AI-Powered Digital Writing Tools
Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, Dean, Computer Science
Updated: May 2, 2024
Published: April 30, 2024
The past two years have yielded unprecedented growth of artificial intelligence (AI) across all industries. A recent McKinsey report on AI highlights a significant leap in its business adoption, reflecting how swiftly companies have embraced the technology to transform operations and foster innovation. This surge is driven by advancements in AI algorithms, data volume, and computational power, suggesting a deepening reliance on the technology for strategic advantage.
Content creation tools have burgeoned, demonstrating a meteoric rise not only in their sophistication but also in their application. AI’s capability to generate meaningful, contextually appropriate text has revolutionized many aspects of writing, from drafting articles and emails to creating complex reports.
Generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and Anthropic’s Claude, signify a transformative development in written content creation. Generative AI models are trained on large and diverse datasets that they use to learn patterns, structures, and nuances of content. These models, built upon neural networks, dissect training data to understand and replicate the complexity of natural language.
As a result, these tools can produce content that mirrors the training material, allowing them to create coherent written content, articles, product descriptions, and social media posts, as well as images, audio, and videos.
The use of generative AI in content creation affords significant advantages, leading to enhanced efficiency. The automation of routine tasks by generative AI facilitates content creation on a scale previously unattainable with traditional methods, allowing it to satisfy the demands of robust content strategies. AI’s speed and accuracy also significantly improve the output’s quality.
Along with its writing capabilities, generative AI also excels as an idea generator and a devil’s advocate. Its capacity to assimilate vast arrays of data and synthesize them into coherent narratives not only sparks creative ideation but also nurtures a constructive dialogue within the creative process. By adopting the mantle of a devil’s advocate, generative AI challenges established assumptions, thereby offering a multi-faceted perspective that is invaluable in scholarly and scientific pursuits. The integration of generative AI into cognitive workflows not only augments productivity but also elevates the quality and depth of intellectual inquiry.
Summarization of complex or lengthy datasets is another area where AI excels. ChatGPT is one tool that can generate a high-quality summary, as can Genei and Sharly, while Notta can convert audio files to text and then generate summaries, transcripts, meeting notes, and reports.
AI tools are also being used by enterprise marketing teams to enable marketing content creation. Jasper.ai creates custom and dynamic templated content and can adapt to a company’s brand voice. By integrating with a company’s knowledge base, Jasper.ai aids in generating cohesive and on-brand content at scale.
AI tools are also handling social media content development. HubSpot’s AI content writer specializes in copy for blogs, websites, and social media posts, while Copy.ai and Flick can both write new content and repurpose existing text into different formats. Meanwhile, Ocoya also writes captions and hashtags, while SEO.ai focuses on creating content that is search-engine optimized.
How are AI writing tools being incorporated in educational settings? They have been incorporated into educational settings to aid teachers in developing curricula, lesson plans, and discussion prompts. The George Lucas Educational Foundation highlights Curipod, Eduaide.ai, and Quizizz as especially useful for educators focused on creating classroom materials adapted to their students’ learning styles.
Additionally, several AI tools specialize in academic writing, including Studybay AI, MyStylus, and LumenWriter. These tools provide students with grammar and style suggestions, research assistance, advanced language generation, and help with citations.
Writers using AI tools must be aware of the ethics surrounding AI to ensure appropriate use of the technology. A recent article in ScienceDirect provides guidelines on using AI writing tools in academia, although its hints can be applied to any industry.
Plagiarism is a major concern connected to AI writing, and there are several tools available to help guard against it, including GPTRadar and Originality.ai. Popular tool Grammarly also has a plagiarism checker that runs alongside its citation generator and grammar/style features.
Although the proliferation of AI tools has increased efficiency and creativity for users in all industries, it still requires significant human oversight. AI-generated content can be inaccurate or even made up – a phenomenon termed “hallucinations.” Instead, as this article from Toolkits recommends, AI should be used to do routine tasks, while the more creative work is handled by humans.
Bernard Marr from Forbes agrees. “I believe there will always be a need for humans in the content creation process. After all, we’re storytellers and creators by nature. But those of us who learn to use generative tools to boost our creative potential will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t as we develop new ways of creatively expressing our thoughts and ideas.”
In conclusion, it can be safely said that in the rapidly evolving landscape of digital content creation, AI has become an indispensable ally. AI writing tools are here to stay.