AI copywriting for small businesses: Considerations, risks and challenges
I’m a freelance copywriter and content marketer who came back from maternity leave and found the whole AI copywriting landscape had changed. After months of milky cuddles, the fanfare around AI copywriting made me want to bury my head in my toddler’s fluffy blanket until the robot overlords arrive.
Instead of doing that, of course, I made myself a strong cup of tea and dove into research mode to get clued up on whether AI copywriting lives up to the hype.
Keep reading to find out what AI copywriting is and what the considerations, risks and challenges are for small businesses, along with details of two experiments that tested AI copywriting vs human copywriting.
What is AI copywriting?
If you don’t know what AI copywriting is (and if you’re not entirely clear on what AI is for that matter), this section is for you.
What is AI?
AI stands for artificial intelligence. It refers to technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, creativity and autonomy. (IBM)
AI has actually been around since the 1950s with Alan Turing (the “father of computer science” who famously broke the German ENIGMA code during WWII) and his Computing Machinery and Intelligence paper. In this paper he asked “Can machines think?” and offered a test (now known as the “Turing Test”) to distinguish between a computer and human text response.
70 odd years and several chess matches later and we reached the rise in large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which made huge waves and created potential for wider AI adoption when it was released in 2022.
Large language models are a category of deep learning models trained on huge amounts of data, making them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other types of content. They’re the first AI system that can handle unstructured human language at scale, allowing for natural communication with machines. (IBM)
Several LLMs have become household names, including ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini assistant, bringing generative AI (AI that can create original content such as text and images in response to a user’s prompt or request) into the public eye.
This leads us to AI copywriting.
What is AI copywriting?
AI copywriting involves using generative AI tools to create human-sounding written content for a range of marketing purposes, based on specific prompts.
Considerations, risks and challenges of AI copywriting
We’ve established that we live in an age where it’s possible to create copy using AI. Now the question is, should you do it? Here are some considerations, risks and challenges to take into account, along with questions to ask yourself before you use AI for copywriting.
Considerations, risks and challenges
Inaccuracies
AI tools are not always accurate. The term AI hallucination refers to when an AI model generates a response that is incorrect or misleading. The hallucinations can be well-written and convincing, so it’s important to fact check everything.
Although Google doesn’t specifically penalise AI-written content, its ranking system does focus on high-quality content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Publishing inaccurate information won’t do any favours for your ranking.
Bias
LLMs can display biases from their training data, producing content that is unfair or offensive. So as mentioned above, make sure you fact-check everything and be on the lookout for anything dubious.
Tone of voice
I’d hazard a guess that your voice and story are at the heart of your small business. For the most part, it’s worth taking the time to use your own words or work with a human copywriter to let your brand personality shine through your website and marketing. An AI tool will never sound as authentically you.
Transparency
Google prioritises content that is ‘helpful, reliable and people-first’ and advises that it should be clear to readers how the content was created. In Google’s own words:
If automation is used to substantially generate content, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Is the use of automation, including AI-generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?
Are you providing background about how automation or AI generation was used to create content?
Are you explaining why automation or AI was seen as useful to produce content?
Data privacy and security
You’ve put your heart and soul into your business. It makes sense to protect it against data privacy and security breaches.
Educating yourself and establishing a clear AI policy from the outset (even if you’re a one-woman or one-man band and it’s just for you!) is a good way to set clear expectations and keep your business safe.
Here are a few AI privacy best practices to follow when using AI for copywriting:
1) Don’t put anything private or confidential into generative AI tools as they can store and use any data provided to them.
2) Manage your data privacy settings within these tools and check for any disablement feature that allows you to disable data storage to prevent your company data from being used for AI model training.
3) Make sure your passwords are long, complex and unique for each AI tool you use. Change your passwords regularly (or immediately if you suspect a security breach).
Environmental impact
Enormous amounts of resources are needed to power generative AI, namely electricity and water.
A key contributing factor is the use of data centres - temperature-controlled buildings that house computing infrastructure, such as servers, data storage drives, and network equipment. The rise of generative AI has significantly increased the pace of data centre construction. By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centres is expected to approach 1050 terawatt-hours, which would make data centres the fifth largest electricity consumer in the world, between the nations of Japan and Russia.
Water is used to cool a data centre by absorbing heat from computing equipment. It’s estimated that for each kilowatt hour of energy consumed, two litres of water are needed for cooling.
That’s not all. Researchers estimate that a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search. I don’t know about you, but that seriously makes me think twice about how and when I use these tools.
Copyright crisis
As a small business owner, you understand what it is to hatch a good idea and nurture it until it flies off into the world with its big strong wings while you watch on like a proud mama. Now imagine someone stole your idea right from the nest and disappeared into the clouds with it.
This is the existential crisis facing creators in the midst of the generative AI boom.
When using AI tools for copywriting, image creation and other types of creation, it’s important to bear in mind all the original creative work the AI tool has been fed to produce its output. Many artists fear being overshadowed by AI tools that can copy their unique styles in the blink of an eye. Indeed, as of late 2024 there were at least 30 major copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies related to image copyright infringement.
In this Forbes interview with Ben Zhao, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and researcher of computer security, he says:
“People take a model, train it on samples of an artist’s work and essentially say, ‘I’m going to wear your style like a skin and control it like a puppet.’”
Zhao also notes how “the value lies in the actual content and real data inside databases - not in these massive models themselves.”
What to ask yourself before using AI for copywriting
The considerations, risk and challenges AI copywriting poses are significant, so it’s always worth questioning whether you actually need to use an AI tool for copywriting.
Here are a few things to try:
Consciously ask yourself for answers before turning to tech. Ask:
What do I already know?
What is my opinion?
How do I feel about using AI for this?
Write a prompt but instead of giving it to AI, use it yourself or give it to your (human) copywriter to see if it sparks a new idea.
Weigh up whether using AI for your copywriting task will actually save you any time.
AI copywriting vs human copywriting: Two experiments
Neil Patel’s experiment
Marketing guru Neil Patel and his team did an experiment to compare the performance of AI-written content vs content written by humans. The findings? Human-written content outranked AI-created content 94.12% of the time.
5 months into the experiment, the average traffic per post for an AI-generated article was 52 visitors compared to 283 visitors for a human-written article. And to account for the fact that AI can produce a blog post faster than a human, they measured how much traffic AI and humans generate per minute spent and found that AI content brought in 3.25 visitors per minute, whereas human content generated 4.10 visitors per minute.
Ultimately, the findings show that you can’t copy and paste what an AI tool writes straight into your blog or website or wherever it might be. These tools can be helpful, but the human mind still comes out on top.
Hotjar’s experiment
Another experiment from Hotjar pitting an experienced freelance writer against ChatGPT found that while ChatGPT was quicker and cheaper at producing an article, it required several rounds of prompting to get the right word count. What’s more, the tone of voice was bland and passive, and it used out-of-date and sometimes incorrect references. Overall, the Hotjar experimenter found that AI can provide a solid foundation to build on but didn’t produce the style and substance of something written and edited by a human copywriter. In their words: “ChatGPT might be a helping hand, but it also needs one.”
Final thoughts
The hype around AI copywriting is undeniable, but so are the risks and challenges to your small business, as well as the wider world. Before using AI copywriting, consider the impacts on your brand voice, your data privacy and your reputation. Beyond your business, think about the environmental impact and the copyright crisis facing creators.
Of course, there are uses for AI in your small business. Generative AI can be a helpful content research tool as part of your wider toolbox, for example. But when it comes to copy that showcases your small business, that you can proudly put on your website and other marketing, human creativity is unbeatable.