When AI writing tools started gaining popularity at the brink of the pandemic, they paved the way for faster operations. Whether it was freelancers or corporate employees, everyone swooned over its power to generate human-like content within seconds.
Before we knew it, social media was divided into conflicting opinions. Some experts applauded the AI tool's dexterity to create content, while others pointed out the drawbacks of using it for large-scale content creation and ideation.
For example, Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who specializes in the ethics of artificial intelligence, said, "I think that we should be really terrified of this whole thing."
ChatGPT learned how to write by examining millions of pieces of writing on the Internet. Unfortunately, not everything on the internet is true. "It wasn't taught to understand what is fact, what is fiction, or anything like that," Gebru said. "It'll just sort of parrot back what was on the Internet."
The Internet stays divided on the use of AI writing tools to this day. However, it does generate impressive results if used with caution, specificity, and intention.
It can definitely boost the writing process through its remarkable feature by removing errors and increasing grammatical awareness. But, to write a leadership piece with fresh ideas and expert opinions, both human feelings and AI need to work in unison.
They lack the nuance, empathy, or creativity of a human. They cannot connect emotionally with the audience. They are not storytellers as they can only simulate language, not expression. Every human has a unique tone and style of writing, which an algorithm cannot replicate, no matter how specific a prompt is.
The idea of AI is to ease human life. So, the question is, does it actually save time or ultimately add more work?
Let’s find out!
AI Writing Tools Expert Opinions: Pros and Cons
If you scroll through your social feeds on the daily, you’ll see scores of expert opinions pop up on the use of Ai writing tools. From use cases to downsides, you can extract immense knowledge from the perspective of such experts.
In this section, I’ve rounded up some of the best tips, opinions, and examples of how experts use AI writing tools where they think they can improve!
AI will replace humans. A common misconception stems from the fact that it can do work faster than us and have better research skills (at times).
The idea that you might get replaced by a bot or algorithm is scary. But, to thrive in this era, writers need to perfect an experience-based niche or use AI tools to their advantage. AI writing tools, while helpful, can also be repetitive, ambiguous, and glitchy at times.
The human mind has an advantage here, since it has emotional intelligence, which helps readers connect with the words. Information is available a plenty on the internet, but the real challenge is to think and write from a perspective the reader will relate to.
A tech journalist Mike Elgan points out, ‘’The risk isn’t that machines will get smarter. It’s that humans will get dumber.’’
So, when the machines update themselves, it’s important that humans don’t become lethargic or dependent, instead, they should upskill to use AI or machines to their advantage.
John Woods, a New York Times Bestselling novelist, is against the use of AI by writers and considers it theft. Many writers suffered due to AI and its quick adoption and even lost their jobs as a part of the technology shift. This created bitterness among some writers for these tools.
The most common writing jobs that AI overtook included, Product Description writers, Summary Writers, Editors, and more. But to keep an upper hand, it’s best to diversify your writing skills across categories, so if one is hijacked, you always have other sources of income.
Brian David Crane from Spread Great Ideas comments, “I look at using AI to write content negatively. Original insights that come from reasoning, storytelling, and personal experience are the secret sauce that has consistently ranked higher. What is hard to present when writing is not “data” but the human emotional connection that readers gravitate to, and personalization, which AI cannot duplicate. This is why human-written content will always win!
He’s not anti-AI, but has a firm belief in how the human mind can interpret the same idea in different ways and adjust it according to the tone of different target audiences.
Personalization is key when a brand or person wants to rank on SERPS, and if many writers use AI for the same idea, it’ll churn the same content with reshuffled words, which might lead to unintentional plagiarism.
This will ultimately push the content down the ranking or even remove it for being copied from online text.
Sometimes, AI writing tools also generate text that doesn’t make any sense. A good prompt can solve this problem though. Before you use AI writing tools, it’s important to establish a purpose and find the right words to explain your needs for the AI tool.
Stating his positive outlook on AI, Josh Kohlback from Wholesale Suite, comments, “Using AI for content generation can be helpful in several ways. It can help you save time researching before you start drafting your content. However, you can’t entirely trust the output you get from AI tools. Sure, it makes your job a lot easier. But you definitely need to double-check the information generated by AI tools before relying on it completely.”
Fact-checking is essential when you use AI. At times, it can generate content that has obsolete information or facts from unverified sources. If you rely completely on the output of AI, your content will lack substance, and at times, sense too!
Now that we’ve seen what experts feel about AI writing tools, let’s move on to more applications on where it saves time and where it might add more work for writers.
Remember, if it adds more work, you can take advantage to pair it with your skills and make your content shine.
AI-Writing: A Time Saver
AI writing is a definite time saver for certain use cases. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Emails
Emails that are written for generic purposes like Birthday wishes, OOO, holidays, leave applications, or greetings, follow the same format throughout. Using AI to create these emails can save tons of hours for HR or corporate employees, and also add a more professional tone.
For example,
Prompt: Write a leave application email to HR. Reason: Stomach ache
Result:
If you’re a sick employee, imagine lying in bed, just typing in a small sentence and getting a whole email written within seconds. All you have to do is add the designation and names, and press ‘Send”.
It has even added text to remind you of adding the medical attachment to the medical record. Which is advantageous if you want to get your leave approved quickly. You can further tailor your prompt to adhere to company rules.
Hence, when writing emails, AI writing tools save time and also give you multiple alternatives and tones to choose from.
2. Editing
Editing makes your content accurate, removes redundancy, and ensures grammatical proficiency.
An AI writing tool like Wordtune comes with features like rewriting. This feature makes sure your content doesn’t have any complicated words and gives a better-sounding alternative.
AI writing tools can help editors proofread extensively, as well as remove nonsensical or casual language.
For example:
I used Wordtune to rewrite the above sentence. It shortened the original version and gave me multiple result options.
Additionally, AI writing tools also help spot jargon errors and give suggestions that are more suitable for the target audience. Be it for rookie readers or for leadership content.
This allows editors to have more time on their hands to assess the factual relevance of content. They will also be able to understand the written content better with the help of AI and determine if a sentence will add any value to the submission or not.
3. Rewriting
Writers constantly deal with deadlines, research, and getting over creative bumps. This overwhelming demand leads them to frantically flush out first drafts that are often riddled with inconsistencies or errors.
Despite self-editing, writers may still miss errors due to inattention, fatigue, or unawareness. That’s when AI writing tools come in handy. Rewriting sentences with the help of AI saves time as it gives multiple suggestions without the need to revisit grammatical rules again and again.
AI not only rewrites but also allows you to change the style of your content. For example, add a casual or professional tone. You can even shorten or elongate a sentence to remove unnecessary words or add more context respectively.
This helps preserve originality while making content easier to digest by the intended audience.
4. Ideation
AI writing tools do a spectacular job of reading your prompts and finding ideas for ads, blog posts, social media posts, headlines, etc. You can use or tweak these ideas and quickly add them to your content calendar.
This helps overcome writer’s block and create a portfolio of options to choose from. The mind can only churn out so many ideas at a time and when exhaustion takes over, complication ensues.
Hence, during this time, using an AI writing tool can create a much needed pause.
For example,
Prompt: Generate 5 ideas for a Christmas marketing campaign
Result:
This idea generation via AI tool paints a clear picture of trendy campaign ideas for a festival. It even uses keywords like joy, magic, 12 days, Santa, unwrap, etc. to make the campaign attractive and more reasonable as per the main prompt.
Note: It also explains how these 5 ideas will be effective for the holiday season which makes the results actionable.
Now, when you need ideas for fresh content, you can just use an AI tool to fill in the gap between ideation and creation. A plus point—they also enhance productivity and efficiency.
5. Generic Text Creation
By providing initial information via a prompt, like target keywords, product descriptions, and who your target audience is, they can help you generate posts, marketing emails, SEO meta descriptions, marketing copy, and even blog topic ideas to write about.
Writing generic text with the help of AI makes it easier to focus more on the core content creation.
For example:
Prompt: Write a meta description for the blog title “Is AI writing actually a time-saver, or does it ultimately add more work?”
Result:
This meta description checks all the boxes of word count, keywords, and explaining context as well. But, that’s not all. If you don’t like this alternative, you can regenerate the content to find better alternatives.
Hence, generic text creation is made easy with the help of AI writing tools and it also helps steer clear of errors in such a process. Since search engines deem content like headlines and meta descriptions as the base or summary for any post, mistakes in them can take a toll on online ranking as well.
6. Research
Research is an indispensable part of any writing process. From the intro to the conclusion, writers need to find relevant sources of information and also make sure they’re up to date. Fresh research also helps brew up new ideas for content, and keep the cycle going!
Since AI writing tools work on learning models, they constantly scour the internet for new information. Writers can embed this information into their content and make it more meaningful and in demand for their audience.
For example:
Prompt: What are the newest trends in Y2K fashion?
Result:
This is raw data taken from social media, online publications, and more by an AI. It reads the behavior of the audience and generates the trend prediction for the same.
To find these trends without AI, you would have to visit multiple social media profiles, read reviews, find fashion journals, and also talk to experts. While you can still do all of these to make your content more unique, initial research with AI saves a lot of time.
AI-Writing: Where it adds more work
Alexis Austin from the Right Law Group comments, “AI is a tool that should be used in combination with human intelligence, not relied upon completely. When writing content for business, AI can assist with brainstorming, phrasing, and formatting, etc.”
AI does have its pros but it’s debatable whether it always saves time. There are instances where it can lead the writer to rewrite the whole result or even discard all suggestions.
Even though AI is helpful, it’s important to be aware of the downsides, so you can fully leverage its features. Here are some use cases where you might want to double-check your AI written content.
1. Repetitive Content
AI is not user-specific. If two people write the same kind of prompt, they’re likely to get the same result from an AI writing tool, which will lead to unoriginality. This further creates plagiarism on the internet and leads to downranking of content pieces.
While 2%-3% plagiarism is acceptable, copying the whole result from AI without personalizing it or adding human emotion will only bring down the quality of your content.
For example:
When writing the prompt, “Top Y2K trends” or “Top 5 Y2K trends”, the AI writing tool will generate almost identical content results which will lead to redundancy. Superfluity.
To avoid this kind of problem, make sure to read and run a plagiarism check on the AI writing tool’s content result.
2. Plagiarized Content
AI works on a learning model and while most of its content is new, it can be the regurgitated version of online text. The question of whether artificial intelligence apps plagiarize is also tricky.
In many cases, the text itself is completely original – sometimes to a fault. ChatGPT, for example, can fabricate details and the resulting text is not only original, it can be completely untrue.
To avoid such instances only did Google release the Helpful Content Update. Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.
This update ensures that people see only relevant and original content with credibility rather than copied AI text which is similar to what is available on the internet. This classifier process is entirely automated, using a machine-learning model. It works globally across all languages. It is not a manual action nor a spam action. Instead, it's just one of many signals Google evaluates to rank content.
As the use of AI content intensifies, search engines will roll out many more such updates to ensure only cited and new content goes live and reaches the audience.
While searching for any generic topic, ensure you add your perspective to make the content unique and new.
3. Adding human emotions
Human emotions are sacred to the mind and are not imitable by any algorithm or AI bot. While it can learn to use emotional words via the learning process, AI tools will always lack empathy and the reflective emotional powers of a heart.
AI tools cannot interpret emotions and hence, their content sounds robotic and plain. Another downside is they can create formulaic content which lacks human insights and add more work for the writers.
Hence, if you’re writing a leadership piece or opinion piece, you have to write most of the content yourself. You can also use the ‘Spices” feature of Wordtune to add jokes, anecdotes, emphasize, expand, add counterarguments, and more. AI content tools may be able to produce content quickly and at a lower cost, but they lack the creativity that comes with human writing. They cannot come up with unique ideas or add a personal touch that makes content engaging.
4. Comparison pieces that require test cases
In AI writing tools, you cannot generate image or video examples, these need to be created by yourself. The comparison needs to be done from practical experience and only a unique perspective can do justice for such test cases.
AI Writing tools: Strike the balance
When AI came out, it really helped writing tasks — from everyday emails to internal correspondence. It’s slowly becoming less relevant due to self-referencing. AI writing tools do save time in certain cases, but they all should be used with caution.
AI is a technological boon that can make your content creation process fast and be an idyllic tool to create outlines, drafts, editing, and more. The trick is to find the balance between the use of AI and human writing skills.
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