide whose tone and professionalism it uses

“Help me rewrite it as a social post” has no role. “You are an editor who runs a financial account for office workers, and your tone is like chatting with colleagues after work.” That’s it.

Once the character is given, the wording, professional depth, and sense of distance from the reader are all in place at once.

This is actually something marketers are most familiar with: you would already set a personality for each account, but you just didn’t tell AI about the personality in the past. The intuition in your mind that “our family account does not speak like this” has always been there, but it has never been written down.

Task: use clear verbs and only do one thing at a time

“Help me deal with this article” is vague, “Help me rewrite the third paragraph of this article into a limited-time dynamic copy” is clear.

The most common mistake marketers make is to cram three things into one sentence: “Help me write a post and think of three titles and a set of hashtags.” The AI ​​will do them all, but do everything half-assedly because its attention is diluted.

Take it apart, one piece at a time, and the results of each piece will be more accurate. This is why I have always advocated that instead of pursuing god-level reminders of one question and one answer, what should be done is to break down repetitive tasks into a process that can be assigned. No matter how beautiful a single instruction is, it can only be solved once.

Context: The biggest difference between you and AI

Whether this item is provided or not determines whether the finished product is usable or usable.

You have in your mind the reason for this brand, the purpose of this schedule, the appearance of this audience, and the red lines that cannot be stepped on. The AI ​​has nothing in its head.

So you have to tell it: which event page this post should be directed to, who is the audience, what are the standards for brand tone, and what the last post with good results looked like. Even relevant materials and successful examples are fed in together.

The more sufficient the context is, the less the AI ​​will need to fill in the blanks with imagination, and the less you will need to make drastic changes afterwards. I talked about the other half of the same thing in 〈Four-step methodology for AI copywriting〉: Poor copywriting is often not a rhetorical problem, but that you haven’t figured out who you want to persuade and what you want to convince him. The context is to tell this matter to AI.

Format: Explain clearly what the finished product looks like first

Should it be a list or a paragraph? How many words or sentences should it be? Should it include emojis? Should the call to action (CTA) be placed at the beginning or at the end? Should the tone be formal or playful?

If you are too lazy to type these out, the AI ​​will have to decide on its own, and then the decision will be different from what you think.

Spending ten seconds explaining the format is better than spending ten minutes revising it.

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Put the four items back together, and the same AI will give you different levels of things.

Putting these four items back to the example at the beginning, you can go from “Help me rewrite this into a social post” to a sentence like this:

You are the editor who runs an IG account that focuses on saving money for the petty bourgeoisie. Your tone is relaxed and a little self-deprecating. Help me rewrite the following blog into a post to warm up the subscription-based event that will be launched next Wednesday. The audience is office workers aged 25 to 35. The brand does not use scare marketing and does not use words such as “wealth freedom”. The format should be paragraph style, no more than 200 words, end with a call to action to guide tracking, and you can use a few emoticons.

The same AI, the same material, what this sentence brings is not at the same level as the original sentence.

The difference is not that you are good at casting spells, but that you have given a proper briefing.

And when you find yourself typing the same paragraph every time, it’s time to save it as a template. One step further is to let an article automatically grow a content production line with six outputs.

It’s actually very slow for one person to figure this out.

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You can use these four elements above today. But the real difficulty is never knowing the method, but whether you have someone to check with you: whether your judgment is correct, whether this month’s numbers are making progress or staying the same, and who you can ask when you are stuck.

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