The Best Copywriting Career Paths in a Post AI Industry

So you want to write. You have a natural gift for words and you’d like to turn that into your career. But is copywriting really a good career in 2025? Won’t AI be replacing all the copywriters any day now?

The answer to both these questions is a lot more complicated than it might seem at first glance. In practice, copywriting can be a fulfilling and lucrative career – yes, even in a post AI world – but in order to get there, there are a few important things you have to understand.

Nobody Wants Generic Content

These days, the term copywriter has almost become synonymous with blog writer. There’s a general assumption that the job of a copywriter is simply to churn out SEO grabbing content for any business that will pay them. There’s a truth to this but it’s far from the whole truth.

First of all, copywriting long predates the internet and the ability to write good copy is still a core skill throughout the advertising industry. Writing blog content is just one part of that.

Secondly, content that is ‘churned out’ generally doesn’t work well for SEO. Google wants to rank content that people want to read. If nobody wants to read your content then Google won’t end up ranking it. It really is that simple.

So if you want to be an online content writer you need to be able to craft a good story. You need to make information interesting and write what people want to read.

AI and Copywriting

Let’s face the facts: there are many circumstances where AI is very useful for copywriting. It can iterate quickly, it writes in clean readable English, and LLMs generally do have a good sense of style and tone. If you’re looking for a machine to generate taglines and help you find the perfect soundbite phrase, then AI has got you covered.

What AI can’t do is be interesting of its own accord. It doesn’t have a story to tell, it isn’t plugged into the culture the way you will be, and, perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have niche information.

Copywriting Niches

If you really want to stand out in a world of AI content then you have to be more than just a copywriter. You have personal knowledge and experience to draw from.

Even before AI, the most successful content writers were always those who could write authoritatively about a niche they understood from experience. If your content is just summarising a wikipedia page, then it’s hardly going to change the world but if, for example, you’re an expert on sailing, then your opinion about the latest ship model from a popular manufacturer will be an interesting and useful contribution.

This is even more true when it comes to competing against AI.

AI essentially knows everything it can scrape from the internet but the internet doesn’t know everything – no matter how much it might feel like it does. The more niche your interest and knowledge base, the less likely it is that an AI model will understand it.

Let’s say you want to write an article about programming. An AI model will know a lot about the most common software frameworks and how they’re implemented. It’ll be able to discuss common points of debate and even provide fairly detailed instructions.

But what if you don’t want to use a common framework? What if you want to use a framework that’s only recently been released? Or one that’s built for an obscure use case.

Fundamentally, an AI article needs human information to train on. It can’t say anything new. At the end of the day, the best content has always come from people with something new to say. In many respects, the advent of AI only widens the gap between original content and generic content.

The Two Main Copywriting Career Paths

So with all that being said, what are your best options if you want to get into content writing?

Well, generally speaking there are two approaches. You could build a solid portfolio and approach an advertising agency with an open vacancy. This would lead to a traditional employment path where your success would depend largely on getting results.

Now it’s true that there are fewer of these vacancies than there were a few years ago. Perhaps more significantly, companies are less interested in taking on people without industry experience. More so than ever, they want someone who’s already proven themselves – someone who can clearly bring more value than just being able to string a few sentences together.

But how can you prove yourself if you can’t get a foot through the door? Well, that brings us to our second option: freelancing. Freelance content writing is certainly harder to get into than it was but if you have the right skill set and can produce interesting content, it’s still more than possible to build a solid career.

So should you become a copywriter? And is it a good career?

Yes and yes, so long as you’re willing to bring passion, dedication, and genuine interest in the subject matter you’re approaching.