Copy.AI Review: Leading the AI Content Revolution?

Welcome back. I am sure that most readers of this blog are, like me, either involved in or deeply interested in content marketing. AI writing applications have been literally lighting up this sector for the past year in a crazy hype train that leaves us all wondering when the human copywriter will be phased out (spoiler: we have nothing t oworry about lol). One of the main tools leading the charge right now is Copy.AI, so today I want to give my full and honest review of it for your reading pleasure 🙂

What is CopyAI?

CopyAI is an AI copywriting service that helps you generate marketing copy for your business. It uses natural-language generation to create content at the push of a button, with the aim to sound as ‘human like’ as possible. You just need to feed CopyAI with the keywords and topics you want to include in your copy, select a style, and it will produce a text output.

In order for these text outputs to be as accurate as possible, like many other AI writing companies, CopyAI have set up multiple content templates for different use cases. This will help them make sure that you are inputting the right information to get good results. In this business, unless you have a ‘God like AI’, if you put crap in you will probably get crap out 🙂

At the time of writing, they have over 60 content templates, including those for blog intros, video titles and landing page copy. This is literally the swiss knife for your marketing copy at this point.

As well as the regular web app that most competing tools use, Copy.AI also has a chrome extension to access the service. Although it should be noted that not all of the content templates are available on it.

Who is Behind Copy AI?

Like many of their competition, Copy.AI are a pretty new business being founded in 2020. It’s almost as if GTP-3 was released and everyone was like ‘oh snap, AI content marketing is actually possible now’ and startups literally started springing up everywhere 🙂

Chris Lu and Paul Yacoubian are the founding brains behind Copy.AI. When you look at their CV’s, they clearly have a lot of experience investing in all kinds of different startups since 2017. It seems they met whilst working at ESO Fund together and have been investing buddies ever since!

Copy.AI comes across as one of the ‘big dogs’ in this space, to me anyway! Along with Conversion.AI they seem to have the most financial backing, anyway. Their last round of seed funding was $2.9 million, which should give you an idea what I am talking about. It will be interesting during this review to see if this gives Copy.AI any advantage over the competition with all these extra research dollars.

How Much is Copy.AI?

The main copywriting plan is $49 a month, which will give you a full month of use. Alternatively, this price will go down to $35 if you are willing to pay for a year upfront. This plan comes with unlimited runs and access to their full suite of copywriting tools. They also offer a free trial for 7 days that will give you access to 100 runs (their version of credits) a day.

The AI Copy Test

The first thing I like to do when reviewing these AI copywriting tools is to check the quality of the text that they output. Above all else, this is the most important thing to me. It won’t matter if they have a sleek user interface or excellent value if the content they generate is crap 🙂

Let’s do a simple test to find out some ideas for titles or headlines you could use in a blog post or a video title. These will be along the lines of the seed key phrase ‘AI writers taking over the world.’ I am going to be comparing Copy.AI to my current favourite AI writing tools, WriteSonic and Shortly.AI. Let’s go!

These are the results I got from Copy.AI:

AI Writers Taking Over The World according to Elon Musk
Will AI Writers Take Over The World? (Part 1)
Will AI Writers Take Over the World?
How AI Writers Will Destroy the Human Race
3 Ways an AI writer can improve your site
The Good, The Bad and Them AI Writers
Two AI Writers Compete Against Each Other

Copy.AI Blog Title Listicle Tool

Now Let’s try the same in Writesonic:

AI Writers Will Take Over The World: What Writers Can Do Today
The Perils of AI Writers: What Happens When Machines Take Over?
The Future Is Now: What Artificial Intelligence Can Learn From Humans
The AI Writer That Will Take Over The World
The Rise of the AI Writers: When Computers Take Over From Humans
The Future of AI: How Writers Will Adapt (Or Die)
When AI Writers Take Over The World: The Pros and Cons of Automated Content

WriteSonic Blog Idea Tool

I think Writesonic is in the lead right now, but finally lets add in Shortly.AI’s results:

“AI Writers Killing Creative Processes: How Do We Save Ourselves?”

“The Novels of an AI Writer”

“An Analysis of the Future of AI Writers”

“AI Writers and the Ethics Behind Their Predictions”

“Gambling on the Success of AI Writers: A Risky Business”

“Will AI Writers Steal Our Jobs?”

“AI Writers and the Debate About Their Future”

“Why We Should Save AI Writers from Themselves”

“AI Authors Dealing with the Ethics of The Future”

“Beating AI Writers at Their Own Game: Are Readers Ready?”

“AI Writers Can Be Our Friends: How to Make Them So”

Shortly AI titles generated with the instruct command.

Just to be clear, all of these results were the first unfiltered results given by the tools. And Shortly.AI simply blew everyone out of the water there. Such a varied set of interesting and thought-provoking headlines! Love it. And I love how all I had to do was type a command into their editor to get them….like magic 🙂

What I Like about Copy.AI

Value

This particular AI tool has been priced very well, considering it is one of the biggest players in this space. It is also great to see that they are giving you unlimited credits to generate as much AI content as you need. AI is still new and trial and error is definitely a part of it. Having this freedom to generate at will is very important to me.

No Credit Card Needed!

Many of the competing tools ask you to enter a credit card in order to enjoy their trial. This is not a requirement for Copy.AI, who let you jump right in simply by making an account.

No Attempt at Long Form Content

I admire Copy.AI for not immediately jumping on the long form content band wagon like a lot of their competitors. Long form content goes against the ethos of Open AI and GTP-3 (what most of these tools are currently based on), so it is not an easy thing to do. Rather than jumping in with something subpar, it is good to see Copy.AI holding off.

What I don’t Like about Copy.AI

All Mouth and No Trousers (British slang of the day!)

Something I found out earlier this week with another big player in the AI content tool business (Conversion.AI), is also true here. Copy.AI is literally all mouth and no trousers. They make us think they are this high level tool with top-notch researchers behind them and yet the content they produce is so basic it’s almost laughable.

Go take a look at the text output I got from Copy.AI compared to Writesonic and Shortly.AI, they are clearly lagging behind with the quality of their algorithms. The thing is, they are all using the same base platform in GTP-3, it just seems that Copy.AI are not able to train their AI as well as the other two. They are certainly squeezing much less out of it.

Put simply, don’t believe the hype train with tools such as Copy.AI and Conversion.AI. If you go test the tools for yourself alongside other top AI content tools, you will see they are sadly lacking.

Too Much Input Required

This tool often asks for longer blurbs and detailed information to help improve the content they generate. I understand that some input from us will certainly help with this, but for me in Copy.AI it is too much. I spend way too much time filling in forms and less time generating content! When I see a tool is asking for so much input from me, I feel it is to make up for the fact that their AI isn’t trained as well!

Too Many Content Templates

Like so many other AI writing tools at the moment, Copy.AI is burying itself in a mountain of content templates. In this AI content arms race, they all seem to think that winning means pumping out as many as you can. For me, this becomes confusing fast! I would always go for fewer templates that are well thought out and high quality. ShortlyAI wins here as it has zero content templates!!

For example, for the AI text generation test above, I wanted a short headline for a blog post or video. I tried the ‘Blog ideas’ template and ended up with things that were more like mini descriptions and couldn’t be used as titles. So I turned to the ‘Video titles’ tool, but this generated the most basic and boring results that I thought it would be unfair to use them! Finally, I tried the ‘Blog Titles’ template, and this is where I got the best results.

I tried another template during my testing that was titled ‘change tone’. I was led to believe it would simply rewrite what I input in a different tone of voice, but when I tried it what I got was more of a reply to what I wrote.

You see how confusing it is to have to deal with so many of these templates? It may take time for you to find the right one, you might miss that a certain one exists (because the menu that lists them is so small). This is one of the reasons I love ShortlyAI right now, as they steer clear of this mess entirely.

BareBones Help Section

Frankly, the help section of their website is barebones at best. Although I understand they are a new company and need time to flesh this out in a better way.

Horrible User Interface

The user interface is not totally lost on me, but there are a couple of things that are bugging me way too much as I use the tool. Firstly, the list of over 60 content templates is way too small. I almost have to squint to read the list, and finding the template I want is a nightmare. Secondly, whenever I generate any text in Copy.AI it exports into this horrible series of boxes on the right side of my screen. I can hardly read what’s inside each box and need to scroll around these tiny boxes to do so. See what I mean below!

Should You Subscribe to Copy.AI?

Copy.AI gets a firm no from me. Navigating their sleek website and finding out about all their seed funding got me excited, but all to no avail. It seems there are several players out there in this market that like to hype themselves up but don’t have the product to back it up.

Yes, it is a decent value tool and they are generous with the free trial, but all of this pails into insignificance when I see the marketing text I get out. They have a lot of work to do if they are going to persuade me away from the other tools I am currently using, frankly! If I was their teacher, I would tell them ‘Could do better!’

So What AI Content Tool Should I Use?

If you want to do longer form content such as blog posts I would highly recommend ShortlyAI for that, as they go for a writing assistant approach where you effectively tag team with the AI, which works much better for this type of content. GTP-3 simply is designed to write large chunks alone 🙂 If you want marketing copy only and prefer having content templates rather than the openness of ShortlyAI’s editor, then WriteSonic would be better suited.

You can check either tool out for yourself by clicking the buttons below.