How to Use AI for Writing Articles [ESSENTIAL TIPS]

It seems as though AI has been around for as long as the internet itself. And while its adoption has been slow, that doesn’t mean it’s a dead-end technology. In fact, in recent years it’s been steadily gaining momentum as one of the ways to cut down on costs within the main business I thrive in, content marketing. Naturally, I was interested to see if an AI application could write a coherent and believable blog article. After trying this extensively, here are my tips for the best way to use AI in your articles 🙂

What is an AI Writer?

An AI writer, or “content generator” as some people call it, is a robot that can generate content for you. This robot will be using an AI algorithm (often based on OPEN AI right now) to generate the content based on the inputs you give it. For over worked content creators that are used to creating this from scratch, it’s a godsend. This AI writer will help you create new content within minutes, rather than hours.

Some of the best AI writers are based on bespoke algorithm models, but these are often very expensive and out of reach of most bloggers and content managers (unless you know how to code it yourself). Therefore, most people end up with commercially produced AI writing platforms that can produce different types of content based on the inputs given by the user. I like to use ShortlyAI, but there are many others such as Writesonic and Conversion.AI to choose from.

These are not the best AI writers on Earth, but they are the most commonly used and affordable options for mere mortals like you and I 🙂

How to Choose an AI Writer for Articles?

Article or Blog Intro Function

As this article is talking about writing full articles with an AI writer, this means you need to find one that has suitable options.

You can either look for one that has the ‘write blog post’ or ‘write article’ function, but frankly these are few and far between (as this is stretching the ability of most publicly available AI writers right now).

As most AI writers on the market at this moment are more suited to shorter form content, the other option is to make a content brief yourself and then fill in the gaps using the AI writer. This is the more realistic option for a lot of AI offerings on the market now.

SEMRush have an excellent article on writing good content briefs if you need help there. Then simply feed your titles and subheadings into the blog intro or text expander tools on your AI writer and you should be golden. Most good tools will generate several blurbs each time, meaning you can usually find at least one that is good.

Don’t Get Mixed up with Grammar Checkers!

Don’t mix up these AI writing services with grammar checking or more passive writing assistants. Grammarly is a massive one, but these applications are only there to correct what you write rather than write for you.

Choose an AI writer without Credit Limits!

At the time of writing, a lot of people seem to be raving about a new tool on the block called Conversion.AI. But for me, not only did I find it had lower quality outputs than my current favorite tools, they also had a hard and fast credit limit. AI writing is a new phenomenon and is far from perfect. Even with the best tools, you will still find errors and need to regenerate content. In a tool with limited credits, you will use this up quickly.

This is yet another reason that I love ShortlyAI. Not only does it have quality output, but I get unlimited credits for the same price as the base Conversion.AI plan. This proves that you shouldn’t always follow the hype on these tools!

Problems with using AI to Write Articles

Dont Be Too Reliant!

There is a reason why many of the tools out there are geared towards shorter form content. Typically, the algorithm used to generate content is not suited to producing full articles. Even some of the shorter form content spewed out of these tools can be far from perfect (this is why a lot of them generate several blurbs at a time, so you can choose the best).

Therefore, if there are people relying too heavily on AI writing tools, they will end up with a lot of low end content that will probably struggle to rank in Google. I am sure that perfect AI generated article content will come at some point, but we are not there yet. Be aware of this fact!

See AI Writers as Complimentary

As soon as people get out of the idea of AI writers generating everything from scratch, the results will be significantly better. See your AI writing service as something akin to ‘Grammarly on steroids’, and use it as a tool to augment what you write rather than be the sole source.

This is the only way you can get the most out of your AI writing service, and will prevent a lot of the bad content that comes from not understanding how to use such tools.

ShortlyAI integrates its tool alongside my writing perfectly, unlike the other tools I have tried. It has a simple editor that lets you type away and use a ‘write for me’ function whenever you see fit. The results I have had here have been some of the best I have had for any writing tool. There is no jumping around from an editor to the AI writing tool and back again, it’s all down in one place.

I would much rather this than having to go through and edit and completely change articles or blurbs fully written by AI.

Junk In= Junk Out

A very important point to make here with AI writing for articles is that if you provide the tool junk inputs, you are likely to get junk out as well. So whenever a tool asks for text inputs to help it know what you want, make sure to do these well!

Plagarism

A lot of these AI writers currently on the market are pulling from a database of hundreds of articles other people have written, meaning plagiarism can be an issue (especially for the lower quality tools).

Always double check your AI articles in the same way you check your own work. Make sure they are complete, well written and not plagiarised in any way. This is a crucial part of getting good results from AI writing services, and most people don’t pay attention to this.

Fake News

One thing I have noticed when using even the best AI writing tools, is the fact that they have a habit of pulling in fake information. This can happen in a number of ways, but one of the main reasons is that they are learning from other sources, and this means it could end up with false information.

In my time using AI writing tools, I have seen everything from fake recipes to fake product names related to whatever article I am trying to write.

This means that you need to make sure you check your AI generated article content thoroughly and don’t just take it as gospel. I would always advise to check sources and information manually before publishing anything.

I have a feeling that unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that aren’t doing this, releasing a lot of effectively junk content on the internet! This is going to be a massive job for Google to block, and it is going to be difficult when there are so many ‘news’ websites out there that have been producing this kind of nonsense.

A lot of people are excited by using AI to write articles but don’t seem to fully understand the limitations of the current technology openly available. This means that a lot of people won’t get the results they want, and that is going to cause a lot of problems in the long run. Hopefully, after reading this article you won’t be one of those people 🙂

Robotic

For obvious reasons, some AI generated content can be a bit too straight laced and boring for your articles. Humour is not something AI has been well programmed to do. Like with a lot of things, this will improve with time. But right now make sure to add your own humour and personal stories to ‘jazz up’ any content generated by your AI writing tools.

In Summary

AI writers are a long way away from replacing the need for a human editor and writer. Unless you are a big company with massive budgets for bespoke AI writing models, I wouldn’t be using AI to write whole articles.

Instead, I would use it to either create chunks of content within an article or augment what you are writing (as my favorite tool ShortlyAI does).

If you are interested in my current favorite tool, you can click the button below to take a look at their official website yourself. This is the tool I am currently using to help write multiple articles or blog posts each day. It is shortening the time it takes me to write my content and also getting better results than I would normally achieve.