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Stand out from the crowd! As AI becomes increasingly prevalent among marketers and copywriters, it’s essential to capture attention in a sea of sameness. The key? Combining the prowess of AI with something just as vital – emotional intelligence (EI). Learn from expert copywriter Nick Usborne as he shares his valuable strategy for future-proofing your copy.
Copywriting with AI and EI (Emotional Intelligence) Summary
Key Takeaways
- Emotional Intelligence (EI) is crucial for differentiating human writers from AI, emphasizing the power of storytelling and human emotions.
- Leveraging AI, specifically ChatGPT, can enhance creativity and productivity, but human input is necessary for brand voice and uniqueness.
- Conversational interaction with AI, experimenting with prompts, and using AI for tasks like sentiment analysis enrich copywriting.
- The combination of AI’s efficiency and EI’s depth creates unique, powerful content that resonates with audiences.
- Embracing AI in copywriting requires learning to integrate it with EI, ensuring a competitive edge in the industry.
Copywriting with AI and EI (Emotional Intelligence) Episode Transcript
Rich: Since beginning his copywriting career in 1979, my next guest has won 15 results- based awards and has worked with dozens of major companies and organizations, including Citibank, Apple, Chrysler, JP Getty Trust, New York Times, Reuters, WebEx, the U.S. Navy, and many others.
In addition to his client work, he has created digital writing courses that have been taken by thousands of students in nearly a hundred countries. He’s the founder of Conversational Copywriting Movement, an advocate for writing with high emotional intelligence, or, EI.
Today we’ll be looking at EI in the age of AI, and what you can do to create the best content possible that will resonate with your audience, with copywriting expert Nick Usborne. Nick, welcome back to the podcast.
Nick: Thank you very much. That was a very nice and generous introduction. You made me sound good.
Rich: Thank you. And obviously I get bio information from my clients, I try not to change too much. But I have a copywriting question for you, because your original bio said that your courses have been taken by “thousands of students in over 97 countries”. I changed it to “thousands of students in almost 100 countries “because, well, it’s my show, I get to do these things. But is there a reason why you went with ‘over 97’ instead of ‘nearly 100’? As a copywriting expert, I bow to your expertise, and I’m just wondering if one sounded better or sounded more important to you.
Nick: I would actually go back and I would change it to 97. So 97 is specific. If I say 100 or over 100, it’s vague. It’s 1like 0, a hundred, yeah, okay. Somebody is rounding down or whatever. But if I said in 97, that sounds pretty specific. Like okay, he actually, these are on 97. So I probably shouldn’t have said ‘over 97’, but it’s like pricing. It’s not a hundred dollars. It’s $97. All this kind of stuff, around numbers, you never see anything for sale for $10, so it’s $9.99. And if I’m making a claim, I want to be as specific as I can, rather than sound like I’m rounding it up.
Rich: All right, fair enough, and good advice. Getting back to the topic at hand, let’s start with some definitions. How do you define emotional intelligence?
Nick: I defer to Daniel Goldman, who wrote the book Emotional Intelligence way back in 1995. And he talked about very briefly four domains. There’s the self-awareness, being aware of your own emotional state. Which is, it’s easy for us to think, oh, I’m always aware of my emotional state, but actually not so much. Sometimes we’re very blind to our own emotional state.
Self-management is how well we manage our emotions. So if your teenager being rude to you or someone at work is being a pain and you feel angry. Can you control that? Can you manage that? So self-management.
Social awareness is where we get into how good are you at actually reading the emotions of the people around you, the person you’re talking to, your spouse, your teenager, your colleague, your co-founder or a group of people, three or four people like that. How well do you read the room? How aware are you? And again, typically we’re pretty bad at that. And a lot of founders are really bad at that because they just talk over, just talk and talk and can be blissfully unaware of distress or upset or whatever’s happening in the room.
And then the fourth domain is basically relationship management, which is where you combine all these together. But within the social awareness, I guess the word that is simplest for us to hang on is empathy. How empathetic are you? How well are you aware of your own emotions? How do you manage them? How do you perceive other people’s emotions? And then how do you put that together? How do you become a more empathetic, emotionally aware person? And that is super powerful.
The thing that Daniel Coleman said was that for generations, we’ve measured people by their IQ, their kind of cognitive intelligence. So we typically, a lot of us get tested as kids, for better or worse. There’s nothing worse than being an eight-year-old and said, “You know what, your IQ is low. Good luck with the rest of your life.” That’s unfortunate. But his argument was when you actually look at the most successful people at work or in their relationships at home or with friends, it’s not about their IQ. It’s actually about the emotional intelligence is a much better way of figuring out if someone’s going to be really successful in life, in business, and personally. So that’s what drove it.
The sudden realization that it’s not about your IQ, it’s about your EQ. And the best thing about your EQ is you really can improve it. Your cognitive intelligence, you get tested when you’re eight or nine or ten, and that’s pretty constant for the rest of your life. But your emotional intelligence is something you really can build on and improve and get better and better. So that’s good because that allows us then to be more successful in many areas of life.
Rich: So you’re a copywriter, obviously, and you think about a lot of these topics. And obviously we’re now in the age of AI. And so as you see all this content being generated, I wouldn’t necessarily use the word ‘created’, but generated by artificial intelligence, where do you think the role of AI fits into all of this?
Nick: We might circle back. I’ll slightly challenge you on whether I think AI is creating stuff. But we can come back to that. So I’m all in on AI. And I say to fellow copywriters lean in, you have no choice. It’s like if you ignoring AI is like candle makers ignoring the arrival of electric light bulbs. It’s like good luck with that. So I lean in as far and fast as I can into AI.
I want to use it as a tool, as a productivity tool, as a writing companion. But when a million of us do that, we fall into what I describe as the sameness trap. If we’re all using GPT 4 and we’re all going from the top 50 prompts published, like on our Twitter feed this morning. So we’re using the same prompts with the same tool. And so now all of a sudden we have copy and content coming out which has this sameness. It’s the sameness trap, because obviously it’s the same, it’s coming from the same place.
First of all, you should as a writer, as a copywriter, content writer, you shouldn’t just be taking output from AI and publishing it. You should be editing it. You should be reprompting, you should be improving on it. But the other thing, if you ask ChatGPT what its greatest weaknesses are when it comes to writing, it’ll say emotional intelligence. AI right now does not get the nuance of emotion. We get, “Hey, these tools get it. They’ve read the script to Love Story. They’ve read Romeo and Juliet. They know what love is.” They can talk about it, but they can’t feel it. They can’t feel it. So what I’m saying to copywriters now, to differentiate yourself from AI and to differentiate yourself from all the companies and writers that are just going in 100% on AI, you need to weave in more emotional intelligence. You need to tell more stories. You need to make it just feel more human. And when you layer this in, now you have something unique and very powerful. Because AI is extraordinary. It’s phenomenal. It is mind blowing. And I’m incredibly impressed by what it does and what it achieves.
But I’ll share a story. So here’s a family story. I was taking the kids to a theme park outside of Toronto. And we parked the car and then suddenly something exploded. Like suddenly I couldn’t see, something had hit me in the face and hit me in the eye. I was completely, I had no idea what was going on. I was in a panic and my kids were laughing and my wife, too. They’re just laughing. And I was in a state of near panic. And what had happened is that a seagull had pooped. And it hadn’t pooped on my head, it had pooped in the gap between my glasses and my eyebrow and exploded on my eyeball. So I just had this splash of this seagull poop. Which was freaking me out because I had no idea. All right. So there’s a story, right? There’s a family story. And my kids, we all remember it. If we talk about it, it’s one of the stories that, “Do remember the time that dad got the seagull poop in his eye?” AI can’t do that.
So AI can read published stories. It can understand, you can figure out what hate is, what love is, what sadness is, what loss is, what bereavement is. You can read about that. But it’s never had that experience with a seagull pooping on its eyeball. And it never will because it’s not written down anywhere. It’s just a shared experience between me and my family. So this is what I call kind of small “s” stories. It’s not Ulysses, it’s not War and Peace. It’s a small “s” story that, that is very, there’s lots of emotion in there. There’s lots of memory. There’s lots of family. I can weave that into some copywriting. I can tell those kinds of small “s” stories.
And now I’m sitting, I’m using AI to do maybe I don’t know, 60%, 70% of the heavy lifting on my writing task, but I’m going to weave in these emotional elements to differentiate it. And also, any copywriter will tell you that emotion is what drives the sale. But we don’t buy stuff because of that, for rational reasons, we buy stuff because we want it. We eat ice cream not because the ingredients panel says ice cream is really good for you, because it doesn’t. We buy ice cream because we want it, it makes us feel good.
So emotion is at the heart of all purchase decisions. And like I say, this is the big weakness with AI right now. It doesn’t have that personal emotional experience it can weave into copy. So that’s why I’m all in on emotional intelligence. One is just the raw emotion of it. And the other thing is just awareness. Emotional intelligence is about emotional awareness. Be aware of the emotions of your audience. Be aware of the emotions that you can create with your product or service that will be well received by that audience. So basically it’s just all in on emotion.
Rich: Your story about the seagull reminds me of a blog post that we either just posted or are about to post about, of all things, Google ads and A/B split testing. And the woman on my team who wrote it starts off by talking about the fact that she and her boyfriend have yet to get engaged because she can’t decide on a ring, and then uses the ring as a metaphor throughout the entire article.
And at my prompting, actually all of the examples she used for Google ads were all about buying rings and different things like that. So that’s an example, I think, that’s similar to your bird poop in the eyeball story, in the fact that you’re bringing in something personal. But at flyte, my company, we can be a little bit more personal. I am wondering about the corporations that don’t necessarily have individual voices and they just have this kind of “we’re so good because we do this”, or “you’re feeling this so you can use our products”. And I just wonder, where can we pull in personal stories or EI if our content creation requirements are more for that kind of corporate vibe? Or is that just an area where AI is going to take our jobs?
Nick: I think there’s a bit of each. I think there’s an assumption that business to business is less emotional or less story-based than B2C. I’m not convinced. I’ve done lots of B2C, I’ve done lots of B2B, and my view is always I’m doing P2P, person to person. Whether that person’s at home or at work, they’re still a person. They’re the same person, actually. They have some different priorities and constraints at work, but they’re still a person. And very often even a business purchase there’s emotional elements. “Hey, I really liked the guy. I like that sales team. I really liked Jack. Let’s buy this one because I like…”. It’s an emotional, that’s why we’re buying from this vendor rather than another that are offering a similar service or product.
That said, to your point, is there a ton of content out there where AI created content will do just fine? I think there is. It spells better than I do. It writes more grammatically than I do. It doesn’t go off on tangents the way I sometimes do. It doesn’t get distracted. And you said earlier I challenge a little bit on creation. Like people say, oh, it’s plagiarizing. It’s just taking stuff from here and here. It’s like auto complete. And that’s all true. But actually the same is true of us, right? If I’m going to write a piece of content about something, I’m going to research, I’m going to get something from what he wrote and what she wrote and what I found over here, and I’m going to bring them together. In fact, I’m just doing the same thing that GPT4 does.
Can I be creative while I do that? Yes, I can. And I’ve got into discussions like just brainstorming with GPT4 where I said, “Look, here’s something else. Find me something non-obvious in between these two. Give me a list of five non-obvious kind of overlaps between these things that I probably haven’t thought of.” And it does. And out of five, there’ll be maybe three where I think, man, that’s really interesting. And in fact, that is a moment of creativity where you get one thing, you get another thing, and you create something for a third thing that is unexpected.
Like I’m constantly asking GPT for non-obvious rather than just give me six tweets or six subject line options. So just give me six non-obvious subject lines, and I get much more interesting output. So, yeah.
Rich: I think it’s an interesting approach using non-obvious. And some of the things that I’ve done in the past is ask it, “what are some unusual questions to ask a copywriting expert on my podcast that…”, and it’ll come up with deeper or stranger questions that I may not have come up with as well. So that’s definitely one approach. I still don’t know if I choose to use the word generative or generate versus create, but I will definitely take that under advisement. Because I agree with you. As somebody who loves to write, we stand on the shoulder of the giants who came before us.
Nick: We do. And say on the art side, people say, “Oh my goodness, it’s just taking other people’s art.” Well, that’s what we do, right? We take Campbell’s soup cans and we, like Andy Warhol, we’re just taking a bit of this and we take.
Who is it? There’s a book out there about something like artists stealing, like the basically artists, we are influenced by other influences. And that process is very much how AI works, is like throwing stuff in here and then bringing something different out of it.
Rich: So I’ve talked to a couple of copywriters and content creators who have lost their job because their boss said, “I don’t need you anymore, I’ve got ChatGPT”, which I think is incredibly short sighted and probably doomed for failure, at least in the short run. But how do we convince our bosses or our clients that we can create more valuable content than AI, at least AI by itself?
Nick: I would go back to that sameness trap I talked about. So I might challenge my boss to say, “Hey, boss, how much money has this company spent on defining its brand over the last decade?” And what is a hundred thousand, a million dollars, what have you. It depends on the size of the company. What have you spent? Because I said, if you fire me and Jack and Janice, and it’s all AI, your content, your voice, the brand voice is going to sound the same as every other company making the same decision today. You’re all going to sound the same because it’s all coming from ChatGPT and you’re all using the same top 50 prompts.
So that would be my argument. And I agree with you, companies are doing that. I’ve heard these stories. I think it’s a mistake. That said, if I were the cold-hearted, objective boss of a company, and I had 10 copywriters. I’d probably think, you know what? We could probably shave that down. Not 10, but 6 or 5. And get them to use these tools to the max, and then get them to add that emotional layer, like add AI plus EI, emotional intelligence. And now we’ve got ways to preserve our brand voice. We’re going to separate ourselves from competitive voices out there, competitive brands out there.
So I get it. I get it like, oh my goodness, we can let go staff. But I’ve also heard of companies where, they had three in house writers, and they got rid of all of them. That, I think, is a mistake.
Rich: So if we find ourselves, I mean, you and I are both content creators, and I think a lot of people in our industry would consider themselves in some way content creators. Maybe it’s audio, maybe it’s written, maybe it’s video, but we’re creating content. And obviously, ChatGPT and similar tools can do all of these things. How do you recommend, if we want to be those not on the chopping block, it sounds like the best solution is to use AI in some way. What are some of the steps that a content creator or copywriter today should be starting to use AI so that their job is safer, perhaps, than the guy next to them, or the woman next to them?
Nick: I was talking at a conference about this last week. And just lean into the max, so that you actually know more about AI and its capabilities than your boss does, the person who’s thinking of firing you. Know more about AI than that person. And then take that extra step of layering in the emotion intelligence thing. Because that is the big differentiator, that is the thing that I cannot do. This it simply can’t do it now is that nuance.
So again I’m going to say to writers, look, bring in those small “s” stories. Be more sensory experiential. So senses. If I’m walking on the beach, that is a sensory overload. I’ve got the sound of the gulls, I’ve got the sound of the wind on the sea, I’ve watching the waves break. I can feel the sand between my toes. I can taste the salt in the air. It’s like every sense is engaged as I walk along the beach. My feet are getting wet because I’m dipping into the water.
So when you bring senses and experiences into your writing, you are adding in a way to AI that it can do in a rote way but it cannot do it in the real way because it’s never felt that. It’s never fallen in love. It’s never eaten ice cream. It’s never suffered loss. It doesn’t know how it feels if your pet dies. ChatGPT can read about it, but it doesn’t know it. I think bringing more emotion into your copy is a great defense. So you can say to the boss, look, I get it. I know I’m leaning into this. I probably know more than you do. And I’ll tell you one thing that is going to save this company, and that is how to not only max out on AI, but to make it better and to defend our brand at the same time.
I think that argument of the brand defense is a powerful one. It’s like seriously, after all you’ve done to establish a brand positioning for this company, you want to sound like everyone else? Because you will. Because if everyone’s using the same tool, you’re all going to sound the same. And that whole investment over the years, all the hard work and people and everything will be gone. You’re going to sound like your competitors. Same phrase, all your final paragraphs in your blog posts will go, “In conclusion,”. That’s one of the irritating things ChatGPT still does is, “In conclusion, comma” almost every time.
Rich: Or regurgitate what the question was in the first place before it goes ahead and answers it.
I’m thinking about the content creators and the copywriters who maybe have dabbled in ChatGPT and similar products. I actually currently prefer Claude over ChatGPT, but I’ve only started to use the newest iteration, the turbo charged one. So we’ll see if that doesn’t change too.
You mentioned using the prompt, ‘non-obvious’, which I think is a great one. Of course, anytime something goes out in the wild, then all of a sudden everybody will start using it. What are some of the things today, or some of the ways today, that copywriters can really leverage the power of ChatGPT without sacrificing their own emotional intelligence and what they can bring to the project?
Nick: I think, don’t use everyone else’s prompts. This is a chat interface. The future is conversational. So that is from Mustafa Suleiman. He’s one of the kind of godfathers of AI. And he said the future is conversational. And something like ChatGPT is a conversational interface. So get into conversation. Go back and forth. Don’t be scared to. Don’t think, “Oh, it’s just a piece of software.” Actually have a conversation.
I have an outline for a short book I want to write, and I spent probably 12 hours with GPT 4, just going back and forth. So don’t underestimate what it can do. Don’t go into using this tool thinking, oh it’s just auto complete. Don’t put it down, because you’ll never understand it if you do. Because it’s remarkable. It’s the most knowledgeable, intelligent person you’ll ever sit down and chat with, ever. Because it knows pretty much everything about just about everything that’ll never happen to you in real life. So don’t underestimate it.
Don’t just go for a first draft. Like I’ve done drafts where I’ve gone in and I said, “write me an email based on…” and I’ll paste in a sales page and say, “write me three emails”, and it does. And I said, “Okay, but make it a little more conversational.” And it does, but sometimes a bit too much. I said, “just bring it back a few notches on the conversational’, and it does. And I’ll keep going back and forth so I don’t just say, “do this” and walk away and judge whether it was a good output or bad output. It’s like an ongoing brief, an ongoing back and forth.
And then I said, “Hey, we’re still leading a bit with a feature here. Can we lead with a benefit?” And it did. It re jigged it. So it understands all this stuff as if I were talking to a writing colleague. I said, “Oh, hey, can you just open with a tiny story?” And it did as an example or as a metaphor or something like that. So tinker. Play around with it. Because if you just go with the first or second output, it’ll be okay, but not great. But if you keep working it.
And there’s also some of the things you can do with it. Stop me if I’m rambling too much. But I wanted to write a product description for a blender. It’s a smoothie blender. So instead of just saying, “Please write a promotion for a blender”, I went to Amazon, I found the blender, I copied 20 different product reviews, I pasted them into ChatGPT and said, “Please create a sentiment analysis for me.” And that’s almost impossible for the human mind to do is to print out 20 sheets of paper and try to figure out the balance of everyone’s sentiment. But ChatGPT does it in three seconds. And I said, “Okay what kind of language was being used for the positive feedback you see here?”
And so it came back to me with words and phrases that were typically used for the positive description of this product. I said, “Okay, based on your sentiment analysis and your identification of that positive language, please now write me a sales page for that product.” And it did. And it was pretty darn good. I did a little bit of tinkering with it. People don’t often think of things like that, of asking, because sentiment analysis we think, hey, that’s something humans do. Actually, no, it’s something that ChatGPT does really well.
Rich: It’s very data driven, and it’s very pattern recognition specific, too. So that’s actually, I think, an excellent use case. As you were talking, I was thinking about all of the surveys that were completed for our recent Agents of Change conference that I’ve been going at, but not really reading as closely as I could. And I realize now I can take that spreadsheet and drop it into ChatGPT or Claude and get some quick analysis.
Nick: So if you save it as a PDF, just you can just upload it now to GPT 4, the PDF. And I do surveys on SurveyMonkey and other tools, and as soon as I have 20, 30, 40, 50 kind of written replies, I just upload them and I put them into ChatGPT and say, “Give me a summary, give me an analysis of this.”
Rich: Yeah, it’s interesting. And I think I may have mentioned this once or twice on the show before. As part of my job, I will sometimes go back and interview some of our favorite clients. What were you going through when we first met? What was the problem you were looking to solve? Why did you choose us? Why did you stay with us? All these sort of things. I’ve got these recordings. They can easily be turned into transcripts, fed back into AI, and that could help me rewrite some of our sales pages in a much more powerful way. Now I just need to find five minutes to do it, but at least that would give me the starting point. And then I can go in and edit it to make sure it’s in our voice.
Nick: I’ve now got in my duty for interface this morning is coming soon where I can create my own bot from ChatGPT, give it access to my Google docs. I can give it access to the thousands of articles and posts I’ve written over the last 20 years. I can give it access to the scripts. It’ll look at all the programs I’ve created. And now all of a sudden I have a partner who has a perfect memory of everything I’ve created over the last 20 years. Man, think of what I can do with that, putting aside privacy concerns, like where is this information going?
Putting that aside, the power of having something like ChatGPT working within your, like letting it loose within your company, all the content you’ve created, everything you’ve done, and just say to it, “Hey, based on this and your awareness of what’s happening out in the world right now, what should we create next? What should we do next?” It’s insane.
Rich: So I think a lot of people are still intimidated by ChatGPT. Maybe they’re afraid that they’re going to be giving into the future, or they’re afraid that ChatGPT is going to outperform them in some way. Or they’re afraid they’re giving up that last vestige of what makes them a unique copywriter. What would you say to those people who still harbor those fears?
Nick: It’s hard. I know what I’ve done. And like I said, I’ve just lent into it as fast and as hard as I possibly can. Because it can be a friend or a foe. And I’ve spoken to an awful lot of writers about this, because I teach a lot of copywriters, and I ask them this question through surveys and face to face.
Some are in complete denial saying, “Oh, it’s just hype. It’s nothing. It’ll go away.” Most are kind of in between of, “I’m into it, but I’m not completely into it” So like you say there’s some concern and fear that it’s almost, am I embracing the enemy? And it could be that way, but in a sense you want to befriend your potential enemy and turn him or her into an ally.
And that’s been my mindset is that I’m not going to treat this as something that could kill my career. I’m going to treat this as something that could power-up my career in some very dramatic ways because it is so strong. It is such a powerful tool and I’m going to use it to the max. Same way when the Internet came along, the same way when we had the first Mac or word processing or something. You can either step away and be scared and say, “Oh, my goodness, this is scary. It’s going to kill me.” Or you can lean in and max out on it.
And I think it is an amazing tool for us as writers. It’s increased my productivity. Because I do copywriting, but I also do a lot of content writing. Content writing, it has increased my productivity 10, 20-fold. It’s extraordinary in that way. And yeah, embrace it.
Like for instance, one of the things I do, and there’s a kind of developer level a little bit below the ChatGPT interface, where you can do some really interesting stuff and you can actually set up all kinds of prompts. So if I’m writing on a particular product, I’ve already got set up on that developer interface, “Okay, this is my voice. Here are three examples” and I can just drag and drop, “I’m going to be writing about coffee today.” So I’ve got these pre-created prompts all about coffee and all about my voice as a coffee expert. I just drag them in. So this, again, is increasing productivity. I’m just dragging, dropping instructions and prompts and then boom, out comes the content. And then absolutely, I never just publish the output. I’ll always go in there, like I’ll go back to ChatGPT and say, “Okay, let’s introduce a character, a story, a benefit”, whatever. But I’ll also do it myself.
So the example I quoted of where I said, “open with a story.” It did. And then I looked at it, I said, oh, interesting. And I replaced that with a real story from my own life. And there is something about that that’s immediately more authentic. Now I’m taking the framework that ChatGPT did 90% of the hard work, I came in and put in the 10% that now differentiates, and it makes the copy better. It differentiates it. It makes me more valuable. So now for my client, I’m 10 times as productive, but I’m still creating unique stuff with a voice that goes beyond just what ChatGPT can do.
So now you’re going back to your client, and you say… this is only if you embrace it, like really. I really strongly encourage you. If you’re scared of it, embrace it. The more scared you are, the more fiercely you should embrace this. Because it really can be your friend. So think about it. Increase your productivity 10 times, improve your grammar a hundred percent, improve your spelling a hundred percent, improve your research capabilities by a zillion fold. And then layer in that emotional layer. Become a more emotionally intelligent writer. And now you’re adding something that ChatGPT cannot do. And that then makes your copy unique.
So to your boss, to your client, you’re the hero. You’re more productive, you’re using the tool. You’re ahead of their understanding of the tool, and you bring in emotional intelligence which makes all those pieces unique and ties it into the brand of that company.
Rich: I want to go back to something, an example you brought up earlier, the candle makers ignoring the incandescent bulb. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t use candles anymore. Of course we do. But with the incandescent bulb, the candle makers can now actually work three shifts and make twice as many candles as they ever could in the past. So I think that actually, I don’t know if you meant it that way, but as I was thinking about it as you talked, it actually is the perfect metaphor for content creators and copywriters embracing AI.
Nick: Maybe you can do the same thing with the carriage makers and the motor car. The point I was trying to make is that you ignore this at your peril. Because this is such a fundamental, this is such a powerful technology. It has made such incredible strides. And as we’re talking almost a year now since ChatGPT was published to the public, just a couple two or three weeks shy of a year. Boy, what a year, in terms of advances.
So I don’t, as a writer, I don’t think you can afford to ignore it. You probably can in the same way some candle makers just carried on doing candles for birthday parties and things like that. But yeah, certainly my approach is to lean in, but always then to do something AI can’t do. And that’s the layer of emotional intelligence.
Rich: Nick, this has been great. Where can people go if they want to learn more about you, your courses that have been taken in 97 countries out there, or anything else that you’re doing these days?
Nick: Go to NickUsborne.com, N I C K U S B O R N E.com. You’ll find a big kind of ad on the homepage for my latest course, which is called Future Proof Copywriting, which is all about this future. I’m saying basically future proof yourself as a copywriter by learning AI, learning EI, and then learning how to combine them together. So basically what we’ve been talking about. So I do have a program, a course out on exactly that.
But otherwise, poke around. I have a blog on the site and go through the last blog posts and it’s all on this topic of AI plus EI. So you can get a lot from there as well.
Rich: Excellent. Nick, it was great catching up with you. Thanks so much for your time today.
Nick: You’re very welcome. Thank you for inviting me.
Show Notes:
Nick Usborne trains authors, marketers, and copywriters to create copy that is both conversational as well as emotionally intelligent. Check out his blog to see what he says about combining AI and emotion. And be sure to check out the courses he offers to help take your copywriting into the future.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.