Copywriters beware! A copywriting AI has just raised nearly $3 million in funding.
Yesterday morning, TechCrunch announced that the copywriting tool CopyAI has raised $2.9 million in a seed round led by Craft Ventures. This is a big deal: CopyAI is one of several companies using the language prediction model GPT-3, which uses deep learning to generate text that sounds like it was written by a human. (GPT-3 is much more powerful than GPT-2; its ability to mimic human language has been deemed “scary.”)
CopyAI doesn’t fully remove humans from the writing process, but does make it a lot faster. The customer inputs their subject and the type of copy they’d like to generate; CopyAI gives a number of possible text results; then the customer acts as an editor, choosing what text they want and moving from there. (On CopyAI’s website, potential CopyAI buyers can generate copy for Dunder Mifflin.)
CopyAI’s website promises that customers can “generate marketing copy in seconds,” which is very exciting for those looking to get copy written for their product, and very concerning for human copywriters who want to keep their jobs. “Natural language generation powered by AI is going to change the way that marketing teams write copy,” said David Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures, to TechCrunch. He noted that, among startups, it’s “rare to see such strong bottom-up adoption in so short a time.” Maybe Kazuo Ishiguro is right: soon, the term cyberwriting will have a whole new meaning.
