If you are a writer, you might have spent some hours staring at a blank screen for your next brilliant idea to appear. In a digital world that is flooded with content, you might have used AI as your writing assistant to enhance your productivity and creativity. However, you might be pondering between artificial intelligence (AI) being your greatest assistant or that it would take your job away.
While AI is a great assistant to writers, and even produces coherent text, does it have the ability to connect, inspire, and evoke emotion? Can it ever fully replace the human touch that infuses writing with emotion, nuance, and authenticity?
Here we explore the ways in which AI can assist you as a writer and the potential risks and challenges it brings.
AI as Writers’ Powerful Ally
As AI evolves, it has changed the way many things are done, including copywriting. It is not a mere trend. Rather, it has caused a major shift in how content is crafted and optimised, especially in the fields where writers are required to constantly provide timely articles. Indeed, AI-powered tools have revolutionised the scale at which content can be produced and they pushed the boundaries of efficiency and creativity, allowing writers to explore new ideas and approaches.
When it comes to producing content that resonates with the audience, AI’s influence goes beyond generating content and it is changing the way of approaching search engine optimisation (SEO). In this matter, AI helps writers analyse and process huge amounts of data and identify effective keywords and trends. Thus, it is easier for writers to tailor their content that resonates with their target audience and meets their needs; in addition, it achieves high rankings in search results thanks to the AI algorithms.
We are seeing only the tip of the iceberg. AI tools are various and they continue to expand as new technologies emerge every day, from proofreading and content generation tools to advanced data analysis platforms. This rapid expansion of AI tools means that writers have access to a wide range of growing array of resources that help facilitate and enhance productivity and creativity and optimise performance.
Here are some of the tools that help content writers:
Jasper
Jasper.ai is an advanced software platform for writers that helps generate content that is SEO friendly and offers multiple templates and workflows for any specific needs. It is ideal for marketing content as it gives up-to-date information and cites sources. Another feature of Jasper is the ability to give it some text to imitate or create multiple voices so it produces different contents based on the medium you are looking for. Additionally, it can remember a certain style of writing and produce a similar content.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is a powerful tool that can create multiple drafts on a certain topic. It can form headlines, generate blog posts, headlines, or a single paragraph, which can be a good starting point for writers to create their content.
Grammarly
Grammarly can be connected with Microsoft Word and Chrome, so it is handy in terms of spotting spelling and grammar errors and it provides suggestions for improvement. It also simplifies sentences and fixes punctuation errors, and it has a built-in plagiarism checker.
AI as a Disruptive Threat
AI continues to evolve and it is starting to take higher-level cognitive tasks and handle more complex endeavours and strategic planning. However, one might be concerned about the immense potential of AI tools. Think about the risks associated with over-reliance on AI!
A research conducted by Science Advances in 2024 to investigate how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories revealed that the model was only helpful to some extent. Surprisingly, the model improved the productivity of and creativity of writers who were less creative.
The stories of writers who were already creative were not improved much. The model also provides different writers with similar stories which threatens the originality and genuinity of these stories. Anil Doshi, an assistant professor at the UCL School of Management in the UK, and one of the contributors to the research said, “we see this leveling effect where the least creative writers get the biggest benefit, but we don’t see any kind of respective benefit to be gained from the people who are already inherently creative.”
Further, according to Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University, who specialises in AI and creativity, AI-generated stories usually have similar semantics and content, and they are long and full of telltale giveaways and often stereotypes. He says, “these kinds of idiosyncrasies probably also reduce the overall creativity. Good writing is all about showing, not telling. AI is always telling.” Therefore, if all or most of the content we read is generated by AI, it will become more homogenous as they will be produced by models trained on the same corpus.
Conclusion
The same tools that ease the writing process and boost productivity and creativity could diminish human input, leading to losing genuinity and originality. Writers might be concerned it might steal their jobs too!
The increasing automation of tasks performed by humans raises concerns about job security among market professionals. However, as Oliver Hauser, a professor at the University of Exeter Business School, says “just because technology can be transformative, it doesn’t mean it will be.”
Nevertheless, adopting AI should be adopted with careful balance, without overlooking its potential dangers and threats to human integrity, authenticity and creativity. Remember, AI will not steal your job, but someone who harnesses its power will!
