Picture the scene. It''s 1996. A bright, ambitious young person walks into an office in central London, CV in hand, and says with complete sincerity:
"Hi. I''d like to apply for the typewriter position."
The receptionist blinks. Then laughs. Then realises they''re not joking.
That''s what it looks like, in 2026, when someone applies to be a copywriter.
A "copywriter" is, quite literally, a person whose job is to write copy. Headlines. Emails. Ads. Product descriptions. Landing pages. Captions. The mechanical act of producing words on demand.
That is now a feature on every laptop sold after 2023.
It''s not that writing is dead. It''s that the typing part — the bit the job is named after — has been quietly automated out of existence by something that does it in 4 seconds, in 47 languages, at 3am, on a Sunday, for the cost of a Pret coffee.
When you walk in and say "I''d like to be a copywriter," what the hiring manager hears is:
"Hi. I''d like to apply for the role of thing that ChatGPT already does for free, only slower and with more sick days."
The typewriter didn''t kill writing. It killed typing as a profession. Secretaries who could type 90 words a minute were paid well in 1985 because the machine was hard. The moment the machine became easy, the job evaporated.
The same thing is happening now, just compressed into about 18 months instead of 30 years.
What''s dying: Producing 12 versions of a meta description Rewriting a brief into "punchy" web copy Drafting a 600-word blog post on "5 tips for X" Translating a landing page Writing 40 ad variants for a Meta test Cleaning up someone else''s grammar