Doom Spiral: Is AI Creating a Copywriting Feedback Loop?

​Em dashes. Delve. It’s not just x, it’s y. The tells of AI-generated copy, or humans who have subconsciously adopted its quirks?

For those who were delving long before the concept of LLMs entered the public consciousness, their impact on language can be frustrating. What used to be handy tools to spice up sentences here and there have been swallowed up by chatbots and regurgitated all over the internet. 

Interestingly, their overexposure has caused them to seep into people’s own speech patterns and bleed out even more profusely. It’s this strange feedback loop that is threatening to blur the lines between human and AI-generated language, and flatten the richness of our lexicon.

Or – is this just the typical anxiety that always surrounds new tech? LBB’s Zara Naseer invited copy and AI experts to share their thoughts.

New Tech, Same Old Threat?

​Grey London’s head of voice and creative director, Bee Pahnke, sagely reminds us, “When photography first became widely available, art purists panicked that painting would simply die out. But it didn’t. We learned to appreciate the two as distinct art forms, each with their own limitations, each unlocking different potential. There are so many examples like this throughout history: TV was supposed to ruin books, and famously, video was supposed to kill the radio star.”

​Vikki Ross, the brand, tone of voice, and copy consultant who curates the popular Pinterest board, ‘Lines I don't reckon AI could write’, is similarly calm about a familiar pattern. “Humans have always been influenced by trends in language, which is how what we say and how we say it has evolved. And it will continue to evolve, with or without AI.”

The fight against homogeneity certainly isn’t new, adds Charles Baylis, an executive creative director at A Time & Placewho runs Advertising Council Australia’s AdSchool Copywriting course with Anthologie ECD, Josh Edge. “Marketing communications are rife with recycled buzzwords, predictable cadences and the same tired metaphors. The job has always been to cut through that noise, stand apart from the crowd, zig when others zag… you get the idea.”

The difference this time, many of them admit, is the speed of dissemination and adoption. AI, Charles continues, is latching onto our conventions and feeding them back at scale. “In our AdSchool class, we ran an exercise to see if students could pick between AI and human copy. Many students mistook the AI-generated mailer for the human-written one, not because the AI was brilliant, but because it perfectly mimicked what advertising has trained people to expect.”

“AI Doesn’t Flatten Language on Its Own”

​TBWA\Australia’s chief AI and innovation officer, Lucio Ribeiro, is definitive. “We don’t need to speculate here. Matt Keon, CCO at TBWA Sydney, recently co-authored a paper called 'Galton’s Law of Mediocrity' that shows large language models naturally regress toward the mean. The more data you feed them, the more their outputs cluster around safe, predictable phrasing. So yes, if left unattended, homogenisation happens.”

Keyword: “unattended”. Lucio elaborates, “AI doesn’t flatten language on its own. People do, when they treat these systems like an autopilot and abdicate responsibility. The models give everyone the same starting point, but it’s on you to decide the voice. It’s like handing every cook the same knife; you can still taste the difference between the chef and the amateur.”

Taste, judgement, and agency, Lucio specifies, will continue to be what protect us from the great flattening. “Taste is knowing when something has life in it. Judgement is knowing when to move, review, or when to hold. Agency is deciding to push past the first answer instead of settling for the statistically probable one. If we lose those three, homogenisation isn’t a tech problem. It’s a human one.”

​Abby Worth, head of copy at Bloom & Wild, agrees with the analysis, observing how language was already becoming more homogenised long before gen AI was readily available in places where the copywriter’s touch was seen as ‘less important’ – like SEO blog articles or Google search ads. “It’s a result of good copywriting being valued less. Gen AI has just sped up the process by which marketers (or non-copywriters) are able to produce good-enough copy without having to brief in creative teams. In the short term, this is seen as an efficiency win. Less time, less money. But long term, brands have to ask themselves whether they’re comfortable sounding like generic, lifeless AI-speak. Or indeed, just like any of their competitors. AI can only copy, it can never create.”

​Cocogun co-founder, Ant Melder, however, is optimistic that humans will reject the spread of detached, lazy copy. “Language that feels overly AI-esque will end up with a stigma and, as with the em dash, people will ultimately look for a way to avoid using it.” His own agency found a way with the creation of the ‘am dash’ earlier this year: a punctuation mark that, in being unusable by AI, serves as a stamp of human creation.

This refusal to settle for what everyone else is doing has always been what set smart brands apart, notes Charles. “The same filters that weed out tired ideas also protect against AI-adjacent tropes. Avoid the obvious. Don’t rewrite what’s already been written.”

Dampening Brand Identity

“I worry about brands losing their voice,” Vikki confesses. “I recently read that Virgin Voyages now uses AI to emulate their voice in customer comms, but looking at the examples they shared, it absolutely doesn’t. And that’s not on AI. That’s on the people behind the prompts, and the people who approve the copy AI generates. The Virgin voice – across all its brands – is famously flamboyant, flirty and fun. The AI-generated copy Virgin Voyages shared is pretty straight. It could be any brand talking.”

For the many brands that have been working to sound like people, even friends, to their target market over the past few years, resorting to copy that feels like a machine seems wasteful of their efforts.

“There’s something undefinably noticeable about AI writing,” Bee comments. “I can only describe it as… sticky. Like a table at a greasy spoon that still has a film of oil or food on it. I know I’m not alone in that. Many of us can feel it, even if we can’t quite explain what ‘it’ is. Maybe that doesn’t matter for some really functional copy. But in the times when a person wants human connection, it does. I think brands will, and should, start making a choice about when to use AI. Because what makes us human has always come down to more than just correct grammar and em dashes. It’s, well, just as indefinable as what makes AI sticky.”

As has always been the case, brands must know their voice inside out or risk losing it, says Vikki. “If they don’t or won’t hire a copywriter to protect it, they need to appoint an ambassador within their business – someone who’s responsible for reviewing and approving copy; someone who knows when their voice is bang on brand, and who notices when it isn’t.”

A Sea of Sameness to Rise From

Inevitably, there will be plenty of brands who will happily use AI to cut corners, and copywriters who won’t care if they sound like they did. But that blurry backdrop might push those willing to do the extra work into the spotlight.

“If everything starts to sound the same, the writers who sound like themselves will stand out even more,” Lucio explains. “Models can imitate patterns, but they can’t imitate the lived experience, empathy and consequence behind a human decision.”

Ant is enthusiastic. “Human consciousness is magic. And the connection between language and consciousness is special. The mysterious brew of experience, memory, imagination and emotion. J. G. Ballard once wrote, ‘Memory is the greatest gallery in the world and I can play an endless archive of images.’ Play that archive in your mind, tap into what it is to be human, read more, think more, live more and imbue your writing with ungeneratable soul.”

Ultimately, that’s what’s going to allow copywriters to stay in the profession they love. “Yes, Al will take copywriting jobs away – it already has,” Vikki states matter of factly, “but I keep seeing people post on LinkedIn that they replaced their copywriters with AI and have hired them back because they weren’t getting the results they wanted.”

Safe Usage

The jury’s out on whether there is a way for copywriters and AI to work together to craft language that actually resonates. Abby, Lucio, and Charles all comment on how AI can be a great tool for removing the barrier of the blank page, accelerating the messy exploratory stage, and unearthing insights from large sets of data, ultimately freeing up time and energy for craft and refinement.

Vikki, on the other hand, doesn’t think AI should be brought into the copywriting process at all, and certainly not to “outsource our thinking”. She explains, “Part of the process is messing around and playing with words and writing them this way and that. That’s what gets us to the good stuff. Yes, AI can get us there quicker but that only gets us to good enough – quicker isn’t always better.”

“The real danger is creative complacency,” adds Charles. “Tools that promise shortcuts can make it easy to stop interrogating the work, to stop being curious about the choices being made. Copywriters will need to become sharper tastemakers, more selective, more aware of why something feels fresh or flat.” 

Copywriters must be more on guard than ever to notice the sameness and fight against it – and that requires effort. Ant picks up the point. “Thinking is hard. It makes your brain ache. Your brain would rather be in the pub chatting about football, or watching some mindless Netflix fodder than working through the cerebral equivalent of a hardcore session with your personal trainer, while AI’s capacity to keep going is infinite. Simply prompt it with a ‘Please can we try some more informal options?’, or ‘A little more informal please’, or ‘More informal please’, or – most often! – ‘More’, and off it scurries to gather more stuff for you.

“The danger I see here is human laziness. It’s a slippery slope from copywriters outsourcing the grunt work to outsourcing the important stuff. Which, if we let it happen, will hoist us by our own petard, put us out of a job, and end in the grim, dystopian slopification of language.”

For Abby, the crux is to ensure creatives are making the decisions about their usage of AI themselves. “The one thing I always say to CMOs is: put the tools in the hands of your creatives. They are best placed to know how AI could help. Copywriters often challenge me with comments like, ‘But I love writing, I don’t want AI to take that from me’. And I’m like, ‘Cool! Then don’t!’. You’re in control. Use AI on the boring stuff, not on the work that brings you joy. My mission is to help more copywriters feel empowered through AI, not controlled by it.”

Protecting Your Unique, Human Voice

So, how can copywriters protect their own voices from what Ant coins the “dystopian slopification of language”?

“Three simple words: read more books,” Ant emphasises. “For copywriters specifically, close reading of books is endlessly inspiring for mapping patterns of language, experiencing masters at work, and simply experiencing the transcendent planes of emotion great writing can lift us to. Be tugged beneath powerful waves of psychological inquest by Philip Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’; wallow in the sublime internal world of Virgina Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’; get mind-blown at the magical fusion of ideas and writing in Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’; look on open-mouthed and in awe as Miranda July breaks all the rules of storytelling to tell the most captivating story of the last 10 years in ‘All Fours’. All great writers are readers. So put down your phone and read.”

From Abby’s perspective, “Copywriting isn’t about pretty words. It’s about great ideas. And these can come from anywhere that anyone is having a cultural conversation – TV, music, books, Reddit comments (a great source of inspiration), eavesdropping in the pub. Look out for tensions. Nuance and contradictions. Things that should be a certain way, but aren’t. The things we find funny or moving are often rooted in tensions, and this is where the gold is.” Vikki agrees – the world is full of inspiration for naturally curious copywriters. They just need to pay attention.

Charles puts it humbly: “Just remember, AI doesn’t know what it feels like to take the bins out. It hasn’t lived those tiny yet instantly relatable human moments. Those mundane, specific truths are what make communication feel personal. They’re how big, generic benefits get translated into something felt, not just understood. So as long as writers stay tuned to those details there’s always a path to a unique voice. One that feels lived in rather than learned.”

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