I had this post in my drafts for a while, to be exact for two years now it sits in my backlog. Back then, AI was the hyped technology everyone was talking and posting about. The loudest voices were the ones that said it will take over and replace thousands of jobs over the upcoming years, how it will literally change everything, and that we are all not prepared for it. I do not have the data, but my impression is that it did not take over as much jobs as experts predicted. Besides that, it produced a lot of nonsense, caused harm, and provided a lack of transparency. Loads of companies within the field kept growing, making a ton of money on users' costs, as they scraped data and trained their models on that data.

The New York Times sued OpenAI, Perplexity lied about respecting sites that block their bot scraping data after a The Verge report appeared that got initiated by a research from Robb Knight, Microsoft's CEO of AI said that it is ok to steal content on the web, and there are countless more stories of AI companies bypassing web standard to scrape publisher sites. EU Digital Markets Act identified so many privacy concerns regarding Apple Intelligence, that Apple decided to not ship it the EU at all. Multiple news outlets already reported that the AI will increase the energy consumption of data centers remarkable. A ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. According to a report by World Economic Forum, the computational power required for sustaining AI's rise is doubling roughly every 100 days, it is imperative that we balance the progression of AI with the imperatives of sustainability, however it also delivers ideas, steps, and foundations that we can lay out today to manage AI and its green transition.

This and a lot of other issues that came with the rise of AI, make it hard to have a balanced and healthy approach to that technology. I remain skeptical and critical, while also being open to such technologies. However, I do not think AI is going to replace my favorite writers, since I am reading what they are writing for a reason. I also agree with Ted Chiang that AI is not going to make art, as an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence. However, it is in my nature and part of the work I do at Creativerly to explore new technologies and apps. Therefore, this post (which initially should have given you an overview of all the AI-powered writing apps) will focus on the current state and issues of AI-powered writing apps, exploring why we should or should not use them, how they changed the industry, concerns, and their effects on creative work.

The rise of AI-powered writing apps

With the rise of AI in 2022, it felt like that the writing sector got influenced the most. Suddenly, loads of AI-powered writing apps entered the market. While most of them focused simply on generating content, over the past two years, they shifted their focus, as most of them started focusing on marketing and SEO content creation. However, there are others that do want to take the creative work off your hands, providing you with a long-form writing AI assistant, and taking you from notes to complex documents in no time (crazy). Besides that, those tools became more accessible and easier to use, which led to not only many businesses turning to them for content creation, but also individuals who prefer quantity over quality started increasingly using them.

As if the internet would not already get flooded with content every single day, suddenly an increasing number of content that lacks creativity and originality got added on top of that, because of the ease of letting AI write for you.

One of the AI-powered writing apps I stumbled across back in 2022 was Frase. It states that it helps and empowers content creators to go from keyword to well-researched, SEO-optimized articles faster and better. Now, while I kind of get the idea of SEO from a business-standpoint, i.e. you are selling something and you wand to get indexed by search engines, so users can find your articles, fully SEO-optimized articles, using multiple keywords over and over again, are the ones I do not enjoy reading at all. In fact, it feels like SEO ruined the internet. Among Frase's features you find the AI Article Writer, which as the name implies generates full articles by using SERP search or your data. Additionally, it will analyze the top of Google search results for your target search query. After that, it uses that information to improve the quality of your AI-generated article. While it seems like the intention of that tool is to help you with the content creation, meaning there are still creative tasks that need to get done by yourself, it does not really hide the fact that it can generate full, research-driven, and as Frase states, "high-quality" articles. It is debatable, if a fully SEO-optimized article actually can deliver such a high-quality. I doubt that whenever you perform a search query that the first page on Google provides you with something that fits the term "high-quality".

The fact that something like this exists is kind of mind-blowing, since it urges users and actually gives them all the tools they need, to create multiple articles based on just a couple of inputs. With tools like Frase, it feels like people are building something others can use to flood the internet with even more content.

Writesonic operates in a similar realm. It gives you access to the AI Article Writer and claims to help you write factually accurate articles with real-time data that drives traffic. To achieve that, all you have to do is enter a topic, select references, primary keywords, a title, secondary keywords, and add some configurations. After that, Writesonic is ready to simply generate the article for you. Writing those lines feels bonkers. That is not how we should approach AI in the realm of writing. To create articles that are joyful to read, it needs creative work, personal touches and opinions, bits of weirdness and playfulness, and especially, they need to be written by a human, who solved a problem and decided to write about how they solved it, a human who shares their expertise in a certain field, a human who has a unique perspective to share, or not, since that is also fine. That is the kind of writing I like to consume, and which provides value for the readers. There is no doubt, that AI-generated articles often lack that human touch, personal connection, and playfulness.

See, and that is the reason why I do not understand why a company would prefer any kind of AI-generated content, over the sheer blissful, lovely, fun, and personal lines written by a copywriter to attract potential users.

AI does not turn you into a writer

Your writing is yours, and we should do everything to make sure it will stay like that. AI-powered writing apps promise you to write hundreds of articles every single day. There are even tools like Sudowrite, which claims to give you the power to write a novel from start to finish, in a week. Let me tell you, if you used a tool like that, you still have not written a novel, you simple leveraged a tool and a technology to do so, and chances are high it is fueled by OpenAI and trained on the original and personal writing from others.

Writing is one of the most creative practices that exists. Suddenly, we went from enjoying every single second of this creative practice, to handing it over to a computer doing it all for us. That is also one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to AI-powered writing apps: those apps will not assist you with creativity. They are trained on scraped material from here and there to produce central and biased ideas. I realized that when I was playing around with Lex, and AI-powered writing app founded by Nathan Baschez, who also founded Every (a writing collective publishing various topics, however as of recently they doubled down on reporting on AI and embracing it in all its glory). It has this feature where you can type "+++" whenever you experience Writer's Block, and Lex will magically continue whatever you have written before that. To no one's surprise, I did not have success with it: the sentences and paragraphs it suggested were bland, unsubstantial, and most of the time it used words and styles that did not fit at all to whatever I fueled it with.

Funnily enough if you ask ChatGPT how AI writing apps are changing the industry (let us assume that it is doing that, for now), it answers that they are increasing efficiency in content creation (there are various content creators, writers, content marketing agencies, etc. which all advocate against adopting AI in their workflows), creating accessibility for non-professional writers (well, I would not call myself a professional writer, but I assume you get better at writing by simply writing, and by reading a lot, but I doubt you become a professional writer by letting AI do the work for you), and they are having an impact on traditional writing processes (what is wrong with "traditional" writing processes so that we need AI-powered writing tools that are helping us to create "modern" writing processes).

Writer's block, distractions, strategies – AI is not the solution

Whenever I read articles in which the authors wrote about the benefits of using AI-powered writing apps they were talking about how it positively impacts creative work, as they can use those apps as brainstorming and ideation tools, and they can help to overcome writer's block. Beyond that, a lot of people embrace the ability to use those apps to do AI-powered grammar correction and get suggestions based on different writing styles. However, we had that for years, without the need of LLM's trained on the creative work of others.

I kind of get the idea of using those apps for brainstorming or ideation. Although writing is such a personal process for me, sometimes I talk with my partner about my writing ideas and get some inputs from her whether the direction I want to take in my next blog post makes sense or not. Most of nowadays AI-powered writing apps have an AI-chat interface, which you can use to talk to AI and ask it questions about your article and your written words. During my rather short explorations of those apps, this workflow felt useful. I am no professional writer, and I experience imposter syndrome constantly, so having an assistant to talk to and get direct inputs for my writings felt actually quite good. And I do get that finding inspiration or motivation to begin can be hard. I experienced the troubles of articulating my own ideas, and I often felt uncertain about the arguments in my posts.

However, that is actually the creative work. It is totally normal to experience those things. Everyone does. People have been experiencing it for years, and they always found ways on their own to overcome those things.

Again, I am not a professional writer, but I have been writing long enough on the internet to say that purposeful thinking, researching, thought mapping, reading, planning, and outlining leads to great writing. And whenever you feel stuck, I recommend taking a breather, getting some fresh air, getting back to it at a later stage, the next day, or even the next week, instead of getting some bland, generic, and impersonal recommendations on how to continue the article from AI.

Writer's block is often a byproduct of experiencing distraction from different areas. If you decide to use AI in such a situation, you are not overcoming writer's block, you are not identifying the distraction, and you are not getting rid of the distraction. In fact, you are adding a distraction to your writing processes, since now you have to deal with whatever AI suggested you to write about, although it might be the complete opposite of what you initially have in mind.

Is there a way to have a balanced approach to AI-powered writing apps?

I keep this section short and to the point. In general, I am open for new technologies, and I love exploring apps. However, AI-powered writing apps, and AI general has brought a lot of harm, plagiarism, it made things up, created nonsense, led to an even bigger flood of bland and generic content, and it consumes a ton of energy. So, is there a way to have a balanced approach to AI? Nope.

The goal should be to stop AI copying the work from others, stop training LLM's on the work of others, and aim to make it green.

Alright, the only balanced approach to AI-powered writing apps I can think about, is to have a local model, trained on your own writing, and your own writing only. Based on that, you could get suggestions based on what you have written before, rather than what others have created, it would analyze your style, and would suggest more ideas based on that. However, my technical knowledge reaches its limits to further think and develop this idea, the advantages and disadvantages, the capabilities, features, etc.

So, what is the state of AI-powered writing apps?

Well, it is devastating to see how much those kind of apps are getting praised, endorsed, and supported. If you have been writing in the past, publishing your writings, and you do exactly that still today, you do not need AI in your writing processes. Those processes are personal, and they are fine as they are. AI will not turn you into a better writer, it will not make you more creative, it will not help you overcoming writer's block. Reading makes you better a writer, writing makes you a better writer, publishing your writing and getting feedback from others makes you better writer.

Writing is creative work, and it can be hard sometimes, writing is incredible personal, and we should everything to keep it that way.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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