An AI wrote this: why using AI tools in copywriting is harder than you think

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7 min read

Jake Ellis

Jake Ellis

Blog writing is wonderfully diverse. It doesn’t take anyone long to find an article on a totally obscure topic from a huge variety of writers. Yet, there is one thing up until now that they all have in common. They are all human. This no longer has to be the case.

AI writing tools are set to reimagine the way the blog posts are written, and indeed reset the foundational building blocks of the internet. But are they the best fit for your businesses’ content creation process and as easy to use as they promise?

Where to start: beating writer’s block

Copywriters or any professional in content marketing can get stuck during the writing process. This is especially true now, when writers are often competing with search engines and Google ads for SEO success, rather than a genuinely original piece.

Writer’s block can slow down content creation, stunt blog ideas, and make social media posts fall way behind schedule, leaving marketing campaigns lacking content and depth.

Artificial intelligence is here to help

AI copywriting tools aim to try and solve this. While they cannot operate completely independently, they thrive best when given a topic in a large market with lots of other blogs and webpages to base their knowledge from.

AI software can help content writers by composing individual paragraphs, suggesting titles and headers, and even write articles and long form content in their entirety. But is it worth investing in an AI tool to help your business create content, or is it best to rely on traditional human copywriters?

Technology behind AI writing tools

The push towards the creation of an AI writing assistant is being led by Open AI’s GPT- 3 copyright engine.

Launched in June 2020, the AI is built to mimic human text conversations and writing through natural language generation.

In order to learn human language and train itself, the AI has already read most of the internet. In total, it has consumed 45TB of text from Wikipedia and Google Scholar. While still under development, it can write anything from short-form tweets and slogans to long-form essays.

Whilst the technology exists for AI writers to transform the internet, they cannot truly be left alone, yet.

Letting a bot introduce itself

To test this I used one of the most popular AI writers, Jasper, and asked it to introduce itself as an AI. This was the only prompt I gave it. The following text is what it produced:

“Hello everyone, my name is Jasper and I am an AI writer. I have been writing for a while now and I think that I have a lot to share. I am interested in a variety of topics, so I am willing to write on any topic that you might be interested in. My writing style is straightforward and to the point, and I hope that you will find my work helpful. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your time.”

This is only a short response because I only gave the writer a one line prompt. If the AI is given more information or even a basic structure for a blog post, it can write much longer entries and complete posts.

In this sense, whilst the technology exists for AI writers to transform the internet, they cannot truly be left alone, yet.

Far from the finished product

Human intervention is still needed to correct any mistakes and give the writer prompts for it to write its own content. The AI cannot work completely independently and still needs to be managed by human administrators to organise blog schedules and the deployment of the content onto webpages.

Luckily, using an AI tool does allow you to make instant corrections to the work and means that the entire content creation process can be completed in one workload. Whilst this is far from the finished product and ideal, it offers a clear picture of the future of the Internet.

What do AI writing tools get right?

Creating content is never easy. This is especially true for topics that require a large amount of research to fully understand. While professional copywriters can learn new topics with ease, this is a time consuming process and can be assisted by artificial intelligence.

Documenting the creative process

One of the best features of AI writing tools is their documentation of the creative process. When given a particular prompt to create content, such as a topic or headings, they quickly collate all of the relevant competitors and existing content for that topic.

This can save professional copywriters huge amounts of time, as they no longer need to spend time doing competitive analysis before writing a piece of content.

Speed of production

AI writing tools should also not be dismissed too easily for the quality of the content they produce. Whilst they may be clunky and require human intervention to correct mistakes, using AI is still the fastest way to produce large amounts of relevant and concise content.

This is largely due to the instant nature of AI tools. While professional copywriters often offer revisions for clients if they are not fully happy with the content produced, it takes extra communication and time.

Meanwhile, content writers can make edits to content produced by AI tools instantly, ensuring a faster turnaround for the content produced when compared to a human writer.

Writing in an established space

They especially excel when given a topic that has a large amount of content already available on the internet. This provides the machine learning capability of the writing tools with a large research base from which to build their content from.

As a result, they can help beat writer’s block in topics where it can often seem hard for professional copywriters to stand out from the crowd. While this is not perfect, it can bring inspiration and push writers into new topics and perspectives that they would not have previously covered.

More than just blogs

The content produced by AI tools does not just have to be blog posts. The more advanced AI writing tools can also create product descriptions and help with social media content writing through machine learning.

This is especially helpful for professionals who create marketing copy and launch products, as this is a job that would not necessarily be left to experienced copywriters. While solutions and product marketers will know their products and their market, they may not know how best to fit this into content or ad copy. Here, artificial intelligence can provide the building blocks for the creation of content beyond just blogs.

Are organisations actually using AI copywriting tools?

This all promises a huge benefit to marketing departments and content campaigns. However, the adoption of AI content writing tools is surprising low.

One study revealed that only 28% of organizations were actively using AI writing tools. For a tool that promises to produce high quality content, the lack of adoption shows that the software falls short.

This is due to the limitations of the software itself. With copywriters increasingly tasked to create SEO-optimized content for an audience of search engines, rather than original long form articles, the job of an AI article generator is much more complex than it may first seem.

While the best AI tools can use machine learning to try to learn new topics, most AI tools work by relying on existing content that is available to them. This leads them to one of the biggest disadvantages of using AI.

They especially excel when given a topic that has a large amount of content already available on the internet. 

Where does artificial intelligence fail?

AI copywriting software is practically useless for new markets and new ideas. Much of the content created falls far short of the standards of a copywriting professional, and has no chance in the ever competitive race for being found by search engines. It simply doesn’t have the large enough backlog of references to draw upon.

This means it struggles to find relevant content for the topic, leading to it struggling to find content ideas. This means it will produce a piece of content lacking in fundamental copywriting areas, such as paragraph length and sentence structure.

Businesses looking to write articles for blue ocean products should steer clear of AI content writers. For them, investing in a quality copywriter is far more favourable than using AI tools to create poor quality content.

In the end, if you are launching a product into a new market, you need to own that space and community. You cannot achieve this with the quality of content that AI will produce.

When should I use an AI copywriting tool?

However, this is not to say that you should never use AI tools to write content. Instead, they can be useful in large and developed markets when you need to produce a large quantity of material at once. The references and competition are abundant, meaning there is plenty of background and knowledge on the subject that will help the AI tool produce better quality content.

This is not a hard task for either an AI tool or a professional copywriter, however AI will prove to be considerably more time-saving.

While AI copywriters are not always perfect, this is a much quicker and cheaper way to produce a large quantity of content, even if it needs a once over by human copywriters. In the circumstances, it is more cost-effective for a business to invest in an AI writing tool, rather than a human copywriter, who is best suited to the more complex content creation jobs in new markets.

Artificial intelligence cannot be relied upon alone

While AI writing software rightly deserves to be on the radar of any business’ marketing campaign strategy, it cannot be relied upon alone. While it can make content writing easier for copywriters, content that is purely AI generated falls short too often to replace experienced human writers.

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