AI Writer Review: Oldy but a Goody?

AI driven content apps are all the rage right now, and AI Writer is one of the original ones to market itself as such. The app promises a simple user interface, automatic writing, and some additional features that will hopefully make it stand out from the pack (which is growing rapidly!). How do we find AI Writer? Do we like it? Read on to find out…

What is AI Writer?

AI writer is almost like the grandparent in the AI content marketing space, having been around since 2015. It’s world must have changed a lot in the past year, what with massive tech startups such as Conversion.AI and Copy.AI smashing down the door and becoming direct competitors!

You can find the AI Writer app over at AI-Writer.com, and it is a web only based service.

AI Writer is, at its core, a fancy way of saying “automated content writing tool”, which you can use to generate blog posts and articles using the speed of AI automation. How it stands out from a lot of its competition is that it focuses mainly on long form content when a lot of other AI writing tools are more short form based (i.e. Facebook ad copy and blog post titles).

Most of the other tools are using Open AI and GTP-3, something that is openly known as not being designed for long form content. As AI Writer is so established in this market, it does make me wonder if they are using their own custom AI algorithm or something. Anyway, the most important thing is the quality of their text output, something we will find out about later in the review.

As well as being an article writing application, they also offer the ability to re-word content as well.

Who is Behind AI Writer?

It was quite hard to find out about who is behind AI Writer. They don’t seem to have the presence of some of the other more hyped tools. However, with a bit of digging I found out they were started in Regensburg, Germany. If you don’t know anything about Regensburg, they are more famous for their work manufacturing the BMW 3 series (there’s a massive BMW factory there!).

With a bit more digging, I found out that Fabian Langer is the brains behind the operation (or he started it anyway) and that he is also an IT consultant these days. That’s about it on the research front 🙂

What is AI Writer’s Pricing?

Interestingly, AI Writer have gone for a subscription only model, meaning that you can’t just buy credits for the content adhoc. The subscription tiers start at $19 a month for 40 pieces of content up to $49 a month for 120 pieces. As this is purely an article writer, this basically means the number of articles or blog posts you can write with the service in a month.

One thing I don’t like with the pricing is the fact that on the public page above it just says that the plans can generate approximately 40 and 120 pieces of content a month. But look at the pricing page you see as a trial member just before you sign up. Can you see the big difference?

You see how they changed it to ‘computing units’ and gave a range of articles per month that is totally different!

AI Content Test

As regular readers will know, one of the first things I like to do with these content tools is an AI text output test. The quality of the content is the major factor for me in these AI writers, so I want to cut to the chase as soon as possible and see how they stack up.

This time will be slightly different, as AI Writer outputs full articles, not short blurbs. So today I will stack WriteSonic against it as they have a somewhat similar feature.

As always, the subject of the articles I ask the system to generate is based around ”Will Ai Writers Take Over The World?”.

AI Writer only asked me for the short title, so this is what I gave it. The end result was a 802 word article. I won’t paste the whole thing here, but just the intro to give you an idea.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most promising technologies in human-machine interaction, but its potential to perform tasks that humans do has generated much debate. While it has been accepted that AI can and will one day replace humans in many jobs, there is also a heightened concern that it will become so powerful and powerful that the writer in the workplace will be replaced by AI.
According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, automation could displace 75 million jobs worldwide, but could also create 133 million new jobs by 2022. A former Microsoft and Google executive who is now a prominent investor in a Chinese AI startup believes artificial intelligence will likely replace 50 percent of human jobs. The World Economic Forum also predicts that the rich world will lose five million jobs to robots by 2020, while a group of AI experts in Scientific American estimates that 40% to 500 large companies will disappear within a decade.

AI-Writer.com Output Article

I have to say that is some decent (if a little unstructured) writing.

Now let’s see how WriteSonic does. The process is a little different there, as they walk me through several wizards to create and choose the different parts I need for a blog post.

What I got was a just over 600 word article, here is an excerpt from it:

Although I got something slightly shorter than from AI-Writer, it seemed to have a lot more structure.

What I Like about AI Writer

Long Form Content Focus

As GTP-3 is not so hot on long form content, and that is what most current AI writers use, it can be hard finding one of these services that focuses on writing long form content such as blog posts. So it is great seeing a service like AI Writer doing just that.

Simple To Use

There are no complex forms to fill in here, just a simple process of entering your keyword related title and letting the app do its thing. It’s actually amazing what they could come up with, bearing in mind how little input I had to give.

The user interface is also very simple and elegant, a far cry from some of the super complex AI writer dashboards I have seen recently!

Decent Output

As alluded to above, when I saw how little I needed to give AI Writer in order for it to generate an article, I wasn’t expecting much. I have tried some other article generators like this (Kafkai i’m looking at you) and they have literally outputted garbage 🙂

So I was pleasantly surprised to get something on topic and reasonably well written.

Decent Re-Writer

Not many services allow you to rewrite up to as many as 1750 words, and AI Writer does do this to a decent standard. It still requires some human editing of course, but this makes AI Writer a decent alternative to other spinners out there. Most AI writing platforms only allow you to rewrite short paragraphs.

API Access

It is quite rare to find an AI Writer that gives you API access. Although still in early Alpha, this is something that AI Writer does, so it could be useful if you wanted to integrate its automated content systems into your other apps. With a little bit of coding knowledge this could be done.

What I Don’t Like about AI Writer?

Un-Structured

Although the output was decent it was also very unstructured. I ended up with a wall of text that I will need to go through and decifer. It didn’t have any subheadings, so I will need to go through and add these. I feel like this will take me way longer to polish up than the output I got from Writesonic, for example. That already had sub headings and was well structured.

Bad Readability

Of course, with the state of current AI tech available to the likes of you and I, we don’t expect flawless writing to come out. Although of course the better generated writing is the less we as humans need to edit it.

I got Flesch Reading Ease and Gunning Fog score’s for both the AI Writer and WriteSonic output and below are the results.

AI Writing App	Flesch Reading Ease Score	Gunning Fog Score
WriteSonic	67.6 (standard/average)	10.2 (fairly easy to read)
AI Writer	50.2 (fairly difficult to read)	13.6 (hard to read)

I look at readability scores very seriously when dealing with platforms that claim to offer AI generated long form content, and as you can see AI writer is falling way short of Writesonic here.

Not Secure

Weirdly for a modern online business, the main website of AI Writer doesn’t have a valid SSL certificate at the time of writing. This gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the service is abandoned (a bit like Articoolo that I reviewed recently). Unlike Articoolo, at least the copyright date in the footer of their website is up to date, so this may just be an oversight. And there is a valid SSL certificate once you log in as a member, it’s just the public part of the site that has this issue.

Deceptive Pricing

As I highlighted above, they have a totally different pricing page that they show to the public and trial members just before they sign up! Why aren’t they the same? Seems dodgy to me.

Should You Subscribe to AI Writer?

Although AI Writer had some good points, it lags behind some of its modern AI writing competitors. The output it gives is too unstructured, and the text will require much more editing than some of the other AI writing tools I use. This was also reflected in the poor readability scores that AI Writer got, a key metric when generating longer form content.

The current state of AI is not the best for longer form content, and this is a platform that focuses on it almost exclusively. Don’t get me wrong, its decent, but it’s just too much hassle for me to edit frankly. At that point, I might as well write the content myself.

Having said that, I might consider it as a content re-writer, as it seemed to give better results than a typical article spinner (even those that claim to use AI).

What Should I Use Instead Then?

Personally, I like to use Writesonic and ShortlyAI. As you can see from this review, the output from Writesonic for long form articles is among the best in the industry right now. And ShortlyAI offers a great way to tag team edit content without relying on full generation from AI. It acts more as a writing assistant than a full on text generator.

Actually, I have a pretty nice system going at the time of writing. I will make the basic blog post in Writesonic and then export it to ShortlyAI to polish up and add to the content. For me, it’s a match made in heaven!! You can check out both of these services for yourself by clicking below.