The proliferation and use of AI writing tools elicit mixed reactions. To some, AI-powered writing is a new and exciting way to create quality content. To others, the use of these tools is controversial. They argue that AI-generated content lacks human creativity or touch.
It is indeed true that AI writing has merits and demerits, which you need to understand and carefully assess. Understanding these pros and cons, your writing needs, and why you need to use or not use AI writers will help you decide if you need these tools or not.
AI writing tools overview
A peek at the market reveals that the AI writing assistant software market has and will continue booming. According to Verified Market Research, the market size of AI software or writing tools was US$818.48 million in 2021. It is projected to grow to $6,464.31 million by 2030, with a 26.94% CAGR from 2023 to 2030.
Some of the popular AI writing tools include Surfer, Jasper AI, GrammarlyGo, Rytr, Anyword, Articleforge, CopyAI, Writesonic, Scalenut, Quillbot, and Perplexity. The list goes on, and new ones are added daily.
To further boost writing automation, Google, the largest search engine, recently acknowledged AI-generated content. However, there is an emphasis on quality, originality, uniqueness, and helpfulness.
Despite Google’s nod to AI-generated content, there is still the fear of penalization online. Issues include content recycling with little added value and lack of originality.
This fear is the likely impetus that has spurred the development of many AI content detectors. Common ones are GPTZero, Hive, TraceGPT, Winston AI, Smodin, Originality.ai, Hive, Copyleaks, Content at Scale.ai, and writer.com.
Let us delve into our subject matter of AI writing tools, giving you what they are, their merits, demerits, and more.
What are AI writing tools?
AI writing tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate or assist in writing. These tools or software use machine learning and natural language processing to create content based on user input.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability of digital machines or systems to do various tasks intelligently as humans do with some autonomy. Such systems can perform tasks, communicate, act logically, or make predictions.
In content creation, AI writing tools can help create articles, blog posts, emails, and social media posts. These tools can also write essays, reports, product descriptions, academic work, and other content types.
To write content, these tools gather content like search engines and convert it into coherent articles using advanced algorithms.
Merits of AI writers
Undoubtedly, AI writing tools have many pros, advantages, and merits. Companies and writers stand a chance to benefit from the various merits.
Some of these advantages include the following:
1. Improve productivity
Automation of writing will improve productivity by increasing the efficiency and speed of content creation.
These tools will drastically reduce editing and proofreading time. They will also speed up workflows, and they can brainstorm ideas or generate rough drafts.
People doing research will find these tools the best research assistants that will reduce time spent. You don’t have to churn thousands of pages looking for information. These tools will find it for you.
2. Improves writing quality
AI content tools will tremendously improve the quality of writing. They will fix punctuation, grammatical, and spelling errors. They will also suggest more appropriate phrases and words, reword text, and change and restructure sentences or paragraphs.
This will ensure that your content is well-organized, simple, clear, and coherent. The tools will also help them stay consistent and better target your audience.
One study confirms that these enhance the quality of writing, especially for non-English native students. This allows them to create precise and more concise content without any errors.
The primary benefit of high-quality content is that it ranks better on search engines and communicates efficiently.
2. Provide feedback
Besides improving the quality of your writing, intelligent algorithms will score and grade your work on various aspects, including vocabulary, sentence length and structure, clarity of your ideas, readability, etc.
This helps writers understand their strengths or weaknesses and gradually improve where necessary.
4. Team collaboration
AI writing tools allow content creators, such as writers, editors, and other team members, to collaborate on a single project in real-time.
Team members can share ideas and knowledge to produce a single piece. Some intelligent algorithms can also help evaluate each content creator’s contribution and provide feedback.
5. Supports different languages and cultural context
Language and cultural context are always intertwined. AI writing tools can translate content into other languages while considering the cultural context. This will enhance effective cross-cultural communication.
Also, most support multiple languages. This allows for content generation in any of the supported languages.
6. Cost-saving
Writing automation will significantly cut the cost of generating content for companies or individual writers. The various software used can create content at only a fraction of human writers’ price.
Therefore, using them will allow you to downsize writing teams or have fewer experienced writers. With most writing needs taken care of, your team can focus on what matters the most.
They particularly excel in some technical writing like guides, FAQs, or other fact-based content.
However, some writing roles will still require human writers, including verifying if the content is accurate.
Demerits of AI writing tools
AI writing tools can understand human patterns and provide high-quality articles that mimic human writing. However, they have cons or demerits too that include:
1. Lack of human touch
An article by Valkyrie Solutions notes that AI-written content can lack the unique human touch – empathy, creativity, critical thinking, flexibility, and adaptability.
These tools depend on historical data or programming to predict and analyze patterns. However, they cannot understand complex emotions, human contexts, or subjectivity. They can also not adapt or be flexible like people.
Therefore, these tools cannot replace but complement authors or content creators.
2. Diminish creative and critical thinking
Overdependence on AI writing tools will diminish critical thinking, personal creativity, and the ability to contribute new, actual knowledge. This will reduce the impact of content to give a real contribution.
3. Lack of novelty
AI writing tools can’t generate novel insights or ideas, analyze deeply, or understand any newly added information. They are better at regurgitating generally accepted information from genuine contributors without creating or adding anything new or original.
Furthermore, most systems cannot know if an outcome is groundbreaking or spurious. This significantly reduces the possibility of breakthroughs in various fields.
4. Can facilitate plagiarism
AI writing tools can circumvent plagiarism detection by rewording and rephrasing paragraphs. However, Florida University warns that expressing other people’s ideas without proper citation is essentially plagiarism.
5. Susceptible to biases
Data input, algorithms, or cognitive biases can generate and propagate outcomes that are incorrect, unfair, discriminatory, harmful, or have ethical implications.
For instance, data input during AI training can reflect societal inequality and cognitive issues such as personal human subjectivity.
This makes AI writers as good as their algorithms and their data.
Will AI content hurt my website?
Whether AI-generated content will hurt a website depends on its quality, originality, and helpfulness.
To take you back a bit, in 2023, Google tweaked helpful content from “helpful content written by people for people” to “helpful content written for people.” This opened the floodgates of AI-generated content.
Today, Google has shifted to helpful, reliable, people-first content emphasizing E-E-A-T. The acronym E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which you need to demonstrate in your content.
The main objective is to reward high-quality content regardless of how you produce it. Also, the information should be reliable without controversial information against generally accepted wisdom.
Reliability is more emphasized in civic, financial, and health information. Such information will directly impact people’s lives.
Should you decide to use these tools, Google has a comprehensive guideline for AI-generated content.
Lastly, remember to include an author’s byline where necessary and provide a disclosure when reasonable. However, use something other than the AI instead of the author’s byline.
Should I use AI writing tools?
To assess whether you need these tools, the why should help you decide. Are you using them to help you create reliable, helpful, original content? Then, yes, you can use these tools.
However, there is a temptation to cut costs, generate huge content volumes, or manipulate search ranking. If this is why you want to use AI writers, then don’t use them. You will likely create low-quality or spam content that will hurt your SEO and website.
Conclusion
AI is a game changer in various sectors. According to PWC, AI can contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2013, boosting local economies’ GDP by up to 26%.
The use of AI writing tools isn’t necessarily bad. However, your success depends on how you effectively incorporate human elements. Also, you should ensure that the information is accurate and reliable.
Lastly, as a content creator, you must retain the right to make decisions and avoid long-term reliance on AI writers.