THEORY 02.3 - Is writing dying & is AI killing it?
PART 3 OF 4: An interview with legendary Copywriter, Vikki Ross, about the headlines that AI could never write, and why the human pen is mightier than the Claude.
INTRODUCTION
Last week, I spoke with Dave King - AI pioneer, serial entrepreneur and bonafide techno-optimist - to hear his views on the future of human-powered writing.
In 2017, Dave shared his theory on how LLMs would affect the creative arts. The claim? AI augments human creativity, it doesn’t replace it. 10 years later, Dave’s views remain the same.
Given that tens of thousands of creative industry layoffs have been attributed to AI - and that’s only counting the lost jobs that are explicitly attributed to AI - I politely suggested that Dave’s thesis was utter bullshit. This was his response:
“The creative bottleneck has moved. The bottleneck used to be who can write the words, who has time, who has access to resources. Now the bottleneck is clarity. It’s: who are you going to be? What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? You have to make a choice. And ChatGPT can’t make that choice for you.”
In Dave’s view, now that AI has (permanently) relocated the ‘creative bottleneck’, it’s no longer who can write the words. It’s who has the taste to know what words matter. Dave solidified his ‘AI augments creativity’ position with two other points.
Point number one: typing isn’t writing. Writing is the cognitive process: the thinking, the curating, the combinatorial creativity. Typing is just the last mile.
Point number two: the enemies of creative work aren’t robots. They’re managers, optimizing for productivity metrics and clients who want to cut costs. “The robots aren’t taking your jobs,” Dave said. “Management is taking your jobs. It’s capitalism.”
While I was initially dubious, Dave makes a seductive argument. It places AI firmly in the ‘creative wingman’ camp, while flattering the Senior Creatives who have developed enough taste to survive. It also shifts the blame onto the suits. Which human Copywriters have been doing enthusiastically since the dawn of time.
But a core question remains: what if Dave’s wrong?
MEET VIKKI ROSS
“Vikki Ross is the UK’s leading marketing tone-of-voice and copywriting expert.”
Vikki Ross is a Copywriter’s Copywriter - an enthusiastic ambassador for and champion of the art - who ascended the ranks of UK marketing the hard way. No degree. No advertising school. No portfolio. Vikki even failed her A-levels - “apparently it helps to actually turn up to class” - and went straight to work.
Vikki started as a receptionist in various offices , then moved to a direct marketing agency where she held the same role. One day, she asked the Creative Director if she could write a reader offer for a film studio. It performed well. She got to write another. Then another. And another. And that was twenty-seven years ago.
Since then, Vikki has written the tone of voice for four British luxury automotive brands - Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar - in three months. Given that’s 100% of UK car brands, one could credibly claim that Vikki is the voice of British cars.
As Head of Copy at Sky TV, then their lead ToV (tone of voice) consultant for 10+ years, Vikki crafted the launches of Sky Atlantic, Sky Q, Sky Studios and NOW TV. She also found time to work with global clients, such as Spotify, Sony Music, ITV , Adidas and IMAX. What’s more, Vikki has been a jury president at D&AD four times and judged at the Gerety Awards, the Effies, the Caples and Creative Circle Awards.
In 2012, she created #CopywritersUnite - the global hashtag that’s connected Copywriters across continents, spawning meetups from London to New York to Berlin - which has become one of the industry’s central community platforms.
She also invented #CopySafari (walking tours that study headlines in the wild) and co-founded Copy Cabana and Copy Capital, the industry’s biggest events dedicated entirely to the craft of copy. She’s been named one of Creative Equals’ Top 30 Female Creative Leaders, received a Women in Marketing Special Award for Outstanding Contribution, and was listed in The Dots’ Top 100 Trailblazers.
All this while (by her own admission) not being entirely sure how to use Slack.
Vikki is a practitioner, not a theorist. She writes for brands because she loves it. And unlike Dave King - who spent nine years arguing that AI and creativity are natural collaborators - Vikki has spent nearly as much time arguing that the craft of Human Copywriting is worth defending. I wanted to know how she’d held up. Here’s what she said.
A VERY HUMAN COPYWRITER
MAX:
Through #CopywritersUnite and #CopySafari, you connect with other writers, and connect creatives to their surroundings. Do you think this ‘human-ness’ will give your writing a lasting edge over AI?
VIKKI:
For now. And for as long as humans want to feel connected to other humans. Humans who see, feel and do things, and who share their experiences. Experiences they relate to and believe in; experiences that inform and inspire.
AI can’t create or recreate any of those things - not meaningfully anyway - because it can’t do any of those things. It can describe things, but it can’t bring things to life with words. Not like a human can.
So until the tech bros have their way and the world shuts down leaving us all home alone with no purpose in life, humans will always want - need - human communication and connection. Human-ness.
ONCE UPON A TIME
MAX:
Back in 2019, you said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the robots aren’t coming, because the robots aren’t Copywriters.” In 2026, do you feel the same? Or are we hearing the last few stutters before AI gets really fluent at copywriting?
VIKKI:
2019 is ages ago in tech years, so I’d expect to feel differently now. But I don’t. Not really - not yet.
I get marketers using AI to generate standard stuff like instructions, automated responses or product details. But I don’t know any Copywriter who ever dreamt of writing that sort of thing anyway. So maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe that gives us permission to want more for ourselves - to write less of the standard stuff and more of the standout stuff.
It might be quicker and cheaper to generate copy with AI, but it’s not always better. No one’s sharing any success stories, are they? If AI is so good at generating copy, where is it? And why are AI companies like Anthropic hiring Creative Directors to build and grow teams of Copywriters?
THE PROS OF AI COPYWRITING
MAX:
Being a worldly human, you’ve obviously ‘experimented’ with large language models. Do you see any advantages to AI copywriting? And how do you feel about AI ‘augmenting’ the word-smithing of human Copywriters?
VIKKI:
Look, everyone’s different so everyone has a different answer. Some Copywriters like using AI as a creative partner. Others like using it to give them route-one ideas to build on. Some think it makes the process quicker; others think it makes it more straightforward. Or formulaic.
But me? No. I love my job, so I don’t want to outsource any part of it. I want to write the hundreds of lines that will get me to The One. I want The One to appear when I least expect it. I want to get frustrated, then elated.
Writing is thinking. If I don’t write, I don’t think. If I use AI to cut my thinking time, I risk missing the thing that comes from the mess of the whole process.
As for AI augmenting the word-smithing of human Copywriters - is that a joke?
THE LINES AI CAN’T WRITE
MAX:
You have a Pinterest board titled “Lines I don’t reckon AI could write.” Could you explain what it is about these lines that means AI could never write them?
VIKKI:
Right now, AI can write straight stuff, but it can’t write great stuff. Stuff that doesn’t even make sense but makes people do a double-take, think, or laugh.
And it can’t play with words, meanings and sounds to surprise the audience. When we make someone feel something, they’re more likely to remember what we said — and more importantly, they’re more likely to do something in response to what they read.
Really good copywriting is more ‘show don’t tell’ than just ‘tell.’ So far, AI is all ‘tell.’ As David Ogilvy said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product.”
(I should add that I do test some of the lines in the collection)
THE JUNIOR COPYWRITERS OF 2026
MAX:
You don’t use AI because you love your job and don’t want to outsource any of it. I agree. But do you think that approach would work if you were a 23-year-old Junior Copywriter looking for a job right now?
VIKKI:
I guess if I was a 23-year-old Junior Copywriter, I wouldn’t know any different. AI would already be a part of my life in many, many ways. I’m coming at you as a 48-year-old who doesn’t like change, doesn’t understand the excitement about all this, and doesn’t know how to use much more than a Word doc.
Full disclosure: if I was a 23-year-old Junior Copywriter looking for a job, I would absolutely use AI to create spec ads for my copy to sit in. But I would absolutely write all the copy myself.
THE TEN YEAR FORECAST
MAX:
When you and I started copywriting, the craft hadn’t really changed in decades. We’d swapped typewriters for MacBooks, but the fundamentals were the same. What does copywriting look like in 2036?
VIKKI: I have no idea. I’d like to think the machines are marvellous at writing copy for all the boring bits — because Copywriters have been instrumental in making sure of it. They’re highly paid copy consultants when they aren’t writing copy themselves.
And I’d love to think that Copywriters are the superstars of advertising again. All this noise has pushed us to be truly excellent. We’re writing copy that’s so goddamn good, even we can’t believe it. And everyone values, respects and loves copy so much, it’s the hero of every campaign.
IS WRITING DYING, AND IS AI KILLING IT?
MAX:
Given everything we’ve discussed - what’s your answer to the headline question?
VIKKI:
No, writing isn’t dying. And no, AI isn’t killing it.
People who don’t get copywriting are killing it — they always have. Clients and colleagues who have never respected what a Copywriter is capable of review copy with a (now, imaginary) red pen, ready to change it before they even finish reading it. Why? Because everyone thinks they can write. But not everyone knows they can’t write copy.
DAVE VS. VIKKI: THE SYNTHESIS
After reviewing part 2 and part 3 side-by-side, something struck me. The pro-AI champion and the anti-AI writer don’t actually disagree
According to Dave: “The robots aren’t taking your jobs. Management is.” According to Vikki: “People who don’t get copywriting are killing it - they always have.” Strip away the framing, and Vikki and Dave are pointing at the same culprit.
So if writing is being killed, the suspect isn’t an algorithm. It’s a 50-something in a meeting room who’s never understood the power of wit, let alone the value of Writers themselves. To these people - the managers who don’t ‘get copywriting’ - words are simply a commodity and if you can generate more for less, you should.
AI didn’t create that person. It just gave them a tool that confirmed their priors.
But Vikki and Dave diverge sharply about how to respond to this situation.
Dave’s prescription is expansive: embrace AI as a thought partner, use it to think wider and further and cultivate taste by feeding your judgment with a wealth of life experiences. Writing - Dave believes - is a cognitive act. The act of typing is simply ‘the last mile.’
Vikki’s prescription is almost the exact opposite: she doesn’t want to outsource a single word. According to Vikki, Writing is thinking; and the hundred drafts you write before The One aren’t a route to the destination; they are the destination. Condensing the process with AI doesn’t shorten the process. It amputates it.
What these conversations have revealed to me is I’m asking the wrong question. The debate isn’t “can AI write?” but “what is writing actually for?”
If writing is a mechanism for producing outputs - copy, content, communication - then Dave is right. AI does the heavy lifting, and humans focus on using their taste to curate. This approach is efficient, scalable and commercially rational.
But if writing is, as Vikki insists, a method for thinking - the process by which you find out what you actually believe and then figure out how to make someone else believe it too - then automating writing doesn’t speed you up. It switches you off.
There’s also something worth pausing on in Vikki’s most pointed observation. She notes that Anthropic - the company which makes the AI - is actively hiring Creative Directors to build teams of human Copywriters.
I find that quite funny. And I’ve got a feeling Anthropic do too.
The world’s biggest ‘thank you’ goes to Vikki Ross. I’d say she’s the Sarah O’Connor of the Copywriting universe, but she has better one-liners. Thank you, Vikki.
Next week: the last interview in the series. A writer who’s not remotely tech-savvy and never plans to be - and who has more to say about writing’s future than anyone else I’ve spoken to.
Thanks so much, @Max Mac - really appreciate you having me, and all the time and energy you put into the series