Using AI in your wedding business copy and content

A wedding business copy and content writer sharing her thoughts on AI? To quote my favourite editor*, “ground breaking.” (Said with a slightly raised eyebrow and deadpan delivery.)

But while there has been (and will continue to be) plenty of chatter about the use of AI in writing, I thought I’d put in my two penn'orth, particularly in relation to the wedding industry. 

I think LLM tools such as Claude and Perplexity can have a place in the writing process – but there are definitely times when you should avoid them like the plague. I’ve listed two instances below where I would advise stepping away from the bot, and three instances where it might actually be a helpful tool.

I will caveat all this by saying that I'm exploring this topic because I don't think AI is going anywhere, and it's important to know how to use it. But I do have massive concerns about AI, especially in regard to scraping (more on that below), taking creative jobs and, one of the most important, the huge environmental cost of using AI. AI tools take a lot of energy – an AI query uses 10x the energy of a regular Google search – and also the servers need a lot of water to cool them. In this age of climate change and water scarcity, I am concerned that we shouldn't be using precious resources to fuel AI tools that really aren't necessary.

I don't think the environmental cost is something many people are aware of. I know that when that craze for creating Barbie-style dolls was all over Instagram, the BBC ran an article highlighting the concerns. And when I was chatting to people who'd read the article, most of them said they had no idea AI was so power- and water-hungry.

AI copy vs your own copy is like fast fashion vs bespoke fashion. The former is mass produced, is often of extremely dubious quality, is found everywhere and comes at a high environmental cost. The latter is created to fit you perfectly, uses quality materials, will last a lot longer and will garner you many more compliments!

So I am personally very uneasy about AI but recognise many people will still want to use it, hence this blog post.

Also, one more thing to note: I never use LLMs in my copy and content writing, except for the number 3 in my list of things where I think AI can be helpful (and even then I very much limit my use for the environmental reasons mentioned above).

Now that's all said, let’s start with the two writing tasks you absolutely shouldn’t rely on AI for.

Avoid using AI for these two things in your wedding website copy

1 Using AI to write the whole damn thing

Your wedding business website is there to showcase your services, make an emotional connection with potential clients, and highlight why you’re their perfect supplier. Using AI copy to do this is just not going to work.

The first massive no-no for me in using AI copy is that you’re likely plagiarising someone else’s work. It feels like this element of AI often goes unremarked upon, but AI tools such as Claude have to have been trained using copy and content that’s come from somewhere – and they’ve probably been scraped from someone else’s website. 

So that phrase you absolutely love in your AI-generated copy, and put front and centre on your site? It may well have been plagiarised from another business in the wedding or creative industry.

Secondly, AI-generated website copy lacks the personal touch that's need on a website for a wedding business. It’s your own experience, your own stories and your own personality that makes the emotional connection with potential clients, and turns someone browsing your site into something who ends up booking your services. AI can’t create that, no matter how many prompts you give it. 

Thirdly, I've always thought AI copy sounded, well, off, but I couldn't put my finger on why. Then I read that because LLMs have been trained using the internet, and the internet is overwhelmingly American and thus written for this audience, this means that AI copy has a very American flavour. (Or should that be flavor?!) This explains the heavy reliance on American stylistic norms – the em dash, the Oxford comma.

This article also discussed the difference in American attitude versus British attittudes when it comes to sales and advertising copy. The former is much more hard sell, which is another reason why AI-written copy can sound very pushy, very forceful and what I can only describe as overwritten. Because it's trained to a different culture and a different audience, it doesn't always work for a British business.

(This isn’t just an observation, by the way, but is also backed up by research.)

Simply put, generic, bot-created copy just won’t do justice to your USP and your personal experience.

2 Writing blog posts

We all know how important writing blogs can be for your SEO, helping to position you as an authority figure and answering the questions people are turning to the internet for. But we also all know that writing blogs can be time-consuming, which is why the thought of writing one in seconds using AI is very appealing. 

But in using AI to write blogs in order to improve your SEO, you're not really meeting Google's EEAT criteria – content that showcases your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Because while AI-generated content could be quality, let’s face it, more often than not it’s terrible. You can usually tell an AI-written post a mile away as it’s lacking in a consistent tone of voice, structure and just sounds, well, weird.

Because AI content is a mash-up of other people’s work (and as already mentioned, probably plagiarised), there’s no inherent trustworthiness to it – it’s not come from a place of true authority or knowledge that can be referenced.

So now I’ve warned you off using AI for your copy and content, here are three things that AI can be quite handy for.

Three instances where AI can be handy for your wedding business

1 Giving you writing inspiration

When the blinking cursor of doom strikes, heading over to something like Claude and giving it a prompt can be a simple way to get your creativity flowing. Sometimes just seeing something written down can give you a push and get you thinking about what you want to say – not what the robot has come up with!

2 Suggesting blog post topics

As mentioned above, please don’t use AI to write your blog posts, but you can ask it for suggestions on topics. It’s useful for generating ideas that you may not have otherwise thought of. It can also be helpful for outlining a structure for your posts.

3 Coming up with synonyms

We can all be guilty of recycling the same words, and a thesaurus is usually the go-to tool to find some synonyms. But the thesaurus function on LLMs is way better than any other online thesaurus I’ve found, consistently coming up with more interesting and creative synonyms.

Using a human wedding copywriter rather than an AI bot

If you've tried AI copy and content and found it lacking, I'm a human writer who'd love to help you with your wedding business. Drop me an email to set up a no-obligation real or virtual coffee to chat about working together, whether it's writing or editing your website copy, creating SEO blogs or auditing your website to see where it can work harder.

*Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. Fun fact: magazine offices are absolutely nothing like TDWP, at least in the UK craft sector anyway.