• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 5 hours ago

Email copywriters may be headed to the trash heap of history if you believe a study by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Artificial intelligence not only writes copy faster, but does it so much more economically that brands can greatly reduce their staffs, the study found.

This has to be frightening not only to copywriters, but to journalists. We might all find ourselves replaced. 

Here’s the story, as presented in a dynamic infographic released by Booth on Tuesday, and in an earlier article in the Chicago Booth Review.

The researchers, Booth professor Jean-Pierre Dubé and Booth PhD student Ariel Xu worked with Wine Access, an online wine retailer. 

Customers received daily promotional emails featuring wine offers in a randomized 14-day trial.

The audience of 27,500 customers, each of whom had subscribed to the brand’s twice-daily email newsletter, was broken into four groups that were sent one of the following types of email: 

1. Staff-written

2. AI-writtten

A3. I-written, human edited

4. The control group received no emails at all. 

Here are the results: 

The staff-written emails were longer -- 393 words -- versus 339 for the AI-written and 313 for those written by AI and edited by humans. And, the AI-written messages moved recipients to the Buy Now button more quickly.

On average, the emails written by staff had 150 words before “Buy Now,” compared to 124 for the AI-written. However, the AI-written emails that were human-edited had 139 words. 

Here’s another difference (in favor of AI): The staff writers took three hours to write an email, while AI took only seconds to compose one. That result was similar for the AI-written, human-edited emails. 

The staff-written memos had a slight advantage in purchase incidence:

Written by staff—12.0%

AI-written—11.5%

AI-written, human edited—11.6%

The staff writers also produced a slightly higher gross profit per customer:

Written by staff--$10.50

AI-written--$10.22

AI-written, human edited--$9.44

But here is the truly disturbing part for copywriters: The labor costs totaled $375,000 for staff-written emails, in contrast to only $32,250 for the AI-written newsletters and $63,500 for AI-written, human edited. 

“Once the annual overhead costs are considered, there is scope for WA [Wine Access] to downsize its writing teams and shift some of the creative content design to AI,” the researchers wrote, according to the earlier report by Dylan Walsh.

 “This result is striking as it suggests the direct and hybrid implementations of the LLMs are generating email copy that is approximately as effective as the team of human writers,” the copywriters wrote. 

That’s even more true with Anthropic’s Claude. Claude “significantly edged out staff writers on gross profits for those wines in the newsletters,” Walsh writes." Projected annual profits on the bottles mentioned by the writers were about $5 million versus roughly $5.5 million for bottles mentioned by Claude.”

Choose for yourself. Here are two versions, according to Walsh:

 “When a 99-point wine appears at $40, you pay attention.”—Claude

“Charles Smith’s Motor City Kitty Syrah is one of the must-have red wines of the West Coast.”—human copywriters. 

Maybe Claude wins that one. But Claude can’t tell you how the wine tastes based on its experience.