A few months ago, I saw somewhere a bit about how both Shakespeare and Gary Halbert would use so-called AI to help them write with if they were still alive today.
And with Shakespeare yes, I agree.
There’s strong evidence, apparently, he plagiarized and/or did not even write works he’s credited with.
If that’s the case, then so-called AI probably would have been right up his alley.
Gary Halbert, though?
I seriously doubt it, and not even for research or “brainstorming.”
This guy by his own admission said he did literal door-to-door research.
He even made fun of copywriters who avoided dealing people directly for research.
He also said – unless he was lying in his newsletter – he wrote his coat-of-arms ad by literally knocking on doors, asking people for feedback on his report that he’d been struggling to sell, then went back and re-wrote it based on what he learned, which then became the most-mailed sales letter ever written.
No “brainstorming” with so-called AI could have given him that research.
If anything, he said he would brainstorm with the market:
Directly, not hiding behind a computer like a timid lil’ rabbit, thinking it can be automated, shortcut, or reduced to asking a computer to what to write or give him ideas. He wrote about how he would even take his ads to a bar and buy a round of beers for the blue collar crowd there (who were his market) in attendance in exchange for them listening to him read his copy out loud to them.
I also suspect he’d have not trusted so-called AI’s penchant for hallucinating information.
And to further horrify the AI geek chorus of copywriters:
Gary said he didn’t even use a computer to write with!
He said he wrote his copy long-hand. And in his April 1995 newsletter he outright mocked & condemned the very idea of caring more about efficiency than effectiveness when writing sales copy. And he also said tools (like a computer) don’t make you a better writer, even if they make you a more efficient writer, and that efficiency means absolutely nothing with sales copy, and that effectiveness was everything.
I can already hear some goo-roo objecting:
“Ben you’re wrong! I KNEW Gary! And he would have used AI to write with!”
You mean the guy telling you to HAND write 1000s of bullets and long form sales letters to get a “neurological imprint” of what it’s like to write world class copy… and who would repeatedly bang the drum that “motion beats meditation”?
That guy?
I don’t know, Chief.
Going by his own writing, seminar training, and other teachings I possess, the idea of using any generative so-called AI sounds like the exact, polar opposite of what he wrote about efficiency and meditation vs motion and effectiveness. Not to mention his many newsletters (a lot of them still freely available on the internet last I checked) where he talked constantly about his tedious, manual, even “analog” processes for writing ads, bullets, stories, openers, and everything else.
And realize this:
Gary also claimed to have hated writing copy.
He outright said writing sucks, and he’d rather do anything BUT write.
He also has an entire newsletter just about that, too.
But even though he hated writing, he said he had to do all the above to write the winners. The only “short cutting” he talked about was with offer gimmicks like his post dated checks, etc. But I never once saw him talk about shortcutting the actual writing or market research phase or trying to make it go faster or more efficiently.
Plus, there is one other thing about this.
Gary was a stock trader, and even sold his own stock trading offer.
So I can only assume he was keeping up with the stock market, financial news, etc.
And that means he’d see what those of us who are not spittle-on-the-carpet FOMO addicts about so-called AI all know who look at the markets: the so-called AI industry is almost entirely one big ponzi scheme of money shifting & shuffling to keep the party (and dumb money speculators feeding it), and that the generative so-called AI companies especially are not making any money at all, despite $100s of billions spent.
I don’t really care if anyone “believes” that or not.
The cognitive dissonance about this from the AI geek chorus is unbreakable at this point, I’ve noticed.
But it’s easy to look up online if you want.
None of this is a big secret.
Even Google’s own search so-called AI will tell you this if you ask it. And everyone from Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerburg admit it’s all a big bubble. Frankly, at this point the only people who don’t know generative so-called AI is in a bubble that will pop are online goo-roos and their marketing moonies.
And so something tells me Gary would not be relying on it even if it did “work.”
Still, I admittedly did not know the guy.
Never met him, never talked to him, never so much as exchanged an email with him.
But the way I see it:
Unless the Prince of Print was a total hypocrite or else had some late life change-of-heart about what he wrote on the topics of efficiency vs effectiveness & meditation vs motion… and writing ads out by hand to get that “neurological imprint” he insisted was so important… and also his hysteria about the dangers of technology like when he was banging the Y2K drum… one need only read his own writings and hear his own words on those subjects to see what he’d likely think of so-called AI today.
All right that’s it for today.
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Ben Settle
