AI has been creeping into many industries and is already making big impacts. In the marketing and SEO content industry, AI writing assistants are looking to do the same. These products like Rytr, Copy, Grammarly, and many others, seek to make the lives of writers and marketing professionals easier.

While these tools are making a splash in the industry, they are built in ways that fundamentally prevent them from offering comprehensive AI solutions. The main problem is that they require continuous human input to work.

One of the most fundamental and radical functions of AI technology is automation - not just supporting the current abilities of humans, but fundamentally altering the way tasks are completed. This article discusses the ways in which AI writing assistants fall short of this ideal and why.

Contents:

How AI writing assistants are currently used

There are a lot of AI writing assistants out there right now, and they all serve different functions. Some, like Grammarly, are mainly grammar checkers - they point out usage and mechanics errors and suggest edits to correct them. These AI tools are often built into other widely used technologies, such as the Editor function in Microsoft Word, or the infamous AutoCorrect function built into smartphone keyboards. 

There are, however, some AI writing assistants that are a bit broader, like Rytr, that offer edits for things like style, clarity, conciseness, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Besides just providing edits, though, these tools can also do things like build outlines based on a given piece of content, or insert transition sentences between existing paragraphs to make the piece flow better.

Writers use these versatile tools to expand and refine their content as they write it. 

Drawbacks

Though AI writing assistants can help improve your content, there are some significant drawbacks that limit their positive impacts and can even make them a bit tedious to use. 

AI writing assistants require continuous human input to function

In order for an AI writing assistant to function, a user is required to (at the very minimum) fill in a series of prompts to engage the content generator. Throughout the process, users are continually required to supply the tools with information to reach the point of a fully formed article. 

In addition, because AI writing assistants are built to work alongside a human writer, the writer will only get out as much as they put in. It is still up to the user to put in the brunt of the legwork, including brainstorming and organizing ideas for content. 

Before going any further into the writing and revising process, this fact immediately limits the automation potential for tools like this.

AI writing assistants require constant supervision and revision to reach acceptable output

AI writing assistants may be able to produce entire paragraphs of text in a matter of seconds, but the content produced is often inaccurate and sometimes even nonsensical. Therefore, these tools require constant supervision and revision throughout the entire writing process. 

While this process can help writers flesh out their ideas in some cases, it can cost writers significant amounts of time and effort overall. In fact, given the nature of the short-form generation process, by the time a user has fixed all the inaccuracies, contradictions and other errors, they might not be saving much more time than if they wrote the content manually. 

Many partial solutions result in a steep learning curve

AI writing assistants tend to offer many different content generation types and features that each assist with smaller tasks. Some tools do offer multiple features that can be combined to make up a full piece of content. However, this can result in an excess of choice and a steep learning curve for those new to the tool. 

Overall, a significant number of partial solutions can lead to a large up-front time investment to make use of the tool and increases the likelihood of user error.

Many tools are powered by GPT-3

Most AI writing assistants use the same 3rd party AI model called GPT-3 (released by OpenAi). While GPT-3 is an innovative and influential language generation tool, it has several shortcomings.

First and foremost, GPT-3 generates text completely from its internal memory and has no ability to do external research. This means it only has access to information that existed when it was trained and it is completely unaware of anything that happened after its training. The major issue with this is that GPT-3 models often write outdated and stale information and cannot write accurately about new topics or current events.

This lack of external research also makes GPT-3, and tools that use it, prone to writing misinformation. Although GPT-3 has memorized a lot of facts, its knowledge is incomplete and it will frequently make up people, events, names, or traits. This issue is compounded when trying to produce long-form content because humans will have to comb through even more sentences at a time to root out issues.

Separately, one of the major goals of GPT-3 was to provide a general purpose model. While this makes GPT-3 widely applicable, it also makes it a "jack of all trades, but a master of none". Unfortunately, this eliminates the ability to utilize GPT-3 for any comprehensive solution. In the case of writing fully developed content, GPT-3 has no way of planning out the structure of an article. This results in output that will often repeat itself, meander, and go off on divergent tangents. A more tailored system can fully plan out the structure of an article before writing, leading to a cohesive article that actually teaches the reader about the topic.

Finally, another drawback of using any tool powered by GPT-3 is that they are all bound to OpenAi's update schedule and their vision for the direction of design. These tools all have little control over the technology behind the products they are creating, which can be concerning for end users whose reputations are based on the quality of content they produce.

Article Forge does not use GPT-3, and it is not an AI assistant

Rather than a writing assistant, Article Forge is a full-on AI article writer. It doesn’t just help people write content, it writes content for them. Rather than enhancing human writers, it fundamentally improves on the manual writing process.

AI writing assistants are great for writers who are fine with spending a lot of time on each piece of content, but they won’t be as much of a help to higher level marketing and content management strategists. These strategists need someone - or something - to actually do the nitty gritty work of writing so they can focus on broader issues of brand direction, market positioning, and the like. 

Article Forge is that something. It is a full-scale writing automation tool that can produce the same amount of unique, high-quality content as a human in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. Users enter some keywords as a prompt and, with the touch of a button, Article Forge will write an entire unique, relevant, naturally readable longform piece of content in about a minute. This also lets them bypass the often expensive and unreliable use of freelance writers or marketing agencies. 

Not only that, Article Forge has also made significant strides beyond the capabilities of GPT-3 in producing factually accurate, long form content. 

The development schedule for Article Forge is also much faster than that of GPT-3, and is not tied to the whims of an outside entity - the creators of the tool have full control over the development of the AI that powers it. 

These advantages make Article Forge the obvious choice for content managers looking to streamline their process with AI technology. Instead of using AI writing assistants, which require just as much if not more work than writing manually, content managers can outsource their writing needs to Article Forge.

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