I started Written Delights more than 17 years ago as a copywriting company. It existed to write copy with real whimsy and substance, through websites, nurture campaigns, blogs and all other forms, long and short. I wanted to create beautiful words that helped customers connect with brands. 


I wanted to tell those stories. 


Businesses, from small cleaning companies to enterprise design unicorns, all run on the same strange fuel. Almost two decades of writing and I’ve found the reason any of these people have for starting a company is rarely money. It’s not even flexibility or glory. The real purpose is so much more intoxicating than that. It’s because a founder believes so strongly in bringing something into the world that they’re willing to throw their whole life (and usually the life of their family) into an industrial washing machine to do it. Not just once, but every day for YEARS. 


That’s why businesses start. That’s why the founder journey is so bloody compelling. It’s why you listen to those stories and feel the pulse running through the description of lunchroom trestle tables and garage setups. It’s why you experience their failures as your own personal heartbreak and suddenly understand the real meaning of the term “sweat blood.” 


But now AI is here and it’s time for Written Delights to change. 


B2B copywriting was one of the first things AI came for. And as it should. Because AI has the most incredible ability to write words that satisfy most content types and styles. Now, Joe Blow Account Manager is spinning up his own nurture campaigns and marketing departments have been whittled down to a delivery person and an agent to write socials. Yes, they’re still filled with em dashes and three comma splices, but to be honest, most people don’t care too much about that sort of nuance. 


And again, that’s absolutely fine. Most of the time, to most people, it doesn’t actually matter.


Until it does. 


Until AI slop started taking over the internet. When websites and blogs and corporate social accounts were populated by generic, mass produced words with little to no human oversight, effort or meaningful purpose. 

Joe Blow Account Manager didn’t notice. Because that was never the space he occupied. He was never trained to scrutinise that type of detail. Marketing Manager Mary didn’t notice either, because she’s a gun who’s focused on delivery and suddenly a sensitive designer or picky copywriter isn’t bottlenecking her to-do list. 


To be clear, it’s not as though I don’t use multiple LLMs every single day to do my work. If I’m not using tools that make me faster and smarter as a writer, isn’t that the equivalent of taking a horse and cart to do my shopping when everyone else is driving an EV? 


But the difference between what I produce and what becomes AI slop is all in the context. It’s in the prompt. 


An AI is an inference tool, which means it’s been loaded up with trillions of tokens and then it spits out what it thinks is most correct based on your command. Most prompts are no more than one or two lines. Without context, the AI comes up with a nice sounding version of a generic response. 


With rich context — with your story committed to its core memory — your AI can produce something with your actual fingerprint. Something that sounds like you and includes quirky details that slop could never dream up. 


There’s nothing wrong with AI writing. It’s actually brilliant. But it needs context. It needs the washing machine, the trestle tables, the garage setup, the blood sweated out over years nobody else saw. It needs your story as its prompt.