Framtidens copywriter är AI - eller? : En experimentell studie som undersöker relationen mellan generativ artificiell intelligens och copywritingkompetensen inom kommunikatörsprofessionen

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study was to examine whether it was possible to discern any effect on the perception of the content of a copytext in terms of credibility and conviction, depending on whether the writer was ChatGPT or a human copywriter, and whether it was possible to discern any effect on the perception of the writer in terms of creativity and professionalism. To achieve the purpose of the study, the following questions were formulated: 1. How credible is an AI-generated text perceived compared to a text written by a human copywriter? 2. How convincing is an AI-generated text compared to a text written by a human copywriter? 3. How credible is ChatGPT compared to a human copywriter? 4. Is there a connection between the attitude towards AI and the perception of the content? The theoretical framework of the study consisted of theory and previous research regarding generative artificial intelligence (GAI), recommendations for writing a prompt, attitudes towards AI, the copywriting competence and recommendations for writing an effective copytext. The theoretical concepts of credibility and persuasion are two central concepts of the study that have been operationalised into competencies and recommended content as well as unique selling proposition (USP), call to action (CTA), rhetoric and storytelling. The results show that those who read the AI-generated copy text had a more positive perception of the content and the writer than those who read the human-written copy text. However, the results show that the creativity of the writer was perceived equally by both experimental groups. Overall, there were no statistically significant relationships between the perception of the content and the attitude towards AI. Based on the significance of the results and their mean values, the study's conclusions are that the text written by ChatGPT is perceived to be more credible in terms of competence and recommended content than the text written by the human copywriter and that the text written by ChatGPT is perceived to be more convincing in terms of USP, CTA, rhetoric and storytelling than the text written by the human copywriter. We can also conclude that ChatGPT is perceived to be more credible in terms of competence operationalised to professionalism, than the text written by the human copywriter, which, however, could be due to chance as the result was not statistically significant. The result of the study shows that ChatGPT threatens copywriting skills. However, it is not the AI tool itself that threaten the professional role, as it currently still requires human involvement. Instead, it is the competence in prompt engineering that threatens the profession, as this knowledge, according to the study, is crucial for achieving a credible and convincing AI-generated copytext.