If you're anything like me, you probably have mixed feelings about writing. You may enjoy expressing yourself through writing, but hate the actual process of sitting down and getting the words out. Or, you may be a great writer but find the task of writing to be a tedious chore. Whatever your relationship with writing may be, there's one thing we can all agree on: it would be nice to have a little (or a LOT) of help.
Enter AI writing assistants. These handy tools can help you with everything from coming up with ideas to writing complete sentences or even full paragraphs. And they never need to take a break.
In this blog, we'll explore how an AI writing assistant can help you with your writing tasks, big and small.
What is an AI Writing Assistant?
Simply put, an AI Writing Assistant is software that harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you with your writing tasks. It can perform a wide variety of tasks, such as:
- Generate a list topics to write about
- Research almost any topic
- Create headlines
- Create outlines
- Generate short and long-form text
- Correct spelling and grammar
- Summarize text
- Rewrite text at certain grade levels
- Expand on existing text
It’s very exciting to think about all the ways an AI writing assistant can help anyone who needs to write content quickly.
How AI Writing Assistant Works
Understanding Your Request
When you ask an AI writing assistant software for help, it needs to translate your request into something the computer can understand. For this, the software will use Natural language processing (NLP).
NLP is a field of computer science and artificial intelligence that deals with how computers can interpret and analyze human language.
NLP algorithms are used to automatically read and understand large amounts of text, including books, articles, and documents. Once understood, NLP can then be used to answer questions, make predictions, and generate new text.
Generating New Text
To generate text, the AI writing assistant relies on a deep learning neural network to write natural sounding text.
On a basic level, the AI system’s neural network produces this text by taking in a large amount of data and training itself to predict the next word in a sequence. The neural network will start with a large amount of data, such as a corpus of text. It will then learn to predict the next word in a sequence by looking at the patterns in the data. Once the neural network has learned to predict the next word in a sequence, it can then be used to generate new text.
The results will mainly depend on three things:
- How well the AI system is trained (quality of the algorithms)
- The amount of data used to train it
- The quality of the user’s request
For well-trained AI systems, the text generated highly depends on the request of the user, but current algorithms can work with as little as a few words to generate quite a bit of text.
Consider this example of asking a AI writing assistant to write from a simple prompt such as, “explain how to throw a baseball:”
There are many different ways to throw a baseball, but the most common way is with an overhand motion. To throw a baseball overhand, start by gripping the ball with your fingers spread apart. Your index and middle fingers should be on top of the seam, and your thumb should be underneath the ball. Then, raise your arm up so that your elbow is level with your shoulder and the ball is behind your head. As you bring your arm down, snap your wrist so that your thumb moves down and your middle and index fingers move up. This will give the ball spin and make it travel farther. Finally, follow through with your arm and release the ball when your hand is near your hip.
The text above was 100% generated by AI, all within a few seconds.
As you can see, the sentences that the AI writing generator produces will likely be very similar to what a human would write on the same topic.
The Benefits of AI Writing Assistant
The obvious main benefit of using an AI writing assistant it that it will save you a tremendous amount of time. Of course it will save time writing, but it will also save time during the idea and research phase. With so much information at our fingertips, it can be difficult to sift through it all to find what is relevant to us. By using artificial intelligence, AI writing assistants can help us identify the key points in a text and then summarize them for us.
In addition to researching and writing text, AI writing assistants can help spark new ideas that you might not have thought of otherwise. This is very important to add value to your content and in corporate your your personal style to your writing.
Once the text is written, AI can help you check your grammar and spelling. This can be a valuable service if you are not confident in your writing skills or simply want to make sure that your documents are error-free.
Another benefit of using an AI writing tool is you may not need to hire a writer, which will save you and your business money.
With a tool that makes writing so much faster, you can also generate much more content than you could otherwise, which can help you with content marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Drawbacks
Of course nothing this good comes without drawbacks. AI writing generators are not perfect. They may produce some odd or incorrect sentences from time to time. They may not be able to capture the nuances of human communication, which can lead to errors or misunderstandings. Additionally, AI writing tools may not be able to replicate the creativity or critical thinking skills of a human writer. Finally, there is always the potential for errors or glitches when using any type of computer-based tool. This means you will have to review and AI generated text to make sure there are no glitches, factual errors or infringed copyrights.
Plagiarism is also something very important to watch out for, since the AI system draws its “knowledge” from all the data it has been trained on. While it tends to be rare, it is possible to find some results that contain duplicate or existing content. That’s why it’s always a good idea to double check any content you may publish with a plagiarism checker, such as Copyscape.
How to Get Started with AI Writing Assistant
If you're interested in using an AI writing assistant, there are a few things you can do to get started. First, research different AI writing assistants and find one that best fits your needs. Once you've found a writing assistant you're interested in, sign up for a free trial or download the app to get started.
Tools like webwriter.ai can help you write content for your website, from headlines to blog posts. And if you build websites for a living, webwriter.ai can be an invaluable tool to write the content for your clients’ websites in very little time, allowing you to build more sites in less time.
If you're not sure how to use the AI writing assistant, take some time to read the documentation or watch tutorials. Once you understand how the writing assistant works, start using it for simple tasks like brainstorming ideas or taking notes. As you get more comfortable with the writing assistant, you can start using it for more complex tasks like drafting emails or creating documents.
Overall, using an AI writing assistant can be extremely beneficial in helping you to save time and improve the quality and quantity of your writing without endless hours in front of your word processor.