An Interview With Pro Writer For 25+ Years, Aaron Wrixon
As a tech-savvy writer grappling with AI, I am pleased to present this interview
A couple of weeks ago I did a 1-hour webinar called “Building — and Showing — Authority with AI-Powered Content” that my boss had directed me towards. I was not expecting much. As a writer with a background in computers, I figured I would at a minimum be on equal footing with whoever was going to be sharing some AI strategies. I was wrong.
The webinar featured Aaron Wrixon, a copywriter from Canada with over 25 years of experience. Aaron taught me more about how to effectively use AI for writing website content in the first 15 minutes of his webinar than I had learned since I started dabbling in it a couple of years before. I was blown away at his knowledge and willingness to share. I was also interested to hear his thoughts on this topic, but on a general level. So I reached out to ask if he would be up for a short interview about AI and writing.
Without hesitation, he agreed! What a guy!
How has AI changed the landscape of writing on the web? (This could be an essay unto itself — I just want your high-level summary.)
AI has upended web content, with major impacts on marketers, writers, and consumers.
For marketers, it has democratized writing, putting the ability to create content into the hands of anyone with a ChatGPT account. Putting aside for a second whether this content is any good or not, there’s no denying that there is suddenly “more” of it — orders of magnitude more.
It follows that for people who call themselves (or once called themselves) writers, this content explosion is a bad thing. When everyone can compete with what used to be your relatively exclusive skill, to say “it becomes harder to make a living” is an understatement. I’ll talk more about this below.
And for consumers, the content explosion is perhaps worst of all. Truly great content — the helpful, entertaining, educational, interesting stuff — runs the risk of getting lost in a sea of slop. I’ll also expand on this in your question below.
Is AI “good” for writers like yourself?
If you hadn’t already guessed, my answer here is no.
When AI first started to get relatively good at content — let’s say when ChatGPT hit the market in November 2022 — there were as many people who swore it was a fad as who rushed to use it to pump out thousands of words a day.
The naysayers have been proven wrong. As I answer your questions in April of 2025, the AI arms race creates new advances in writing ability almost monthly. These days, with the right prompting and fine-tuning, you can, out of the box, have Claude or ChatGPT create content that “out-writes” everyone except very skilled professionals.
And with the relentless pace of technological change (apocryphal or not, Moore’s law about computing power doubling every 18 months sure seems real when you’re on the ground, fighting for your job), there’s a good chance that the AI of January 2027 will represent a similar advance on the AI of today.
The short version, to be perhaps over-dramatic, but deadly serious, is many writers like me feel AI is killing us.
Is AI “good” for website users?
It may sound curmudgeonly, but my answer here is also “no.”
For starters, AI-generated content degrades trust. When you can’t know for certain whether the content you’re reading was created by a human, you find yourself being less and less sure that you can rely on what that content says. This has implications for everything from baking a cake to replacing a faucet, from starting a workout regime to determining whether that politician in your state legislature actually said that near-fascist thing you’re reading about.
But AI will also change us in ways I don’t think we understand yet. It used to be the that the right words could change your life. I went through a crisis of belief and came out a different person at age 20 — all because of a single essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Who could say that about the mediocre, AI-generated pabulum that threatens to fill the internet to the brim? Translation: when the answer to every question we’ve ever had is a Google search away, yet we’re more and more likely to read answers that were created by an algorithm trained to mimic human writing, what will that do to us as a culture? As a species? It’s like breathing stale air for too long — eventually you’re going to get a headache, then pass out, then die.
When was the first time you ever used a commonly known AI tool (like ChatGPT) for writing? Did you recognize it was a game-changer at the time? How long until you felt like you had wrapped your head around how to use AI effectively?
I first tried an AI called Jarvis, later Jasper, in early 2022 and wrote AI off as garbage. Nine months later OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, putting the power that Jarvis had intermediated directly into the hands of users. At the time, this felt like moving from DOS to Windows 95 (yes, I am old), but in retrospect, it was more like moving straight from the Bronze Age to the Space Age.
The effect on my business was immediate. I’ll talk to anyone who will listen about how I earned $20K a month in October 2022 and then had no revenue by April 2023. That was a heck of a six-month ride.
I quickly came to terms with three hunches I took to be facts: AI was here to stay, it was only going to get better — translation, make it harder and harder for me to compete against — and I’d sure as hell better learn how to use it. By the end of 2023, I was using it to augment my own work, trying to make up revenue on volume, and using it better and more than anyone else I knew.
In general terms, how do you use AI in your own process?
Facility with AI is becoming a competitive advantage, maybe even the only one I have left, so I hesitate to flat-out describe what I do in detail. Suffice it to say that AI now helps every part of my process, from ideation to editing.
What specific AI programs, tools, websites, etc. do you find most useful for writing?
As of this writing, Claude is still a much better “writer” than ChatGPT. CopyLeaks runs the best detector I can find. I wouldn’t use anything but Grammarly to proofread, but I fight daily with its tendency to homogenize writing — it sees only one “right” way to write things, and therefore wants to strip every ounce of personality from writing in deference to the one true path. Perplexity is my go-to for research, and Google’s Notebook is interesting for synthesizing sources.
I hesitate to use other tools than the ones I’ve mentioned because I like to know what’s going on under the hood — I don’t want a Jasper or something similar mediating for me with its own formulas about what a landing page should contain. I want to be able to tell the AI what I want and then get my hands dirty shaping it.
If we’re talking about “on” the business instead of “in” it, Motion has been invaluable as an AI-powered scheduler. And I’ve been having great fun vibe-coding things with Google’s Firebase lately.
Speaking of fun, my Facebook profile is about 95% powered by Ideogram. Haven’t yet found an AI image generator that can so quickly and easily make me a picture of Donald Trump driving a car in a Shriner parade.
What is the one great tip or word of advice you can give a website writer who wants to use AI more effectively for their craft? Assume they have dabbled but don’t know how to “do it right.”
Here’s a word of advice about how to write in 2025: don’t.
Painful joking aside, the best thing you can do with AI is commit to getting as good with it as you can. Learn how to prompt instead of taking other people’s prompts. Learn how to fine-tune. Watch as much as you can on YouTube from people who are trying to make money by selling you their secrets, then ask yourself how you could accomplish what they’re pretending is magic. Or simply ask the AI itself — some of the best things I’ve done have started with AI telling me what to ask it.
People act like they can break AI, but they can’t. That makes the best way to get good at AI the same as the best way to get good at anything: practice.
Aaron Wrixon is a seasoned copywriter based in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. As a copywriting expert and content strategist with over 25 years of experience, he has helped hundreds of businesses across more than 150 industries find their voice and reach their audience with strategic copy. Founder and chief copywriter at WRIXON, Aaron has written over nine million words for clients across the English-speaking world.
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