The Categories Where Generated Copy Still Needs A Signature
Most advertising can absorb a slightly wrong word. The regulated categories cannot, and in those the arrival of generated copy has changed almost nothing about the timeline, because the bottleneck was never the writing. Financial services, health and education have all adopted the tools enthusiastically and all report the same thing: the work arrives faster and goes live at exactly the same speed as before.
Financial services, health, education and anything making a nutritional claim all share a property: the sentence is a legal position before it is a line of copy.
Why regulated categories do not speed up
Because the slow part is substantiation, not drafting. A claim has to be traceable to something a company can produce when asked, and the Advertising Standards Council of India code requires claims to be capable of substantiation. Generating forty versions of a claim produces forty things to verify, which is worse than one.
The second reason is sign-off. In these categories the approver is a compliance officer with personal exposure, and nobody in that position approves faster because the draft arrived faster.
Generation moved the cost from writing the claim to checking it, and checking was always the expensive half.
Where it does help
On everything around the claim. Structure, variation in tone, adapting a cleared sentence across formats and languages without altering its substance. That is real work and a great deal of it.
The discipline is to keep the cleared string untouched while varying everything else, which is a far more mechanical use of these tools than agencies tend to market.
What teams are actually doing
Keeping a locked library of approved phrasings and generating only the connective material around them. It is unglamorous and it is the only version that survives an audit.
The signature at the bottom has not moved. It still belongs to a person who can be asked to explain the sentence.
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