Authenticity is about being genuine, real, and true to one’s character or brand.
At its heart, it’s about radical honesty and transparency.
When a person or a company manages to share their true selves, that authenticity goes a long way to connecting with their audience in a way that builds trust and a deep sense of rapport.
Authenticity is a profoundly human and emotional quality.
It’s hard to achieve at the best of times.
Who’s opinion should you listen to?
Always a tough question. Right now there are plenty of conflicting views when it comes to the future impact of AI on the careers of writers and copywriters.
At one extreme, there are those who claim AI is just hype, a passing fad, and that it will never replace human writers.
At the other extreme, some copywriters are worried their jobs will be completely obliterated by AI within the next few years.
The truth, as it almost always the case, lies somewhere in between.
I use GPT-4 every day. I use it to brainstorm ideas, research topics, come up with content suggestions, and to outline longer-form content.
Once I’m done researching and outlining with GPT-4, I open up Nick-4 and look for ways to add Emotional Intelligence to whatever I’m writing. (Yup, Nick-4 is me.)
In other words, I’ll never just start writing based on the output of GPT-4 alone.
AI tools are great for improving our productivity, but they’re not good at genuine empathy, cultural sensitivity, or nuanced emotions.
They’re not human.
One of the best ways to add the human touch is to tell a story or two.
The third domain of Emotional Intelligence is Social Awareness.
And a big part of Social Awareness is feeling empathy for others.
We feel empathy when we open our ears and our hearts, and walk in the shoes of other people. We feel what they feel.
This is easier said than done.
When it comes to truly understanding the feelings of someone close to us, or just like us, we can score reasonably well. On a good day!
AI is the big thing right now.
And while tools like ChatGPT are incredible in many ways, there’s one thing they’re really, really bad at.
Emotion.
Bots don’t do emotion.
They definitely don’t write with emotional intelligence.
For a start, they have no first-hand experience of emotions. Lines of code can’t fall in love, or laugh.
And they can’t feel empathy for others. Lines of code don’t care about people, and how they feel.
Emotion is at the core of great copy. This has always been the case… before AI, before the Web, before computers.
Great copy touches its readers at an emotional level.
Why? Because as consumers we buy based on our feelings. We buy the car that makes us feel good. We buy the pair of shoes that makes us smile. We buy the video game that gives us pleasure.
Every purchase is triggered by emotion. Once we have decided we want something, we will often turn to our more rational selves to justify the purchase.