AI writing refers to using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate written content. It’s an old concept that has materialized in the past couple of years thanks to the latest advancements in AI.
These days, AI can generate basic blog posts, code, emails, and much more.
AI writing can be useful for a variety of purposes, including content generation for websites or social media, idea creation, translation, debugging code, and much more.
It is important to note that AI writing is not (yet) able to fully replace human writers. The quality of the output can vary depending on the specific AI system and the input it is given.
This comprehensive guide shows you the benefits and drawbacks of AI writing and AI writing tools. You will find a bunch of insightful examples and use cases too!
💡 Make sure to read my comprehensive guide to the Best AI Writing Software.
Let’s jump into it!
Pros
AI writing is impressive these days.
You can already use the best AI writing algorithms, such as ChatGPT to generate blog posts, song lyrics, or anything involving natural language and written content.
Here are some of the main pros of AI writing.
1. Save Time
AI writing tools can automatically generate written content based on input provided by the user. This can save time by eliminating the need for manual writing and editing.
For example, take a look at this piece I just generated with ChatGPT:
This would’ve taken at least 15 minutes to produce — or even longer for someone who’s having difficulties with numbers but still wants to explain the concept. With AI it only took 30 seconds.
Better yet, this technology is available for free at the moment.
2. Save Money
If used correctly, AI writers can not only save time but money.
Instead of having to hire a freelancer to write or proofread content, you can let AI do the job. Even though you shouldn’t fully rely on AI writing, it can be a huge time and money saver for your business.
Essentially, you can think of an AI writer as a free little assistant that is free or practically free to use and has endless power.
For example, have a look at how stellar job Grammarly does. Here’s a small piece of text that I just wrote:
Because I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the quality, there are lots of typos, grammar issues, and other errors.
But thanks to Grammarly, the AI that runs behind is capable of detecting those issues. More importantly, I can just click the errors to fix them.
Grammarly is a great example of an AI-based writing assistant. It doesn’t necessarily generate textual content, but it analyzes and fixes your content so that you can focus on writing rather than nitty-gritty details.
3. Generate Ideas
You can use AI writing to generate anything text-based—including ideas. This can be useful for example if you’re fighting the blank page syndrome.
Here’s a cool outline idea for a blog post I generated using ChatGPT AI:
Of course, you can ask the AI to come up with any other types of ideas. These don’t have to be related to content creation at all.
For example, I asked AI to come up with something I can do to kill time while at home alone.
5. Massive Potential
At the moment, the biggest pro in AI writers and AI writing, in general, is the massive potential and countless new opportunities that might arise in the next years.
If you think about the state of the art in AI writing back in 2020, it was nonexistent. No one could even imagine that an AI would be capable of producing blog posts or even simple emails. All we had was those scrappy chatbots that can answer a question or two. Other than that, there was no AI writing.
Look at the Google searches for the past 5 years for AI writer:
During 2021 and 2022 AI writing tools have become a massively popular thing. Before that, AI writing was merely a concept that no one was searching for.
We can only Imagine what the AI writers can do in 2 years given the fact that they went from bad to amazing in 2 years… Needless to mention what they will be capable of in 10-20 years. Only time will tell, but the revolutionary potential is huge!
6. Understands Different Languages
The latest developments in AI writing have also made it possible to translate or generate content in non-English languages. This is useful for those who are looking to target foreign audiences. Instead of hiring a freelancer that knows a foreign language, one can soon rely on AI translations.
Let’s give AI a try with one of the hardest languages on the planet, Finnish, (which happens to be my native language).
In the following chat, I ask AI to describe Helsinki, which is the Capital of Finland.
Verdict: It did a really good job! The text is definitely not 100% correct and some parts feel like they’ve been written by a non-native or middle schooler. But hey, Finnish is one of the hardest languages out there and there are only less than 6M speakers!
Cons
Now, let’s face it. AI writers are by no means perfect. They make a lot of mistakes and this is why you can’t fully rely on them.
There are big issues and concerns when it comes to AI writing. These facts are useful to acknowledge before blindly using AI in writing.
1. Human Intervention Required
AI writers require humans in many ways. Perhaps the most important part is AI written content needs to be fact-checked by someone. This means you can’t fully rely on AI writers (at least yet).
So even though AI writers can get the job done quickly, a human needs to add actual value to the content.
Not only are the fact-checks necessary but depending on what you’re writing with AI, you might need to do much more.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post, you need to do the formatting, add images, captions, links, and much more to actually make the content both pleasant to read and useful.
In this sense, AI doesn’t really help that much when it comes to blogging. It for sure can generate outlines, intros, and conclusions, but it requires a human to actually bring the value in.
For example, here I’m using AI to write a review of a restaurant I visited:
In this example, AI expands my short bullet points into more enjoyable text.
Although AI cannot read my thoughts, based on my input it can make the dull bullet points into something read-worthy. This again saves 5-10 minutes of my time. But the real work was still made by me who went to the restaurant to review it.
I think this is a perfect example use case of AI in writing. The AI can for sure help write basic text and make text look professional and rich. But it cannot still provide the real value that the readers are craving.
2. Makes a Ton of Mistakes
AI writers make a whole bunch of mistakes. This can be hard to detect at first, but the more you use AI the more often you notice how many silly mistakes they still do.
The lesser known the topic, the more mistakes it makes.
The AI writing models are designed to sound convincing. But the problem is AI also writes convincingly when it’s absolutely wrong.
This makes fact-checking super hard—especially if you’re unfamiliar with the topic. With AI written content it can be really hard to distinguish the factually incorrect parts of the text due to the convincing tone of voice the AI has.
To write factually accurate content, you need to be extra careful with your content. In my experience, sometimes AI messes up so bad that it’s easier to write a blog post without AI.
3. No Human Personality
AI has no true personality.
Even though you can ask the AI to write the content in a different tone of voice or writing style, it really has no human side to it.
An AI writing program is just an algorithm full of maths and program code. AI has no capability to think or imagine the way we do. Rather, the AI-written outputs are predictions made by AI models or in plain English, the results of a calculation. The AI models are designed to sound convincing and accurate. But there’s no personality there.
4. Bias
Unfortunately, AI writing models have a tendency to produce biased text. Although the developers of the AI algorithms are paying really close attention to these biases, sometimes one or two might slip through.
The biases stem from the fact that humans are the creators of these AI algorithms. The AI reads the internet and learns as it goes. Thus, it’s impossible to serve the AI completely bias-free content.
5. Plagiarism Concerns
Although it’s not common for AI to produce duplicate/plagiarized content, there’s still a chance it happens every now and then.
For example, if you ask the AI a very specific question on a different occasion, it might produce a nearly identical response.
The AI writing models produce text based on a prediction made using the human-entered input. Thus, it’s extremely unlikely that the AI constructs the words exactly the same way someone else has done.
Anyway, you use AI to generate content, make sure it’s plagiarism-free.
You can use a free tool such as DupliChecker. It takes your content (1,000 words max per run) and analyzes it and points it out to the original resource if it detects plagiarism.
6. Google Concerns
This drawback/concern mainly touches bloggers and content creators.
Google is fighting against low-value thin content that the internet is full of these days. Google regularly updates its algorithms to serve useful content for the searchers.
Here’s an example of a big Helpful Content Update that targets low-value content (likely referring to both scraped and AI-written content).
If you solely focus on writing content with AI, you aren’t really bringing anything new or unique to the table. The AI summarizes what it has learned on the internet but it doesn’t provide additional value. This is why Google is doing everything to stop this type of useless content from ranking high.
Although detecting AI content is a big challenge, if Google nails it, a ton of AI-based sites will go crumbling down. This makes writing blog posts with AI scary and uncertain—and for a good reason!
Summary
To put it short, AI writing is an interesting application of artificial intelligence that has pretty much popped up out of nowhere in the past couple of years.
Although AI is impressive, you can’t fully rely on it to create content (at least not yet). AI makes a lot of mistakes and does it in a convincing manner which makes it hard for authors to detect.
Before you start using AI in your writing, remember to use it as an assistant, not as an autopilot. Remember to do fact-checks and bring value!
Thanks for reading. Happy coding!