If you have been following the news lately, you must have heard something about ChatGPT. That chatbot can talk to you and answer your questions just like a human. It can even write an academic paper or content for a blog site or a LinkedIn post. Just ask it a question.
Artificial intelligence has been introduced in various industries and fields for some time and has automated some tasks and processes. Apparently, one of those jobs that robots (artificial intelligence) are supposed to do for digital businesses is writing. Just search for AI content creation to find tons of AI-powered tools that can create content for content experts and digital marketers.
How about UX writing? Is artificial intelligence able to write microcopy for digital products instead of UX writers?
This question is answered in this content.
Table of Contents
Artificial intelligence and UX writing
Before answering the main question, I need to talk a little about the importance of UX writing in digital product design and tell what experience writing is and for whom it is done.
An experienced writer or UX writer is the person in the design team who is responsible for writing microcopies or texts guiding users. The text of messages, errors, buttons, and any text that helps the user to do something, such as registering or placing an order, on the website or application and achieve the desired result of interacting with the product. So, UX writing or experience writing is a part of the user experience design process (UX Design) of the digital product.
User experience design is done for humans. The digital product is a machine and humans do not know how to work with that machine. If human-machine interaction does not happen, no one can use the website with the application. So, the audience of user experience texts (the same microcopies) is humans.
Just like the user experience designer, the UX writer must, first of all, know the user very well. Find out how he feels at every stage of the interaction. Find words and phrases that the user understands more easily and quickly. It is after all this research that the experienced writer writes the guide texts.
So, the main question is, can artificial intelligence understand the user (human) and his feelings as well as UX Writer?
If the answer to this question is positive, artificial intelligence and the tools built with it can replace the experienced writer and even the user experience designer or product designer. But fortunately, this question cannot be answered with certainty.
Will artificial intelligence replace UX Writer?
Do not be afraid and do not worry. Product designers or UX writers are not going to be unemployed. No one is going to take their place. The answer to that question is negative. UX writing, just like product design and user experience design, requires creativity and empathy. Today artificial intelligence and its tools are indeed used both in user experience design and content writing. And in the not-so-distant future, their role may increase in the product design and marketing process, but artificial intelligence cannot be replaced in tasks that deal with human emotions and the human psyche.
Writing is one of those things. Maybe AI can write a college paper. But he cannot create a masterpiece like Tolstoy’s War and Peace or write an article for the newspaper’s events page by himself. Because for both, the author must have experienced and understood things. UX writing is the same. To write microcopies, one must understand the experience of human interaction with the product. For this, UX Writer puts itself in the user’s place, which we know artificial intelligence cannot do.
It is better to hear from one of the most famous UX writers in the world, Bobbie Wood, about why artificial intelligence cannot replace experienced writers.
AI is not truly generating original content or information as humans do. At this point, it’s mimicking human language and structure—very effectively, but not anywhere near the cognitive level of humans.
Does AI help novice writers?
The answer to this question is positive. Just as AI tools help UX designers, they can also help UX writers. In research and data analysis, you can always count on the help of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the experimenter can get ideas from the answers of artificial intelligence.
In UX writing, the basic principles of UX writing must be observed in each guide text. So, the experienced writer can start working with suggestions for artificial intelligence tools and modify and improve them. Or vice versa, that is, the UX writer should write a text, and then artificial intelligence wants to make it better.
Anyword.com is one of the artificial intelligence tools that write advertising content as well as email, SMS, product description, and blog post. This tool is designed for marketing purposes and to help the product marketing team. So, it reviews and modifies any text to increase the conversion rate of the user into a customer.
So this tool is not designed to write microcopies. And writing texts and advertising content is not the main job of a UX writer. But there is no reason why the experienced writer should not try it or seek help from it. One of the things that a UX writer should keep in mind, especially when writing button text, is to encourage the user to buy from the website. In this case, content creation tools with artificial intelligence are very helpful and helpful. The experienced writer may ask the tool to optimize the text and contents of the landing pages, including the text of the buttons.