Where will all the senior writers come from if AI is the new junior?

It was a regular call and the person on the other end said: “We’re just doing some routine maintenance on the pipes…” Sounds like a simple enough thing and not the start of a huge regional media story, right? 

Wrong. I asked some questions: how are you doing the maintenance? What are the benefits? How often do you do it? 

And there it was. The nugget of information I needed to turn routine maintenance into a great story. The technology they were using to do the cleaning was the same as that which had just powered a vehicle to the land speed record. Now I had the angle I needed to write the press release and tempt my black book of journalists to cover the story, resulting in widespread regional coverage, including TV and radio. Boom!

Knowledge is no longer power – the right questions are

I was once told asking questions is my superpower. It’s something I’ve spent a career doing, because as a human, I can't expect to have all the answers, but I am deeply curious to learn more. For more than two decades, my job has been to uncover stories, often digging them out of people who think what they’re up to is routine, boring, not likely to be interesting to anyone else. 

Honing my writing skills in a PR and communications team, I spent time speaking to journalists who didn’t mince their words if what you were suggesting was *not* a story they could print, and learning from some incredibly skilled people who just seem to magically know what would work and what wouldn’t. (I know now that it wasn’t magic, it was hard-won experience). 

I’ve been lucky to have that career and to now spend a decent chunk of my time still writing. But there’s a monster on the horizon for people at the start of their careers – generative AI. 

Is genAI the new junior copywriter?

I’ve written about AI and copywriting before but a recent project has added a new lens. 

We’re collaborating with an agency partner to create lots of content for a new website. It’s a biggie – more than 140 pages – so it made sense to explore what needs a human to write it, and what role AI could play. Turns out, there’s quite a lot that AI can do to help.

We’ve worked with the agency on their prompting to make sure that the AI tool they’ve built turns out the best possible version of content for our team of (human) copywriters to review and edit. It’s been a serious investment from the agency on building the tool, creating the right process and refining the prompting to make sure that what comes out is great quality. 
 “What brief would you give a junior copywriter?” asked the agency. So we talked through the information we would give and the questions we’d ask:

• Who are you writing for?
• What’s the purpose of the content – to inform, to persuade, to entertain?
• What are the key messages? And the call to action?

When we reviewed a test page to see if refinements were needed, it turned out that, having been fed with the current content and briefed to make adjustments, the AI had done a decent job. (Note that this is significantly different from getting it to write from scratch based on everything on the internet ever.)

But it will still need a human to edit the AI content, adding our life experience and the nuances needed to make the copy effective with the audience. Critically, we’re able to ask questions – what’s missing? Does this make sense on its own? What does the reader need from this content? The content delivered by the AI tool is a good start, but it still needs at least 50% of the input we’d have if we were editing the original content, so while there’s a saving, it’s not as much as you might think. 

Am I a dinosaur?

But the experience leads me to wonder, if AI is the new junior, am I among the last of a dying breed? Is AI the asteroid about to hit our industry, with us unsuspecting dinosaur copywriters too tied to our keyboards to look up at the sky and realise the end is nigh?

I’ve acquired more than 25 years of writing experience, honed from a range of roles from media manager to stakeholder liaison. How will the future copywriters who need to edit what AI has started, learn to refine their craft? Will future generations of junior copywriters just be expert prompters? And if so, who checks the content that comes out? 

Clearly, I don’t have all the answers, because AI must have a place in the equation of effort, cost and quality we’re all trying to figure out on every project. We still won’t use it to originate any of our content (we wrote a policy and made a commitment on that), but we’d be silly not to be exploring how it can contribute. 

I am now concerned that this apparent revolution in how content is created might mean the craft of copywriting disappears – not because AI can do everything we can, but because of a lack of opportunity for people to learn how to be the senior copywriters we will need to check AI’s homework. 

How can people in the early stages of their career learn what I was able to, alongside accumulating the life experience that our expert team brings to each of our projects? It’s one of the reasons we only have associates with more than 15 years of professional writing experience as our Wordsmiths.

With people in the early parts of their career already disadvantaged by a range of factors – from hybrid working meaning they miss out on learning about the nuance of the working world and those little details that you have to be there to observe, to a lack of jobs available in the first place – how can they work their way up to become the senior people? 

I’m back to leaning on my superpower – asking questions. And no, I still don’t have all the answers, and neither does AI. 

Louise Turner is founder and MD of Wordsmiths and Awards Writers. In 2011 she left her corporate career for the freelance world and is now an accidental agency owner, with a small but perfectly-formed core team enhanced by a merry band of freelancers. She is mum to two teenagers both sitting exams in 2025 (0 stars, would not recommend), is married to Pete and has a lazy spaniel, Floyd. 

Read more blogs by Louise Turner

The skill that comms professionals should teach young people
Why working in PR makes you an expert storyteller
In-house teams - the gold standard or should freelancers be part of the mix?