A slippery slop: Why AI copy is the best thing to happen to language in 2,500 years.

26 years ago, Groove Armada released the album Vertigo. This is, of course, how all articles about language and healthtech should start.

The two lead singles, ‘I See You Baby’ and ‘At The River’ (yes, the latter is the Marks & Spencer’s song now) were huge hits and have stood the test of time.

But the first single on the album wasn’t quite so successful. That was ‘If Everybody Looked the Same’, and it’s essentially a sample of Q-tip from A Tribe Called Quest repeating the lines:

If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other

Which is true isn’t it? Sigmund Freud, when he wasn’t being quite weird about his mum, called it the Concept of the Uncanny, which is the idea that something repeated is unsettling.

Horror as a genre has played on this for years. The twins in The Shining, speaking in unison. The Stepford Wives. The pod people in the Body Snatchers.

There’s something deeply unsettling about everything looking the same. It’s unnatural. It feels off. Contrived somehow. There are times when uniformity is beautiful, but it’s rarely natural. Nature is not uniform.

The same thing with language. No two people speak completely alike, like snowflakes. Literal snowflakes of course, not the Daily Mail term for anything they don’t understand or was invented after 1992.

We have different nuances, patterns, words-of-choice, emphasis, phrases, idioms, mispronunciations and gargled grammatical gaffes.

It’s passed down by parents, picked up off peers. It’s teenage you tentatively testing new slang to see if you can get away with it. Its patterns moulded by geography and culture. Upbringing and environment.

And because no two humans have had the exact same life, no two humans speak, write, or think in the exact same way.

That’s one of the many beauties and joys of language. It’s simultaneously universal, connecting us to those around us, and yet deeply, inextricably, personal.

Companies are broadly the same. They may have largely homogenised to a dull mid-point linguistically, which Peter Whent calls Brandwank in his new book, but they have their own peccadilloes, dos and don'ts, and patterns.

But something weird is happening to language. And to understand it, we have to look into my pet subject*, rhetoric.

That thing is AI generated copy. Lots of people hate it, lots of people defend it. Personally I think it’s the best thing to happen to copy and rhetoric is 2,500 years, but probably not for the reason you think.

Words are weapons - what is rhetoric?

About 12 years ago, when my hairline was significantly closer to my eyebrows, and I didn’t make noises when getting up off a low sofa, I was bought Sam Leith’s Words Like Loaded Pistols by a friend. It’s a dissection of what rhetoric is, why is works, and how it’s shaped the world around us. I am on my 6th copy, because I keep giving them to people who want to learn how to write better copy. It’s a masterpiece.

It’s a book that I genuinely believe anyone involved in trying to persuade other people to do things should read. It doesn’t matter if that’s buying your product, going to your event, or reading your articles.

Much of the below is influenced by that and William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears, a book of speeches from 431 BC to the early twenty first century.

In a nutshell, rhetoric is the art of persuasion.

Aristotle broke it down into three branches:

• Ethos: Building personal credibility, character, and trust.
• Pathos: Appealing to the emotions and values of your target audience.
• Logos: Using logic, facts, and clear reasoning.

Rhetoric gives words power. It coaxes and cajoles, inspires and befuddles, thrills and misdirects. You have been using rhetoric yourself, all your life, whether you know it or not.

And rhetoric has rules. Rules which have now been broken.

The Rules of Rhetoric

Looking up rules for good writing is like Googling ‘How to write a pitch deck’. You will get a thousand opinions, each more contradictory than the last, until your deck is 137 slides long and about as effective as marzipan scaffolding.

But if you read about rhetoric, then go back and read all of the speeches, from I Have a Dream via We Will Fight them on the Beaches, to Still I Rise (alright, technically that’s a poem, but it reads like a speech), they all lean heavily on the below.

There’s a reason you’ll recognise most of these speeches. It’s not just their historical significance, all of the orators gave multiple speeches around the period these ones were delivered. It’s that the structure, the rhetoric, sticks.

1) Rule of three

Ideas land better when there are three of them. Blood, sweat and tears; veni, vidi, vici; see it, say it, sorted. Two is not enough, four is labouring the point. It works. In speeches they create what are known as ‘claptraps’, natural pauses for the audience to put their hands together. Threes stick in the craw like a Rice Krispie sticks in your teeth. Snap, crackle, pop.

2) Negative parallelism

Fancy term for ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ . You say what something isn't, then what it is, using matching grammar for contrast. ‘Not a slogan, but a strategy.’ ‘This isn't a bug, it's a feature.’ ‘This isn’t just food. This is M&S food’, Christ, two M&S mentions in one article. Rogue.

The Atlantic’s brilliant piece, ‘The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious’ covers it in great detail but in a nutshell it works because it ‘gives the impression of nuance and insight’. Impression is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

3) Anaphora - repeating the opening words across clauses.

• ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds…’
• ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy, now is the time to rise from the dark

Repetition works. (Side note: Lack of repetition is one of the many reasons so much healthtech messaging is dire, as it's trying to say too many things poorly, rather than repeating a single repeatable truth.)

4) Antithesis - contrasting ideas in balanced clauses.

• ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’
• ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’

5) Chiasmus - mirrored structure or reversed order. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’

6) Alliteration - repeated consonant sounds for punch and memorability. Alliteration appears aplenty across my copy, because it seems to form a fire in my frontal cortex.

7) Circular plot - beginning and ending any text with the same phrase or idea. This article is an example, as it goes. Seems to be a pre-requisite for being a Guardian columnist currently.

8) Asyndeton - dropping conjunctions for pace. ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ “Stop, look, listen’.

9) Hyperbole - deliberate exaggeration for effect. Much more fun to pronounce it hyper-bowl, of course.

10) Litotes - understatement via underselling. ‘Not bad’ meaning ‘very good.’ Quite peculiar to British diction.

11) Zeugma - one verb governing two unrelated objects. ‘Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground’

Now of course you don’t need to know all these terms. Nobody does. In fact, listing them could be seen as wordy-willy-waving from me. I promise it’s not, it’s to point out that we are surrounded by these patterns, and that they stick.

We use them without knowing we’re using them because they form part of the natural patter of speech.

Why rhetoric works

There are infinite white papers, studies, and books written about why it works, but it basically boils down to: ‘because brain like pattern’.

Human brains like patterns. If the human brain didn't find patterns more interesting and memorable than non-patterns, thought would be very different.

Rhetoric works because it is nestled somewhere between an evolutionary accident, and the fact that memory adores pattern.

Simplistic rules create those patterns, and those that employ them effectively have their words remembered by their target audience.

But for as long as there’s been rhetoric, there have been rhetoric naysayers. Those who argue that using words to persuade is in some way illicit or unseemly. Ironically, they’re employing their own kind of rhetoric to do this.

This is often led by people who are competing with a great orator. Hilary Clinton described Barack Obama's approach as ‘My opponent gives speeches, I offer solutions’. Ironically employing negative parallelism.

The idea is to paint those who have mastered rhetoric as demagogues and rogues, peddlers of half truths, maniacal Machiavellian manipulators.

But Clinton didn’t stop giving speeches of her own during the democratic primary. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t stop her marketing campaign, from leaflets to debates. She just didn’t master the rhetoric as well as Obama.

The rules have been set out since Aristotle and Cicero (if you read Cicero then read a Trump speech, it’s quite fucking terrifying how populism has been bubbling away for 2.5 millenia only to find its purest form in a tangerine toddler-tyrant).

Rhetoric works because it's pattern reinforcement. Patterns that were first codified about the same time the Parthenon was built, and had likely been in use a hell of a lot longer.

How AI has broken rhetoric

So why does AI use rhetoric? Look if you ask for something persuasive and there’s a body of works stretching back to 400BC that say ‘This is how to write to persuade’ you’re probably going to follow it.

The brilliant Professor Marl Riedl has written what I think is the best explanation for a dunce like me on how LLM’s work. They’re always looking for the mean, the median, the most obvious next choice of word.

And when rhetoric has 2.5 millenia of rhetoric rules to follow, and infinite examples from historical speeches to modern advertising copy, they’ve infiltrated the training data more times than I’ve had hot dinners.

(Which at 38 years old x 7 dinners x 48 - assuming 4 weeks of UK summertime where dinners are likely to be cold and/or salad based - is 127,468 dinners. Probably more. I was quite fat for a few years.)

But the result isn’t that we all sound like brilliant orators. If everyone uses the formula, the formula becomes too obvious. Rather than arousing interest, loyalty, excitement, these patterns now arouse suspicion and contempt. Nobody wants to be seduced by the words of a Poundland Obama.

Think about it this way: a single wrong figure in a presentation to a client is enough to throw the rest of the presentation into doubt. If you’ve got number X wrong, how can we trust numbers A through W?

That’s what happens when these long established rules are used. Everything comes into question.

• Is this whole thing AI?
• How much original thought went into this?
• Are you trying to foist off this slop onto me, your buyer/client, without thinking it through?
• Why have you not thought for yourself on this matter?
• Does he/she/they even know about this topic?

It calls everything else into scrutiny. And as more people become savvy to the rules, and patterns, the less effective they become.

You can’t be a thought leader if you’ve outsourced your thinking.

Why this is the best thing that could possibly happen to copy, communications, and language

There’s a joy to this. Genuinely. It's a good thing. Lots of people who pay their bills with copy are lamenting it. About 25%-30% of my business is around copy & narrative for healthtech companies. And I think this is the best thing to happen to copywriting since the invention of the question mark.

This is the first time in thousands of years that the rules don’t work. A machine (machines plural, I suppose) have broken them by reinforcing them so rigidly and ridiculously that they look absurd. This is complete freedom. This is wondrous.

Everyone has started to sound exactly the same. It's fundamentally changed how language works. And if we all sound the same, nobody stands out.

So now is the best time to be able to write. Because everyone and every company has started to sound exactly the same.

You can’t stand out if you’re fitting in. And in a world where there are infinite companies in every single healthtech vertical, that’s a death knell.

Look at the AVT framework in the UK - 28 companies. Almost the same number as were on the DFOCVC framework in 2019. Want to know how many of the DFOCVC companies are still around? It’s Googleable. And the ones that have survived are the ones with a good product, brilliant differentiated by how they describe it.

The exercise I do with clients who want to rebuild their narrative (this isn’t a pitch, I promise) is to take strap lines from their website and 3 competitors and put them on a slide.

You would be amazed at how few people can tell you what is on their site, not their competitors. Your buyers are busy (busy busy) and you have the temerity to throw generic lukewarm averageness at them and hope it sticks. Come on now. If you all have very similar products, very similar networks, and your copy sounds the same, how do you expect anyone you need to listen to remember who you are? Let alone choose you.

We did it at HLTH. We took every other events’ slogans, removed their logos, then asked them to match the slogan to the event. Virtually 0% success rate.

So you’re free. There are no rules any more. We’ve reached No Rules Rules for copy. Language has never, ever evolved at this pace before. There’s a reason that dictionaries have words and phrases of the year, rather than ‘entire-new-set-of-grammatical-structures-because-the-old-ones-now-look-unhuman’ of the year.

Traditionally language creeps forward. Little tweaks, culturally induced phrases and structures. A few new words a year. But the patterns have always stayed pretty tight. We know these rules work, language says, so we will stick with them.

But in a little over 4 years, AI has broken that. We are in a free-for-all, where sounding slightly different is a huge differentiator.

Twenty six years on, Q-tip & Groove Armada were still right.

If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other

Now go and sound like yourself.

Nobody else can.**

*I’ve always wanted my pet subject to be either pets or the Pet Shop Boys, but I don’t have any pets which would make that tricky, and I’ve never warmed to Neil Tennant’s vocals. I suppose I could choose Petworth, which is a lovely corner of Sussex. Read the original piece here.

**Circular plot.