A guide to the 5 best AI text generator tools
By Martin Jones
Digital marketing consultant and web development business owner with 21 years running Red Design. In this series, I’ll be describing the new AI marketing tools and how they can help your business.
My disclaimer
This is my top 5, as of now. However, the very nature of these AI text generator products means that competitors are entering the market each month.
It is also worth mentioning that most of these applications are built around Chat GPT with a dashboard that makes it easier to use. These apps give you somewhere to manage the content you create and the tools to help you write your prompts.
One last thing to remember; rubbish in, rubbish out. So you need to think carefully about your prompts and you need to cast a human eye on it when it’s done.
Grammarly has been around for a long time now and was an early example of a front-end AI tool. Ok, so it’s a grey area as to whether or not it’s strictly a marketing tool. However, it’s worth a mention as it can be easily integrated into anything you do in a web browser.
Benefits: I’ve been using the Grammarly extension in my Google Chrome browser for years. It saves time proofing reading my website copy and SEO details as I work, and it uses AI to do it. It checks your grammar and spelling automatically. If you to make your writing better, say for readability (in-page SEO) purposes it can improve sentence structure also. It’s a great writing assistant. Give Grammarly a try.
Drawbacks: It uses an American language database and so gives the occasional false positives. Browser integration is a little bit complicated.
Ink (or Ink For All) is a lot more than a text generator. It has a few nice bits of functionality that the others don’t. One of my favourite parts of the app is its AI protection tool. This is designed to identify AI content and plagiarism. It also has an SEO optimization tool and content planner. It also provides WordPress integration, which really makes it stand out from its competitors. You get a good mix of other tools, like a text generation tool, a keyword research module, an optimisation function and image generation.
Benefits: It has a pretty straightforward interface. A number of SEO-related tools and plagiarism detection. A wide selection of writing templates. So far, it still has a free version.
Drawbacks: It sometimes gets product descriptions wrong. It only supports English and has some features still in Beta testing. Users find integration with WordPress difficult.
Chat GPT has been in the news every day for months as the world has become fixated on the benefits and threats of AI. If you have to generate copy for a website, email campaign, brochure or even a difficult email, Chat GPT is indispensable. It is trained using internet text data, including articles, books, websites, forums, social media posts and more. An earlier version of the chatbot was indeed trained on Wikipedia, which is often inaccurate, though this is not the case any more.
Benefits: Chat GPT writes human-like sentences and has a vast database of information. It means you can have a quick starting point and don’t have to start with a blank piece of paper. Just drop a prompt into the text field at the bottom of the page and your text comes back in seconds.
Drawbacks: It often provides incorrect answers and biased answers, as its data is not moderated. It lacks human insight and has no sense of context which leads to it providing text about the wrong subject. Content can be detected as non-human, which may, in the future affect SEO. It can be very repetitive, recycling information for huge amounts of users. It is perfect tool for plagiarism. It is not up-to-date with information only as recent as September 2021. This means it cannot provide information about current events or real-time news.
Formerly called Jarvis, Jasper is a big player in the generative AI market. They have acquired other AI writing tools like Headlime and Shortly AI. Jasper can be used for image generation, though its real strength is in content writing.
Benefits: It has a lot of templates for creating blogs, articles, books, scripts, and more. It walks you through the prompt writing step-by-step. Gets you past writer’s block. It has a Command feature, that works like an AI assistant that can supply up-to-date information like weather reports, or the cost of a pint of milk. Best of all it combines information from multiple AIs; Open AI (Chat GPT), Bard, Stability AI and Anthropic. Also, it can reference Google Search. Finally, it has editorial checks.
Drawbacks: It is complicated to use, with a steep learning curve. Content needs to be fact-checked, despite its editorial checks. Sometimes the output doesn’t make any sense, and you have to make further edits.
Sudowrite is a writing tool for creative writers. It helps you generate text content, rewrite existing content and generate ideas. It’s one of the better AI content generators.
Sudowrite is designed around long-form writing; novels, short stories and anything with a plot or character arc.
Benefits: It uses text fields and other tools which help with prompt writing. For instance, you can write a story and it can generate ideas for plot twists. It can help you elaborate on pre-existing content when you need to expound on a subject or need a higher word count for SEO purposes. It can rewrite existing content. It can also generate metaphors. It can write a whole novel in a week. You can adjust the pace of the story. Offers very quick rewrites.
Drawbacks: Plot ideas may be based on existing stories. It uses Chat GPT, so you are paying for an interface, rather than the underlying tool. It does not learn from your writing to train itself. Who would want to read an AI novel?
