Here’s the thing nobody who runs a business wants to say out loud: persuasion is unethical.
If the weather outside is cold and you need a winter coat, you don’t need a keyword stuffed 500-word article with a strong call-to-action at the end to be persuaded to buy one. You just go find the highest quality coat for your budget and you buy it. Quality brands should be earning your money not by deploying the right psychological manipulations against you, but by making a higher quality product at a more attractive price. That’s how this is supposed to work.
The problem isn’t the writing. It’s that businesses at some point decided that it was cheaper to research how to exploit your psychological biases than it was to actually make a better product. And they hired writers to execute that. Copywriting, which once had a real craft to it became a manipulative system gaslighting you into believing whatever you need to believe to add to cart.
I did that job for sixteen years. I got good at it. And the longer I did it, the harder it got to explain to myself why I was proud of that.
So I stopped.
AI Didn’t Start the Fire
Everyone’s very upset about content unaffectionately called “AI Slop.” And sure, a lot of it is absolute trash. But let’s not rewrite history to hide our techphobic narrative: human beings were producing industrial-grade slop long before the machines showed up.
You’ve seen them. You’ve clicked on them. You’ve read them.
- 10 Tips for Doing [Thing] Better
- Everything You Need to Know About [Topic]
- The Ultimate Guide to [Topic]
- Top 10 Things You Need to Try in [Current Year]
- How to Get [Desired Result] in an [Unrealistically Short Timeframe]
- [X] Mistakes You’re Making with [Topic]
- Why [Topic] is More Important Than Ever
- Beginner’s Guide to [Topic]
Don’t feel bad for reading them. We all did. Hell, I wrote them.
These headlines didn’t come from an LLM. They came from a content strategy. From an editorial calendar. From a brief written by someone who read an article called “The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing” (Shit, that’s one of them, isn’t it?) and took notes.
AI didn’t invent content slop. It just automates it. In fact, AI learned its slop content by studying the writing of human beings.
SEO Broke Our Brains
Here’s what happened. Businesses figured out that Google was basically a popularity contest with rules, and if you understood the rules, you could game them. So “content strategy” became less about saying something of quality and more about using words that would appease the algorithm gods.
Suddenly writers weren’t writing for people anymore. They were writing for crawlers. Keyword density. Search volume. Semantic relevance. Long-tail variations. I wasn’t crafting sentences, I was building a bait trap for a Google search.
The result is the internet you use every day. It’s thousands of articles that technically answer your question while managing not to say a fucking thing of value. Pages padded to hit that word count. Introductions to explain what the article you’re about to read is about. Conclusions to explain what the article you just read is about. Remember third grade essays? Yes, that. That’s the internet.
Keyword stuffing for ranking is stupid. It always was. And appeasing the Almighty Algorithm was always a losing game that made everyone’s life worse.
The Manipulation Playbook
Then there are the tactics. God, the tactics.
The copywriting industry has produced an entire vocabulary of psychological manipulation dressed up as “conversion optimization,” whatever the fuck that means. There are frameworks with acronyms, so many fucking acronyms (SEO, CTA, CTR, SERP, CRO). There are CTAs (goddammit) engineered to create artificial urgency. There are email sequences designed to make you feel like you’re missing out on something that everyone else already knows about.
The premise underneath all of it is that your audience is a problem to solve. An obstacle between you and revenue. Something to be overcome with the right words in the right psychological order.
I get it. Businesses want to succeed. Money must be made. Customers need to be reached. The communication has to happen. But there’s a difference between sharing a message with someone and beating them to death with a playbook.
People know the difference. They’ve always known.
What Actually Works
Here’s the thing about brands and creators that actually build something that lasts: they don’t have to try to convert you. They’re trying to share what they made and why they made it.
The businesses that earn loyalty are the ones where you can feel the people behind the product. Where the origin story isn’t marketing copy, it’s just the fucking origin story. Where the pricing reflects a genuine philosophy. Where the writing sounds like a human being who gives a damn wrote it, because one did.
I’m not naïve. I’m not anti-business. I’m just tired of the bullshit.
Instead of asking how to get someone to buy your product, ask how to find people who will love this almost as much as you do.
Those are two completely different approaches to a business. The first requires manipulation. The second one requires passion.
Telling the Story
Every person who builds something worth caring about has a story. Why they started. What they believed. What they got wrong at first. What it cost them. What it means to them now.
That story does more work than any marketing framework ever will. It doesn’t convert everyone. It was never supposed to. It finds the people who were already looking for you and gives them a reason to stay.
Good writing has always done this. The craft hasn’t changed. What changes is the industry convinced a generation of writers that their job was to optimize rather than connect with people.
So…
I still write. I’ll always write. But I’m done pretending that stuffing keywords into a 2,000-word article about nothing is the same job as the craft I fell in love with as a kid.
If you need someone to write for the algorithm gods, I’m no longer your person.
If you need someone to help you bring out what you actually want to say, the story you actually want to tell, that’s the conversation I want to have.
The right people will find you. They just need to know that you’re not trying to pull one over on them first.
Fuck copywriting! Long live the storytellers.
Paul Scott is a writer with sixteen years of copywriting experience who finally got honest about what it means to him. If you’re building something worth talking about and need help shaping your story, reach him at paulscottcopywriting@gmail.com
Paul Scott 