Will AI replace copywriters?
It is by far the most common question that I get here at the Posse.
And listen, I know it can be a little bit scary, especially if you’re just starting out when you think about the future of technology and AI and what that means for your copywriting career…
Especially when you know that Jasper.ai which is the world’s largest AI content generation platform, just got valued at $1.5 billion.
It is safe to assume that AI is not going anywhere.
So what does that mean for you as a copywriter and your future in this industry?
Well, Posse, you know, I got you. I went straight to the source and interviewed Austin Distel, the CMO of Jasper.AI and got your most pressing questions answered.
In this interview, you’ll get:
✅ Austin’s opinion on AI and its role in copywriting
✅ The right way to use AI
✅ The secret to cutting your writing time in half
✅ What makes Jasper AI different from any other content-generation tool
✅ Exactly how to use Jasper AI and “train” it to give you the best results possible
Here’s the interview…
Alex:
Hey Posse, what’s up? I have a very, very exciting interview planned for you today. But before we get into all the juicy stuff we’re going to be talking about, I’m gonna go right out there and introduce our special guest, Austin Distel. Welcome to my YouTube channel. Can you go ahead and tell everyone at the Posse who you are and what your role is?
Austin:
Hey, what’s going on Posse? Austin Distel here from Austin, Texas, and I am the head of marketing here at Jasper, an AI copywriting sidekick for you to get your jump done a little bit faster today.
Alex:
First of all, I have to say congratulations because just, I think it was like literally 2 days before recording this interview, Jasper got $125 million in funding with a $1.5 billion valuation. That is massive. Congratulations! I’m sure you guys have been insanely busy over there.
Austin:
Yeah, it’s been pretty awesome. A ton of awesome announcements as well. And we’re so grateful for being able to impact that many people to be valued at a billion and a half. That’s really cool. In my wildest dreams, wouldn’t have ever expected that. Yet, also we are here supporting and helping over 80,000 people now write better content every day. And so our mission is to build a dang good product that supports and is your epic sidekick.
Alex:
I love that. It goes without saying that Jasper AI is the largest AI content platform right now on the internet and with a valuation of $1.5 billion. It is so clear the value in what it is that you are creating. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about the future of copywriting, the future of content-generation.
How did Jasper come to be? What is sort of the origin story of creating this software as a service tool?
Austin:
Yeah, well I think I’ll tell, I’ll tell some of the more interesting details that most interviews don’t get. So I was actually a copywriter myself back in 2016, writing Facebook ads and emails and website copy for clients around Georgia and where I grew up. And I ended up buying this online course with all my spring break money. I was in college and ended up, paying this stranger a thousand bucks to learn how to scale my freelance business. And he taught me the freelancers trap. And the freelancer’s trap is this cycle I think that you might relate to where you are doing all the work, but first, you gotta find the work.
So you go out and sell, you go and get clients, that’s hard. Then you finally are so excited, you got this work done, you focus on serving them and doing a really good job. And then after the work is done, they like to move on. You don’t have a retainer and now you don’t have any pipeline. So you’re back to chasing and you are all like, your money might have gone up. Then it’s like right back down. I found myself in the freelancer’s trap. And so I bought this course to figure out one, how do I scale my bandwidth with better systems and operations? And then how do I hire teammates to help me with sales and fulfillment? And that’s when I really started diving into the marketing world and ended up moving in with the guy that taught that course. His name is Dave Rogenmoser.
And so long story short, 8 years later now I’m in this chair and we’re in Austin, Texas where Dave is the CEO of Jasper. And so I don’t know if I would be here today if I weren’t a copywriter trying to figure out how to make my operations a little bit easier and how to do better work for my clients.
Alex:
I love that, yeah, I love that. Before we started recording, you were talking about how your whole team at Jasper is really a bunch of marketers and a bunch of copywriters, and that you used that skill set to then go and create an incredible product. I absolutely love that. And I know the question on everybody’s mind listening right now. And we’re just gonna come out and like, and ask you because I get this asked, I get asked this all the freaking time, new copywriters, they join The Posse and inevitably they slide into my DM’s, they comment on my videos and they go, Alex, but what about AI? Is AI going to replace copywriters? Am I going to be out of work? And as I said in my intro, I wanted to go straight to the source and talk to the marketing director at the largest AI content generation tool on the planet and ask you, Austin, will AI replace copywriters?
Austin:
This might burst your bubble, but no, no. It’s a tool, not a takeover. It is here to support you. That’s why we always say it’s your AI sidekick. The truth is the human brain needs to be the direction for writing great copy. Now, if you view copy as only the ability to print words, then copywriting probably wasn’t your career. It’s probably going to overcome like that first draft because I think any brainless buffoon can write words really quickly. What great copywriters need and do, why they exist is to find the story, find the pain points, bridge it to a product, the features, the benefits, and all of that, and present it at the right timing, at the right pace with the right tone.
So there are a lot of nuances here that come with great copywriting and here’s the good part… Where does Jasper help? Well, it helps you get your first draft done faster. It helps you brainstorm those different hooks. It helps you come up with ideas when you just frankly haven’t had your coffee yet. And it also helps you scale your bandwidth. It’s that assistant to get outta the freelancer’s trap. And you know, sometimes it’s hard to just duplicate yourself, but what if you had tools like, okay, I think you all have probably used Grammarly before, right?
Grammarly isn’t here to like replace editors, but it is super helpful to make your punctuation and verbiage better. And so, sometimes I’ve also found as a copywriter, or even just being an entrepreneur, it can be lonely sometimes. And if you are just, blazing away against a computer screen and maybe you’re a solo freelance copywriter, you got nobody to brainstorm ideas with. And so you’re basically like throwing a tennis ball at a wall, trying to come up with ideas.
You know, what if you had a brainstorming buddy right there on the other side of your keyboard that you could ask it something and it spits something right back at you? You can ask it questions. And what if that brainstorming buddy has read the entire internet that’s public and knows deeply about like what if it read the forums about the niche that your clients are in and it knows the subreddits on what their true pain points are?
So let’s say you’re trying to sell Yerba Mate. It knows what this is. It doesn’t maybe know the brand, but as you look, if you Google Yerba Mate, there are like a billion articles. And so it’s read those and it can state a lot of research there very quickly for you. And you can go, what are the benefits of Yerba Mate and who are the kind of people that drink Yerba Mate? It’s cool stuff there. And so that’s where like this tool, you get to choose your own adventure. How do you want to use it? And I think it’s a limiting belief to think that it’s gonna be here to replace you because this is your best assistant.
Alex:
I love that. I love that you said it’s a tool, not a takeover. I have been saying that since I created the Copy Posse. And I think that’s the way we need to look at it. Because again, and this is sort of the downside of this word copywriting is that if you think of it really literally it is the writing of words on a page that then get published somewhere online. But when you actually understand what copywriting is and everything that goes into it, it is so much more than just writing words on a page.
But the things that take the longest, the research, the ideation, the outlining, the research, I said that already, but it’s a big one, that takes the most amount of time for sure as a copywriter. I know what I sit down to write a sales page, especially if it’s for a new client or a new product, where I don’t have all of that background information sort of already baked into my brain, it does take a lot of time to go, okay, where am I gonna go to go find this information about the pain points, about the common questions that are asked about this brand?
I could go read a million Amazon reviews and subreddits and sub-subreddits if that’s a thing. And the forums and everything that you spoke about and hey, don’t get me wrong, that’s still I think a great skill to know how to do. However, you can use AI to drastically increase the speed in which you’re able to do that. So that then you can focus on really the craft of taking all that information that is compiled and like you said, sort of the finessing the transitions, the working on the positioning on the strategy, on making sure you’re using the right tone and the right brand voice and that you’re speaking to the audience correctly. And so everything you just said is so genius. And you sort of already answered this question, but my next question is, does the largest, AI content generation platform on the internet and in the world hire copywriters? Do you have copywriters working at Jasper?
Austin:
Heck yeah, we do. I was actually literally just on a call 45-minutes ago with Cole, who I also met at Traffic & Conversion Summit, who’s an amazing copywriter legend, and yeah like he’s gonna be working with us and we have two freelance copywriters on email marketing. I still write copy and like I use it for, brainstorming ideas and giving me that, like let’s say I wanna write an email subject line, I like to give it my best shot. ‘Cause I sometimes like have a little edge on me and I’m like, I’m gonna beat this thing today, but then I have Jasper write the B version and I do a, a 2020 split until there’s a winner and then the rest, the 60% goes out to the rest.
So it’s like, that’s how I’m using it and I know others are as well. So something I’ll do as well is like, I know I have a lot to do in a day and I, I’m sure everybody else here can relate with that too. There’s work to be done, I wanna conquer some stuff, I got things to do. And so if I have to write a 10-email sequence, I can’t be spending a day on each email. So because that’s 12 days of my life. So I gotta then like I know what I want to say, I know the themes, I know the architecture, but then I’ll have Jasper help me write those out. And here’s the good thing. So like when we first started, we were teaching it based off of, we’ve had other companies, we do have other companies that exist today. We are not gonna get into them today, but they’re doing very well.
And we do it from a direct response, paid ads to a landing page with an email follow-up. Like that’s what we do. And we taught Jasper all of our highest converting examples. And then we also taught it things like how to write like the Boron Letters. We taught it the formulas from the copywriter’s handbook. So if you know the four U’s of a subject line, Jasper’s taught that, how do you make it urgent and useful, etc? When it comes to the right response, we use things like Hooked. And how do we get them to click? And then Positioning, brainstorming, and unique ideas on how to position your product. And so this is what’s baked into Jasper. We’re the only AI that knows direct response copywriting and it’s because we ourselves are that. And so we understand the importance of it and it’s honestly a tool we created to assist ourselves.
Alex:
Oh, it’s so good. It’s so good and again, if you’re a copywriter listening to this, that should sound really freaking exciting because and again, I’ve had the ability to actually login to Jasper and play around with it and it’s freaking amazing and it’s not perfect, right? So you’re not going, oh my God, all of a sudden it’s pumping out this top to bottom sales page that is done and I’m just gonna go ahead and publish it. It’s not perfect, but holy cow, the tools and the commands, and the templates that you can use as a base to streamline your workflow is incredible.
And as copywriters who are also incredible marketers and who understand what makes great copy, you’re gonna be able to look at that output with a marketing lens and go, okay, is this what I wanna say? How do I tweak this a little bit? How do I add this transition to make this the final product? Which is I’m sure what all of you and your team of copywriters do at Jasper is you kind of get the foundation and then the copywriters come in and they kind of put their magic gloss on everything.
Austin:
Yeah, no doubt. And again, like you, the human brain is so creative, it also takes a human brain to spot what’s magic and what’s not. And sometimes like Jasper gives you a seed of an idea and then you sprout it. Sometimes it comes up with brand-new ideas. It reminds me of like this one marketing agency in southern California. They were onboarding their new client, it’s a window tinting business. And around the round table of that creative department, they’re like, how do we, what’s the new campaign for this, this chain of window tinting businesses?
And they were basically like TikTok’s new, like we’re gonna go for like the C, D list, Z list celebrities on TikTok and say, hey, fanboy, block them out with tint and you’re gonna look cooler in your sports car with tinted glass. And that was like basically what they were like, like Hollywood has that kind of vanity style to it, so you wanna look cool. That’s what they’re going for. You want privacy, that’s what you’re going for. So anyway, that was the positioning that the creatives originally took and then they login to Jasper, they said, generate some alternative angles, and it said nothing like that. It goes, “Hey, moms protect your kids from the hot California sun rays tint your suburbans windows in the backseat to stop UV light from burning their skin.”
Now which campaign will do better? The TikTokers who wanna look cool or the moms that wanna protect their kids and which ones have more money and are willing to spend on those problems? The exact same product positioned different ways and using creativity, to figure out the markets and things like that and really what are the problems that are being solved and the hierarchy of these problems. And so, I don’t know, like I love stories like that because it shows you like in a round table, it’s your brainstorming buddy. And sometimes we like need fresh ideas, especially when we’re so close to the subject. I need this being on the brand side now. I had the agency, I’ve now left that and so I’m like selling the same thing every day. I need fresh ideas. I need like new creative for ads and a fresh perspective. That kind of brainstorming is so helpful.
Alex:
Absolutely. That is so insanely helpful. That’s the number one thing that I miss about leaving my role as creative director at Mindvalley, being surrounded by 50+ entrepreneurial minds every single day to starting my freelancing business. It was like, oh my gosh, I am alone in my office or my dining room table, I was working from at the time, and who do I bounce ideas off of?
And I imagine the more you use it, the faster you get and the more you’re able to really save that time because you just know exactly what inputs you wanna share and what you need it for and you’re off to the races.
Austin:
Yeah, no doubt. And you know, I found that AI is like a puppy and you know, when you go and you buy a puppy, you want it to learn these tricks. Maybe go get a beer outta the fridge or sit and stuff. And when you take the puppy to training, which we’ve done, we’ve trained it on some stuff, now it knows some stuff. But also it’s about training the owner, you the copywriter. And so I found that like when you enter our ecosystem, the Jasper ecosystem, you’re gonna find so much support because like it can sound daunting before you see it.
And so like we have a whole bootcamp, it’s like a Hollywood performance style, like really solidly put together training course on how to use AI in your workflows. So it’s specific too, like how to use AI for ads, how to use AI for writing SEO articles and emails even so like, now you have a puppy, it’s learned some training. We’re gonna continue making it better too, by the way. And then also you need training to figure out how to use it and how to give commands, little commands to the AI, to use its tricks.
If you didn’t know it, understood how to do Jerry Seinfeld’s voice, like that’s a trick it can do if you just ask it to do it. And so that’s like when you think about our platform, like, yes, we’re an AI company, we’re a training company, we also have a huge community, we got like 70,000 marketers and a Facebook group, and we’re actually coming soon up to make a conference. And so there’s like a lot of awesome, different edges to this AI content platform.
Alex:
Yeah, and what’s really exciting, and we won’t get into it right now, but I know you have Jasper Art, which actually allows you to create AI-generated images, which is so cool. And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the visuals that complement my copy and have, I mean, I work with designers who luckily are, sometimes just as crazy as me when it comes to coming up with ideas. It’s like, Hey, I want a tiger with a lightning bolt because that’s the Copy Posse branding to be able to use AI. Is there a tiger with a lightning bolt?
Austin:
Here’s some AI art. That’s actually a rabbit with a tennis racket. That is Keanu Reeves holding a puppy in Mosaic style. That’s a cowboy, electric cowboy and then just.
Alex:
Dog astronaut, yeah, I mean, and that’s so cool to be able to say, okay, I want this image and I can’t find anything like it in all of these stock photos. Or you spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours going through stock photo sites to try to find the image that most closely represents what you want. AI is now going in the direction where it can, it can with the right commands and of course you need to know how to use it, create incredible AI-generated images.
And so I am so excited, to see where AI takes the marketing industry and going back to what you said about it, AI being a puppy and you needing to be trained as well, I really think that the future of marketing combines technology with humanity and with, the beautiful brain that you all have and that to become a better copywriter, it’s not only knowing how to use the tools, but to continue to understand marketing and what makes people tick and what makes people click, so that you can then use these tools to the greatest, potential of what they have to offer.
And that’s so exciting. And I know we chatted about, of course, inviting all of you watching to check out AI or Jasper.ai and you can go to jasper.ai/posse to get a free trial. So if you wanna talk a little bit about that Austin, about the free trial and what everyone can play around with?
Austin:
Yeah, totally. So I would say for the next week here, just give it a shot. Install the Chrome extension, see where you might use it in your workflow. Whether you’re like, what’s that Facebook post I need to do in my group to stir up some engagement today and like Jasper, brainstorm some ideas. Or if you’re doing client work and you’re like trying to get stuff done faster, you’re on a deadline. We wanna support you there.
So we’ve given everybody here 10,000 free credits. You can go and activate that at Jasper.ai/posse.
Alex:
Awesome, thank you so much. I am really excited to hear all of your experiences trying it out. Again, you can go to jasper.ai/posse or you can click the link here, try it out! See if it makes your job faster, see what you can create. Remember, AI is a tool, not a takeover, and I cannot wait to hear all of your experiences.
