TCC Podcast #445: The Proper Place for A.I. Writing Tools with Petter Magnusson

In a world where A.I. can write all of the words for free, what is a copywriter to do? What tools should they adopt and how should they approach artificial intelligence? I invited Petter Magnusson, the creator of PurposeWrite, to join me on The Copywriter Club Podcast to discuss these questions and talk through how copywriters can use tools like his to serve our clients better. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   Stuff to check out: Petter on LinkedIn PurposeWrite (sign up for a free trial) The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: It’s been three years since ChatGPT launched and changed the world. So what does A.I. mean for copywriting today? This is The Copywriter Club Podcast. When OpenA.I. released the first version of ChatGPT to the public, what had been a quiet conversation about artificial intelligence happening mostly behind the scenes suddenly burst into our collective consciousness. Writers and creators in particular were suddenly aware that at least at some level, these large language models could do some of the work we were being hired to do. Many of us dove into these tools to see what they could do. We launched a short-lived podcast that talked about how A.I. was impacting so many different ways of working, certainly within marketing, but also in many other industries. You can find the 20+ episodes of that podcast on The Copywriter Club website. Since that time, the dust has settled a bit. The A.I. tools have gotten a bit better. Image creation tools are significantly better. Writing tools have also improved, but it remains true today that the best copywriters seem to be able to use them to get the best outputs… if you want good copy, copy that captures attention and converts readers into buyers, it helps a lot to have a copywriter guide the inputs and rework the outputs you get from the A.I. model of your choice. Another thing we’ve seen in over the past couple of years is that while tools like ChatGPT and Claude get most of the headlines, lots of other tools have added components of artificial intelligence to improve their products, speed up useage, and make applications more sticky. At the same time we’ve seen the launch of job-specific A.I. tools that do one thing… like writing emails, or writing articles at speeds humans simply can’t match. So when it comes to A.I., where are we headed next? What tools will we be using to get better results? And how helpful is it to have a user or prompt engineer or copywriter who really knows what they’re doing versus just playing around to see what they can get a model to do? I asked Petter Magnusson, the developer of PurposeWrite to talk a bit about A.I., the tool he’s built, and also the broader environment of artificial intelligence and where he sees us going from here. And because whatever happens with A.I. will have a big impact on copywriters, this is a topic I may come back to in the coming weeks. This whole industry is fascinating. The speed of change is a bit scary.  During our conversation, I had a realization. In the past copywriters charged for the things we delivered… the words. Officially we sold blog posts or sales pages or emails or some other copy, but it was the words that clients expected to get. But now that ChatGPT can produce the words pretty much for free, we need to move up the value chain and sell the process, the strategy, the analysis, and the ideas. And bringing that to the A.I. model you use will make the outputs there so much better. Any way… I think this is a discussion you’ll enjoy. Before we get to my interview with Petter, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. Unless you are hitting the 30 second skip button when you get to this point of the show, you are no doubt familiar with The Copywriter Underground. I talk about it every week. The Underground includes more than 70 different workshops—and accompanying playbooks to help you gain the skills and strategies you need to build your business. The Playbooks make it easy to find quick solutions to the challenges you face in your business everything from finding clients, conducting sales calls, using A.I., building authority on LinkedIn or YouTube or Pinterest, and dozens of other workshops. You also get dozens of templates including a legal agreement you can use with your clients, monthly coaching, regular copy and funnel critiques, and more. You can learn more by visiting thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. And now, my interview with Petter Magnusson… Petter, welcome to the podcast. I am really interested in your journey. How did you go from, i think, photographer, content creator, and now you founded an AI company all about writing How did you get here? Petter Magnusson: First of all, thanks for having me. I've been like, to be honest, I have discovered your pod fairly recently, but I have listened in and I really like what you do. So I'm going to be stuck in here for a long time listening. Rob Marsh: Thank you. Petter Magnusson: There’s a bunch of episodes. So yeah, it's so much, so many I want to listen to. So I'm surely going to do that. Yeah, so I have a bit of a weird mixed history. So I started as a, I don't know if you youll probably You will edit this, you I guess. Rob Marsh: Of course, well if yeah we can always cut it down or or sometimes we just like to hear the story. Petter Magnusson: My background is a bit long story, I started out as ah as a programmer, actually, a long time ago. And then I started studying physics and I studied physics engineering. Then I went to Japan for for my work in advanced laser physics kind of thing. And then I stumbled into sales for that laser company doing sales. And that led me into marketing where I became marketing manager for an IT company in Sweden. And we did extremely well. We happened to sell modems at the time that internet exploded. My boss still thinks that I had magic hands or something because he became super rich from that. And and he still thinks I was had a part of it. So anyway, so I did that. And then I started getting really interested in photography. And... I was having reached some of my life goals, to be honest, at the early 30s. I thought, ah, I want to change direction. So then I just bailed out. I applied for art school in Norway and I got in i as I took a bachelor in in art ah photography. And then I went to to do master's degree also in Sweden in yeah photo and film. So then I was like a ah photo artist actually exhibiting in galleries and stuff like that. Classic art, you know, career. Until I got a little bit angry with that world in a way, because it's not as it's not as free as you may think. You know, I used to think that art is free. But in the art world, to survive, you have to be fairly political. You have to know certain people, you have to network, and you need to make pieces about the right topics if you want to get the scholarships and the exhibitions. And, you know, that might be all fine, but then I saw how people are were adapting to that, and that like goes against everything that art is for me. So that kind of got me, yeah. Rob Marsh: Yeah. Petter Magnusson: And then I thought, well, I might as well go commercial. so so So I did that. as so I went into commercial photography and and filmmaking. And now I have a small production company in Stockholm, and we're doing corporate stuff mostly. So a lot of B2B topics. And that's when I started to see what what kind of led into PurposeWrite. I have a lot of I see exactly the same. I saw the same happening in visual content as in copywriting, I think. People come to me and they were like, hey, video is hyped. We want to make a film or or something. And I'm like, OK, great. Why do you want to make a film? And they're like, it's hip or something. And I'm like, OK, who's going to see this film? I don't know. Everyone. and i'm like okay you know So I had to start you know the journey with them to like, okay, let's find out if if you actually should make a film and who should watch it. What is your target audience and you know pain points and and interests and stuff like that. So that was kind of a struggle sometimes to make people understand that, yeah, of course I can just make a film for you, but that will make not make you happy or or the viewers or anyone. so And then we started… producing some text content too, and and especially for ourselves. And I think the trigger point came because I was trying to hire a guy that was not very good at writing, to be honest. Oh, maybe you should edit this out in case he listens to this. But anyway, ah yeah, I came across that that was going to do some some writing for us. And then I saw the same pattern in text. And I think that's what triggered me. like Because he would produce content pieces that had no direction, no purpose, no, you know, not thinking about who's going to read this and why are writing it? And and why are they going to read this? Everything like that. And that got me started that, okay, this is this is exactly the same problem. But and And then at that at that time, AI came along, you know, ChatGPT and everything. So I started playing with that and put that tool ah to work by kind of turning the process around. Because when you normally when you use ChatGPT, you write a prompt um and that will do something for you. And I could see the same problem there. Like, you know, generic content just exploding on LinkedIn and platforms like that. um I'm mainly talking content now because that's the the area that I'm familiar with. But people are are mindlessly prompting stuff and they get something that looks pretty good. I mean, AI writes pretty good. Layout is nice with nice headlines and stuff. So yeah, on the surface, all is always fine, but it's really horrible. It's got no no value, you know.