Emotional Intelligence

Empathy Mapping is An Essential Tool for Futureproof Copywriting

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[NOTE: This post was written in part by GPT 4o, working from the slides and transcripts of a presentation I gave on Empathy Mapping.]

While AI tools like ChatGPT have revolutionized content creation, the human touch remains irreplaceable.

At the heart of this human element lies Empathy Mapping—a structured approach that helps writers better understand their audience. Rooted in emotional intelligence (EI), empathy mapping is a pathway to creating authentic, impactful copy.

As I often say… If you don’t know who you’re talking to, how can you know what to say?

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Don’t use AI as an Easy Button. Use it to get better at what you find hard.

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AI writing easy button

People get excited by how AI models like ChatGPT make it easy to create copy and content at scale.

As a writer you can create way more content when using AI. And yes, it’s a lot easier. No more writer’s block. AI can help you come up with new ideas for content, suggest headlines, and even write a finished draft for you.

And instead of a new post or article taking you two or three hours, or more, you can get it done in 5 to 10 minutes. How awesome is that?

Well, it IS awesome.

But…

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When writing AI prompts, act less like an engineer and more like a musician.

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Writing prompts shouldn’t feel like you’re acting as a “prompt engineer”.

Honestly, I don’t much like that term.

First, I think it’s disrespectful to true engineers. Writing prompts is not engineering.

But more to the point, I think the title steers us in the wrong direction. Engineering implies a fixed process and a certain formality. A process with a guaranteed and constant outcome. “Use these top 20 prompts for optimum results.”

That approach sounds attractive, but I don’t think it’s the way to get the best outputs from an AI model like ChatGPT.

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How to be more collaborative when working with AI.

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collaborating with AI

Much of the time, we use tools like ChatGPT to answer questions.

Search engines like Google have trained us for decades to interact with the internet in this question-and-answer format.

“Where can I find the best price for an all-inclusive vacation in Cancun?”

“How do I make coffee with a percolator?”

We bring those same habits to models like ChatGPT, or hybrid tools like Perplexity.ai.

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Be the Human In The Loop… And dramatically increase your value as a freelancer.

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t-shirt with logo saying I am the human in the loop

You have a lot of choices when using AI to write copy and content.

First, you can choose between the major Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude3 and others.

Then you have dozens, if not hundreds of new AI-writing platforms, most of which are using these models as the engines that drives them.

It’s little wonder the web is being flooded with new AI content, most of it sounding like it was written by a well-meaning robot.

The content isn’t badly written. With some decent prompts, most of these tools will give you a very passable first and second draft.

But there IS a problem.

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What if Sam Altman is only half right about AI doing 95% of your work?

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Kyodo Photo via Credit: Newscom/Alamy Live News

This is what Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in an interview last fall:

“It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”

To put this into context, he’s not talking about GPT-4 or the upcoming GPT-5. He’s talking about when AI achieves Artificial General Intelligence, AGI.

AGI is broadly defined as the stage at which an AI model gains enough skills to perform any task that humans can do, with equal or better proficiency.

We’re not there yet.

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