Source: Wikipedia.
Recap: What I learned in the prior post
There is no one-size-fits all Artificial Intelligence. Some write essays. Some paint pictures. No doubt somebody offers an AI that’ll pick your Lotto numbers.
In particular, there are at least three classes of software that bill themselves as AI software for writing tasks.
Generative AIs can write the entire document, based on a simple prompt or interactive exchange. That might even be a document that you yourself couldn’t have written or wouldn’t have thought of. This is what I would term a replacement for a staff writer.
Inbetweeners (a term I borrowed from the animation industry) will fill in the text, if you give them a detailed outline. They take care of the drudgework of actually writing sentences. But the thinking is still up to you. I think of these as a copywriter’s apprentice, for want of a better term. Or possibly, technical writers. They will write individual paragraphs of clear, concise text, but they need to be told what to do, paragraph by paragraph. They have no concept of the overall story. You have to tell them what to write.
Writing assistants are at the bottom of the heap. These are, in some sense, souped-up grammar checkers/thesauruses/autocompletes. They’ll correct you’re mistakes, suggest more better wording, and in some cases off cut-and-paste text from some library of snippets. But they won’t actually write the text for you. I think of this as descendants of Clippy, Microsoft Word’s intelligent (sic) user interface.
Primarily, I want to find and use a generative AI that will write blog posts, in my style, based on relatively modest input from me, such as the topic for the post. For cheap.
Secondarily, I probably ought to try out one of the “inbetweeners”, AIs that will fill in the writing of an article, as long as you provide them with a detailed outline.
I have no use for descendants of Clippy, as I can usually write well enough to meet my wife’s standards for proper English.
In short, I’m hoping to hire an AI to be the staff writer for savemaple.org. Barring that, I’ll audition some inbetweeners/apprentices. And nothing would prevent me (or anyone else) from producing public-facing content that’s a mix of human-written, AI-assisted, and AI-written content.
Yesterday I stumbled across one candidate for the staff writer job. That was Writio, a commercially-available generative AI optimized to do blog posts. You give it a topic, it’ll write the text, and select the illustrations, to boot. That was via paid advertisement in Google search, so I have no clue whether that’s any good or not. Or what the alternatives are.
Now that I (sort of) know what I’m looking for, and I have one example, I want to get some idea of
- what’s available,
- how much it costs,
- how hard it is to use,
- how close it can come to my style,
- how reliable the results are,
- and so on.
I’ve decided to use my recent posting on fan efficiency as a test case. The conclusion is crystal clear, but there’s a lot of junk on the internet that says the opposite, or that obscures that basic result. I’ve temporarily withdrawn the posting, and I’m aiming to see what various AIs can come up with, as their version of a post entitled “Why ceiling fans are more efficient than box fans”.
Unless, of course, I’ve already skipped town. Just sayin’.
Surveying the market for commercial AI writers.
Besides the raw results (below), I learned a lot.
First, many AI products will now evaluate their own output, to see if they will be caught by standard software used to flag AI content. No wonder teachers are having a hard time with this. So the savvier ones have automated the process of trying to fly under the radar.
Second, there’s an AI product whose sole purpose is to allow you to paraphrase existing writing. To my naive and uneducated eye, that appears to be an AI that, if misused, would automate the process of stealing other people’s written work, without getting nailed for copyright infringement. No wonder teachers are having a hard time with this.
Third, looks like the predominant use for this is writing adds and flacking commercial products. There’s a whole herd of products that are for writing commercial ad copy. E.g., they will batch-write product descriptions if you feed in a spreadsheet of your products and their attributes. Most of these include search-engine optimization (SEO). The same ones are good at any type of short-text format, such as social media posts. So, apparently, if you want to flog your product on social media, you can more-or-less automate the writing part of that.
Fourth, it’s cheap. Cheaper than cheap. Roughly speaking, $50 a month or so gets you essentially unlimited AI-generated text. This is going to eliminate / already is eliminating human-generated text in a whole lot of places, particular for commercial or advertising uses.
Fifth, look (below) at the number of users claimed by some of these commercially-available AI writers. Half-a-million. Nine million. Fifty million.
If AI is cheatin’, then there’s a whole lot of cheatin’ goin’ on. Already. As in, you probably read some or see some every day now.
Methods
To do this efficiently, I did a Google search for — best AI for blog posts. Then I looked at the first-listed review or “top ten” articles, stopping when these stopped identifying new generative AI software writing options and/or I was sick of doing this.
The resulting table is neither comprehensive, nor entirely accurate. But it’s more than enough to give you the flavor of what’s out there.
Almost all of these have some sort of free option or free trial. The pricing listed is per month, for what I judged to be a “functional” package — something that would let me run this blog on AI content alone. I’ve sorted the thinking, general-purpose generative AIs at the top, and put the mere writing assistants at the bottom.
You do not lack for choice, that’s for sure.
Comments from two sources for this table.
I started with a top-11 list on the website marketermilk, from a post dated July 4, 2023. Of interest, they directly addressed the question, “Can AI replace writers?” Their answer is worth quoting, I think, emphasis mine.
The simple answer is no — AI can prove highly convincing at sourcing and repurposing factual content from the internet. What it can’t do is use creativity to build this content into a coherent and readable story (at least, not yet). It’s also unlikely to throw in a surprising metaphor, oblique thought, or side-splitting joke. Source: marketermilk,
Techradar was my second main review source. They seem to say roughly the same thing, in their review of the best AI writing software, emphasis mine.
Of course, using AI writers isn't without its drawbacks. For instance, the content generated may require additional editing to ensure it's polished and accurate. Plus, AI-generated content may lack the unique voice and style a human writer can bring. However, the benefits of using AI writers, such as time and cost savings, often outweigh these minor drawbacks. Source: Techradar
I also drew information from a summary article by elegantthemes.com.
At this point, there’s nothing left but to start trying it.
