An AI Writer (otherwise known as AI Copywriter or AI Writing Software) can help digital marketers, bloggers and content marketers come up with content, be it ad headlines, answers to questions or long-form content like blog posts.
With an AI writer, you can quickly generate fresh content or rephrase, summarize and improve existing ones. Some AI writing software have unique and interesting features, such as the ability to generate social media images, social media scheduling, content optimization, product description and keyword clusters.
As it is still early days, the of AI for content generation and content creation will only improve as time goes by.
Personally, I have some background on Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks, having studied AI as a subject while building a working Neural Network software as part of my Engineering degree’s Final Year Project.
1) What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) leverages computers or machines to achieve the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. Artificial intelligence is divided into Narrow AI (ANI) and General AI (AGI), whereupon Narrow AI is defined as, ‘A specific type of artificial intelligence in which a technology outperforms humans in some very narrowly defined task.’
General Artificial intelligence makes it possible for machines to learn from experience and adjust to new inputs to better perform human-like tasks through neural networks.
Many AI examples that you hear about today – from chess-playing computers to self-driving cars – rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing (NLP), branches of AI that are gaining rapid ground.
History of Artificial Intelligence and Content Writing
While the first AI written poem was created in 1967, AI writing software back then was limited. Subsequently, the emergence of Narrative Science and Automated Insights in the early 2010s, helped with the adoption of AI in creating sports and financial reports, low-level writing that can be automated via AI.
This saw a widespread adoption of AI by various media companies including Associated Press (Automated Insight’s Wordsmith), Washington Post (Heliograph) & Forbes (Bertie CMS) in the next few years.
Software such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and similar technologies has brought the AI writing software to new heights. Nowadays, the AI writer is able to write useful content for websites, blogs and online stores.
Read more via our History of AI Writing Software article.
2) What is an AI writer?
An AI writer software is a computer program that uses machine learning to write content for websites and blogs. It learns from previous articles written by humans and then creates its own unique version. This is done with minimal human intervention and runs as necessary after setup.
Nowadays, advanced AI writers come with recipes, where you can train the AI writer to write like certain people or in different genres. Nowadays, an AI article writer can be taken as a writing assistant, as AI content generation helps cut down on hours of manual work. This frees up the human writer to do research and focus on making each blog post unique while producing quality content.
How does an AI writer work?
An AI writer works by analysing the prompt and then creating new content based on this analysis. This can be improved by providing context to the prompt, so that the AI content generator is able to generate more relevant content.
With proper training, the software learns and improves over time, hence more matured AI writing software tends to produce better output.
3) Types of AI Writing Software
If we exclude enterprise-level AI writers (e.g: Wordsmith & Quill), proprietary AI writers (e.g: Alimama, Heliograph & Bertie), consumer-level AI writing software (the ones small businesses can afford) are divided into two broad categories, namely AI writers for short-form content and long-form content.
Now, while some AI writers can do both long-form and short-form content, we find that most AI writers are better with short-form content (e.g: marketing copy), while others are good with long-form.
However, with increasingly more AI writers able to do long-form content, we need to differentiate between a regular long-form AI writer vs an AI writer built for long-form, SEO-friendly, blog content.
An AI tool for writing articles for your blog, should be able to do more than generate blog outlines, blog intros, blog conclusions or expand headings into a paragraphs.
Rather, you will want one with the following features:
- Content Optimization – meaning, it’s able to tell you the content gap, so that you’ll cover the topic sufficiently and not miss out on any major angles.
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Content Brief
- Outline Creator
- SERP Analysis of the Top 20-30 results
This would mean AI writing software like Frase, ClosersCopy, Scalenut or Jasper AI x Surfer SEO, among others.
4) Benefits of AI Writing Software
AI writing software helps with productivity as it handles low level writing well. If you run a digital marketing campaigns, an AI writer will help with the writer’s block as you can generate multiple Facebook and Google ad headlines for inspiration.
Some of these generated headlines might help you to craft the perfect ad copy.
As for writing blog posts, an AI writer can quickly generate blog outline ideas and fill them with content. With some edits and unique content of your own (from some research), you can quickly churn out quality content at a fraction of the time.
Personally, I prefer researching the topic first, before using the AI writing software to analyse the SERP results for interesting headlines that I should consider. This is a longer process than just generating blog outlines, but ensures a higher quality content.
5) Weaknesses of AI Writers
AI writers aren’t perfect and are not a replacement for human writers, not yet. It comes with a number of weaknesses, namely:
- Repetitive outputs – Having tested a number of AI writing tools, we discovered that most tend to repeat certain information. This means, you will need to edit the content for clarity.
- Wrong information – AI writers are limited by the language model that’s used. For GPT-3, it has 45TB of text data from 2016 – 2019. Ask it about recent events (e.g: Covid-19), and the AI writer will generate fiction. In my experiment, one AI writer based on GPT-3 even said that Covid-19 was a new antibiotic.
- Unoriginal content – You will need to run your AI generated content via a plagiarism check as most AI generated content output have some percentage. The most affordable would be subscribing to Grammarly Premium.
- Lacks uniqueness – While it is possible to get interesting marketing copy from an AI writer, it is different when it comes to long form content. AI writers lack the ability to write truly unique content that is needed in content marketing.
- Doesn’t work for articles that needs research and/or testing – Hence, if you need to write content that needs research, the AI writer might not work for you. This includes if you do product reviews as an affiliate marketer or if you write opinion pieces for a media publication.
6) How to Grow Your Blog with an AI Writing Tool
While an AI software can write an entire article for you, if you plan to rank well with Google, you will want to ensure you have original content that other sites would want to link to.
This means, for long form content, you will want to edit the content and ensure it adds value to the readers. Always ask yourself, why would other bloggers be interested to link to your article.
Instead, it’s good to use the AI writer as an AI writing assistant, not a replacement for your human content writer. If your writers have a writers block, the AI writer can help generate ideas that they can then craft to their needs.
Do try out a couple of AI writing software before settling for one that you can get your staff and guest writers on. This might mean a Google Docs extension so that guest writers can get their writing optimized without you needing to give up a seat.
7) Best AI Writing Software
There are many opinions on what’s the best AI writer software or best AI copywriting tool. In my humble opinion, it depends if you’re a digital marketer or a content marketer, as both parties have different needs.
Here are some of the more prominent AI writing tools in the market to help you in your writing.
- Jasper AI (formerly known as Jarvis AI or Conversion AI)
- Frase AI
- Copy AI
- Article Forge
- Zyro AI
- Shortly AI
- Copysmith
- Scalenut
- PepperType
- Writerzen
- Writesonic
- ClosersCopy
- Rytr
- ContentBot
- Wordtune
- Bertha AI
- Bramework
8) Will AI writing replace professional content writers?
“In 10 years the majority of content will be generated by software. In 20 years, humans will wonder why we wasted so much time on content creation. I can’t see any other way around this.” said Joe Pulizzi in 2017
“Does this mean that newsrooms will now be staffed entirely by robots, that journalism schools will close and that legions of journalists will have to find new careers? Not for the moment, anyway, but reporters unable to evolve from covering a soccer match or writing a story about a company’s quarterly results toward more added value tasks and who see algorithms as threat rather than a tool to help them will find themselves surplus to requirements.” wrote Enrique Dans in this article, Meet Bertie, Heliograf and Cyborg, the new journalists on the block
“As the use of artificial intelligence has become a part of the industry’s toolbox, journalism executives say it is not a threat to human employees. Rather, the idea is to allow journalists to spend more time on substantive work.” said New York Times in 2019
Will AI writers ever replace professional content writers? It really depends. AI writers has already replaced human writers in producing sports and financial reports, as those can be programmed in.
But can AI writers really replace content marketers and bloggers? We would say no, as AI writing software isn’t smart enough to write in-depth, unique articles. Sure, it can generate a good article for a general informational topic such as, ‘How to save money’. But it won’t be able to come up with unique stories or product reviews that only a human writer can.
As such, yes, you should use AI writing tools in your content marketing, but use it to empower your writers and not replace them.
