Everywhere you turn, artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic—on social media, the news, and even at work.
A lot of these discussions include talking about AI for writers—both how writers use AI, and whether or not the technology will reduce the need for human-crafted content over time. If you’re a content writer or a creative writer, you might be wondering what the rise of AI means for your livelihood.
Will AI eventually replace human writers? Do we need to fear it? Or is AI a tool that can help anyone become a better writer … even folks who already write for a living?
The answer is nuanced, but ultimately, it all comes down to one thing: recognizing that AI writing software is just a tool—and that you’re in control of how you use it.
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1. Brainstorm ideas
Because developers trained ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools on large portions of the internet, they can be a great source of article ideas.
These aren’t new ideas—they’re probabilistic sentences that draw upon existing content—but they can get your own creative juices flowing.
Rather than saying “give me five ideas for an article about email marketing,” you can improve results by giving the AI additional context about who your audience is and how you plan to write the article.
The AI tool can then use these data points to improve its predictions and come up with ideas you can use as a jumping-off point during the text generation process.
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2. Conduct research
While AI writing tools can hallucinate, or provide answers that aren’t factually accurate, they’re still a useful partner when it comes to sifting through your research. Once you locate text sources, such as webpages and PDF documents, upload them to your chat tool of choice and start asking the AI questions about the docs.
ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools can:
- Summarize multi-page PDFs
- Extract data
- Answer your questions about uploaded files
OpenAI even has “data analyst” and “document assistant” GPTs available to help make this process even easier. You can find them by logging in to your ChatGPT account and clicking “Explore GPTs” in the left sidebar.
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3. Conduct basic grammar editing and proofreading
AI copywriting tools can also help you self-edit your work, which can boost your grammar and writing skills.
You can get editing and review help from AI in three notable ways:
- Engage in an ongoing conversation with a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. Because these tools keep your conversation history, you can use the same chat thread from initial ideation all the way through final review. This way, the AI has solid context around what you’re writing, its tone, and how it should sound.
- Start a quick conversation with your generative AI tool of choice and ask it to parse a sentence, act as a grammar checker, or provide dictionary and thesaurus results.
- Build a custom GPT (this requires a paid ChatGPT Plus account) and tell it to look for your most common mistakes, errors, or words you don’t want to use.
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4. Write headlines
Even though you may have been working as a writer for the better part of two decades, I still get stuck when it comes time to write a catchy heading. For whatever reason, I’ve always found this to be one of the hardest parts of my job.
AI writing tools can help with this. While I don’t use the AI’s outputs directly, seeing lots of options and versions can help me get closer to my own final copy.
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5. Generate blog outlines
Once you’ve figured out what topic you plan to write about—or even have a headline ready to go—you can then ask an AI writing tool to generate an outline.
You can also ask the AI to expand on an existing outline and add more details—and even references, if your tool of choice connects to the internet.
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6. Explain complex topics in new ways
Generative AI can even help you better understand the topics you’re writing about, especially if the tool you’re using is connected to the internet. In this way, it functions similarly to a search engine—but one that can create a summary of the results.
All you need to do is type your question into a new chat with the AI and begin “discussing” all of your related questions.
You can even ask it to do tasks you don’t know how to complete, such as creating an example code block for an article.
That said, remember that when an AI tool doesn’t connect to the internet, its “knowledge” only goes up to the point at which its training data ends. In Claude 3, for example, this cutoff is August 2023.
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7. Repurpose existing content
If you’re a writer who’s responsible for creating lots of different kinds of copy—from long-form guides to email headlines—you know how time-consuming it can be to create every asset you need.
AI writing tools make this process easier. I find that it makes the most sense to start by creating the longest piece of content first (either by yourself or with the help of an AI writing software tool) and then ask AI to help you break it down into shorter things like:
- Instagram captions
- YouTube scripts
- LinkedIn posts
- Email newsletters
This is where a tool like Jasper comes in particularly handy, as it’s already trained on common content structures and formats. You can still do this with a tool like ChatGPT, though—you just need to be very specific about what you want, and give the AI some examples.
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8. Speed up repetitive tasks
If you repeat the same time-consuming tasks over and over as part of your work, you may be able to use AI to speed up the process.
As a writer, you may ask AI to do things like:
- Create a content brief template you can use for all of your projects
- Draft the template for a weekly client update email or Slack message
- Write the copy to explain various metrics you’ll include in a report
You can take the core functionality of a tool like ChatGPT further by building custom GPTs or using custom prompts developed by a machine learning pro or prompt engineer.
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9. Localize your content for different audiences
Besides reformatting your content for different media or channels, you can also use AI to help you localize your writing.
If you or your clients have a global audience, localization can help you better connect with readers, customers, and users in a variety of countries.
Localization may look like asking a generative AI tool to:
- Update a document from British English spelling to American English
- Replace all dollar amounts listed in an article with the equivalent amount in euros
- Replacing an FAQ section with new questions specific to a new country
- Edit your document for the correct grammar, slang, and spelling used by speakers of a particular dialect
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10. Create character profiles
AI tools aren’t just useful for content marketing—they can help in the creative writing process, too.
One great way to use generative AI in your creative work is to ask it for help with creating character profiles.
Whether you’ve got some loose notes on a character that you’d like to solidify into a profile, or you’re completely starting from a blank slate, a tool like ChatGPT can help you work through the ideation process.
For example, you could ask the AI to take your notes on a character idea and turn it into a full-fledged profile, complete with family tree and physical description.
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11. Simulate dialogue between characters
You can also use generative Al to simulate dialogue. This can be helpful from a creative perspective and a marketing one.
For example, you could ask ChatGPT to create a conversation between two personas that represent your target audience—and then turn the output into a short commercial.
If you’re writing creatively, you could ask an AI text generator to develop an example of a conversation between two fictional characters. This can be helpful if you’re experiencing writer’s block when it comes time to write an important conversation in a story.
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12. Add unique images to your work
You can use AI to boost your writing in ways that don’t even involve words, too. If you have a great blog post that you’re ready to publish, but aren’t finding the right stock image, you can explore using AI. A number of AI writing tools—including Jasper, Gemini, and ChatGPT—have the ability to generate images.
Once you know how to prompt an AI image generator, you can create all kinds of graphics—including ones that are sized for social media posts, blog headers, and more.
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13. Get feedback on your writing skills
AI writing assistants can also give you feedback on your writing quality, readability, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. Purpose-specific tools can be helpful here. If you write a lot of SEO content, you may find that a tool like Clearscope or Surfer (which integrates with Jasper) gives you the most detailed feedback.
Creative writers might like ProWritingAid, as its analysis compares their writing to a favorite author’s— and provides feedback on things like plot structure and pacing.
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