8 Best AI Copywriting Instruments (Beyond Chat GPT)

It seems like AI copywriting tools are everywhere, from content generators to ecommerce chatbots. With good reason: AI can save you a ton of time and money. Two things we all love, right?

But like most tools, AI copywriters are only as powerful as the person using them. Besides knowing how to use it, you need to know when to use AI copywriting and when it’s best to use your team’s real human brains.

Try these 8 AI copywriting tools to save time and supercharge your marketing efforts (without making you redundant).

What is AI copywriting?

AI copywriting is the process of using natural language processing software combined with machine learning capabilities to generate content for blog posts, social media, emails, scripts, and much more. Content written by AI copywriters is meant to sound like a human wrote it, but making it takes only a fraction of the time.

Who can benefit from AI copywriting?

That’s like asking, “Who can benefit from saving time and money?”

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: AI isn’t stealing our jobs. I’ve seen tons of chatter from other writers worried ChatGPT and other natural language model copywriters will render us all obsolete.

Kaleigh Moore sums up the truth well:

Another day, another post from a scared freelance writer who’s worried AI/ChatGPT will eat their lunch.

I’ve said it before and am here to say it again: We cannot compete with the robots; we can only use them to our advantage or double down on our areas of specialization. pic.twitter.com/MBLSd3jsfG

— Kaleigh Moore (@kaleighf) March 9, 2023

Creating and using tools is how humankind evolved, from prehistoric stone knives to the horse and buggy and now, microchips and computer software.

You are a human. AI is a tool. Use it and evolve.

But… how? We’re all learning as we go, but here are a few examples of how AI can help you work smarter, not harder.

Marketers and social media managers

AI copywriters can’t create your marketing strategy from scratch, but they can:

Letting an AI chatbot take over audience research could save you 20 hours per week — based on the average marketer spending 48% of their time collecting and analyzing market research data.

57% of marketers already think chatbots give them a better understanding of their audience, as well as qualify leads, educate customers, and more.

how b2b marketers think their chatbots can benefit demand gen programs

Source: Marketing Trends

We already know that to be true, with our very own AI chatbot Heyday automating up to 90% of support tasks while costing our clients 25% less, and — most importantly — keeping a near 100% customer satisfaction rate.

Intrigued? Learn all the benefits of using AI chatbots for business.

Writers

Let AI serve as your assistant so you can focus on why people pay you instead of a robot: Your unique voice and writing style.

Use AI to:

  • Generate ideas and inspiration, ad copy variations for A/B testing, SEO keywords, or even a basic outline.
  • Get something on the page to beat writer’s block.
  • Brainstorm title or heading options.
  • Translate content into multiple languages.

Business owners

You already wear many hats, so let AI take some of the pressure off.

AI copywriters can save business owners time by:

  • Drafting web and social media content so you only have to tweak it instead of writing from scratch.
  • Drafting email replies.
  • Summarizing meetings and sending the notes out to your team.

Retailers

Whether you’re a mall anchor or starting a new ecommerce side hustle, AI copywriting can dramatically boost your productivity by:

  • Taking care of customer service and sales via chatbot.
  • Drafting product listings, ad copy, emails, and more.
  • Quickly creating multiple versions of pages or ads for A/B testing, or language/location optimization.

Best practices for AI copywriting

Fact check everything

A recent study used ChatGPT to write abstracts for scientific papers and found that expert reviewers — actual scientists who review research for a living — could only identify 68% of the fake ChatGPT-generated abstracts.

If you’re using these tools, the onus is on you to ensure the accuracy of your content.

While your marketing copy isn’t as crucial to human survival as the validity of scientific discoveries, it’s still important to have a proper fact checking process. AI copywriting tools can save you a lot of time, but letting false information slip by could do irreparable damage to your reputation and credibility.

Be aware of AI’s limitations

The term “artificial intelligence” can be misleading. AI tools don’t actually think to generate new ideas about the world, as we humans can. They can only synthesize information they’re given, or have previously received, to solve the question (or “prompt”) they’re currently tasked with.

In short, an AI is only as “intelligent” as the algorithm it’s based on.

For example, a study measuring the accuracy of an app designed to identify cancerous skin lesions found that the AI could not reliably tell the difference between actual lesions and common flaws in digital photos, such as overexposure.

AI copy tools can save you tons of time in idea generation or getting a rough draft started, but they can’t “see the forest for the trees,” as the old saying goes. AI can absolutely help you, but leave the big picture thinking to humans.

Edit AI copy

AI-generated content is far from a finished product, even if it looks like one.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my favorite dog breed. It gave me this:

ChatGPT paragraph about doberman pinschers

Source: ChatGPT

Sounds fine, right? But I ran the paragraph through a free online plagiarism checker:

Grammarly significant plagiarism found

Source: Grammarly

Yikes. Using that content as-is could jeopardize your reputation and cause significant legal issues for your business. Plus, let’s face it, it’s lazy.

Using AI copywriting tools to inspire and inform your work? Smart.

Using AI copywriters to do your work for you and pass it off as 100% original? Not cool.

What’s the solution? Even ten minutes of editing can eliminate any plagiarism or brand voice concerns:

Doberman Pinschers, named after founder Karl Dobermann, are intelligent, loyal, courageous, and as any Dobie owner will tell you, highly affectionate. They have a black or brown coat with rust markings and a sleek, muscular body. They’re classified as a medium-to-large dog, yet mysteriously expand at night to cover an entire king-size bed. Their natural protective instincts often lead to careers as police and military dogs, but they also thrive as family pets as long as their needs for lots of exercise and daily belly rubs are met.

Much better (besides my grammar):

edited paragraph Grammarly no plagiarism 6 writing issues

Source: Grammarly

Do the creative work yourself

Use AI copywriters for inspiration, but don’t rely on them to fill up your content calendar.

For example, I asked Copy.ai to give me some blog topic ideas:

Copy.ai generate 10 blog article topics about social media

Source: Copy.ai

I wouldn’t want to use any of those generic titles as-is, but this list is great to spur some topic ideas, like number 4 about trends. Though I’d rename it to, oh I don’t know, “The 11 Most Important Social Media Trends for 2023.”

Relying on AI copywriters to do too much of the thinking isn’t as efficient as it seems at first. Soon enough your audience will think your content suddenly sounds like every other company in your space, or isn’t quite what they’re looking for anymore. The world’s most powerful AI still can’t replace the relationship-building power of your (comparatively) puny human brain.

8 best AI copywriting tools for 2023

1. Chat GPT

Though not the first AI copywriting tool ever made, ChatGPT is one of the most recognizable after it sent the internet into a tizzy after its viral launch in November 2022.

ChatGPT examples capabilities and limitations

Source: ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s familiar, chat-style interface is easy for anyone to start using right away, even if you’ve never heard of generative AI software before. The sophistication of ChatGPT’s interactions is what’s gathered so much attention over the last six months. Not only can it understand what you’re asking it — known as “natural language processing” — but it also remembers the history of your conversation and adjusts its responses accordingly, instead of being a “one-hit wonder” where each new question you ask is like your first interaction.

Pricing

ChatGPT offers a free tier and ChatGPT Plus for $20 USD/month.

Response speed was the main difference between the accounts until March 14, 2023 with the release of ChatGPT-4, which is currently only available to Plus customers.

Who is ChatGPT for?

ChatGPT is highly versatile, but is especially well-suited to content marketers wanting to scale up production of articles, reports, or other ongoing publishing needs. OpenAI says GPT-4 “exhibits human-level performance” in many scenarios, including passing the bar exam.

2. Jasper

Jasper prides itself on generating human-like written content built with team collaboration in mind. It’s like the Google Workspace of AI copywriters. Jasper’s template library and cloud storage make it a great choice for businesses of all sizes to seamlessly draft, edit, and approve copy projects.

Jasper uses a document-style interface. You supply a brief for the content you want, including options for tone, SEO keywords, and more.

Jasper labradors paragraph

Source: Jasper

Pricing

Jasper offers a free trial for up to 10,000 words of content. Paid plans are based on word count and range from $24 to $500 per month.

Who is Jasper for?

Jasper is perfect for keeping marketing and content creation teams in sync and on brand. The Jasper for Business plan includes a brand tone of voice analyzer to match its content to the tone of your existing content.

3. Lately.ai

Don’t want to use AI for article writing, but do want a faster way to repurpose that article into social posts? Upload your long-form content into Lately and it’ll write dozens of ready to post social media captions.

Lately goes beyond text, too: Upload a video and it’ll chop it up into multiple, bite-size clips ready to upload as Instagram Stories, TikToks, or YouTube Shorts. Lately dives deep into your content to extract key points and different perspectives to create content that’s truly unique, not just 24 versions of the same generic paragraph.

The best part? Connect the Lately app to Hootsuite to finalize, schedule, and auto-publish all those posts right inside your Hootsuite dashboard. Woo! Check out how it works:

Pricing

Plans range from $29 USD/month for text-only output, to $49 USD/month for text, audio, or video content, and $129 USD/month and up for teams.

Who is Lately.ai for?

Anyone who wants to repurpose content faster and easier, especially for short-form videos to post on social media.

4. Copy.ai

Copy.ai generates almost-ready-to-publish drafts requiring only minimal human editing. The process is similar to hiring a human writer — give it a topic, a bit of creative direction, approve the outline it generates, and done — but all of it takes only a few minutes. Copy.ai creates articles, social posts, sales emails, and more.

The step-by-step brief format makes it easy to get started, as do the built-in templates, and I was able to generate this blog post in only a few minutes:

AI copywriting blog post on Copy.ai

Source: Copy.ai

Pricing

Get up to 2,000 words per month for free, or subscribe for $49 USD/month for unlimited words, automatic workflows, translation tools, and more.

Who is Copy.ai for?

Can you really call AI-generated copy “thought leadership?” Questionable. Nevertheless, it’s definitely one of the most powerful AI copywriting tools for solo marketers or teams to boost your production.

5. QuillBot

QuillBot doesn’t draft content from instructions like other AI copywriters. It’s for rephrasing existing content in new and creative ways. More than basic synonym changes, QuillBot can also simplify content for brevity and clarity, or expand it to add useful details. It also features unique extensions, such as a web research AI search tool, citation generator, and “co-writing” sentence completer.

QuillBot rephrasing existing content

Source: QuillBot

Pricing

The free plan limits are 125 words for rephrasing and 2,500 words for summarizing with basic options only. The $19.95 USD/month premium plan offers unlimited word count, additional rephrasing modes, anti-plagiarism tools, and more.

Who is QuillBot for?

QuillBot is great for repurposing content, including simplifying and rewriting sections of articles to use as social media posts or creating multiple versions. It’s a simple and quick way to try out AI copywriting.

6. Wordtune

Wordtune is another AI rephraser to improve the clarity and readability of your writing. Like QuillBot, you can change the tone of your content and either shorten or expand it. Wordtune also has what it calls “spices” to add some oomph, including statistics, facts, and even jokes.

Wordtune AI rephraser with editor notes

Source: Wordtune

Is that a coffee-out-your-nose joke? No, but it’s not terrible for AI.

Pricing

The free plan allows up to 10 rewrites per day, or get unlimited access for $9.99 USD/month.

Who is Wordtune for?

From freelancers to content teams, Wordtune can help you bust writer’s block, repurpose content, and hook your audience faster by clarifying your message.

7. Notion AI

Picture this: All the productivity power of a spreadsheet combined with the formatting options of a document mixed with the aesthetic of an iced coffee on a sunny patio. That is Notion, a tasks and notes app known for its beautiful and functional templates.

Notion also has a built-in AI tool. It’s mostly focused on productivity tasks, but there are powerful AI copywriting features, including jargon elimination, idea brainstorming, and even drafting full pieces.

Notion AI managing multiple projects with ADHD using Google Calendar

Source: Notion

Pricing

Notion itself is free. Notion AI is a premium add-on for $10 USD/month per user.

Who is Notion AI for?

It’s a no-brainer for existing Notion users to try out, as well as marketers of all kinds who want to try AI copy, and who are looking for a flexible space for team notes and to dos.

8. DeepL

One of the best use cases for AI copywriting is to improve localization via content translation. DeepL uses AI to efficiently translate your content while keeping its meaning and nuance. Of course, at a fraction of the cost of hiring human translators.

That said, just like with content generated from scratch, you’ll want to have someone check it over to make sure it’s an accurate translation. Not only for readability, but also to avoid any potential legal and/or public relations disasters if your translated copy doesn’t quite match up to your original, for example.

DeepL translator English paragraph to German

Source: DeepL

Pricing

You can translate up to 3 documents and 3,000 characters for free. The Pro plan, which ranges from $8 to $57 USD/month, gets you unlimited translations and more.

Who is DeepL for?

DeepL can be used on any kind of document, so it’s perfect for businesses expanding to new regions. Large companies also benefit from the cost savings at scale of only needing translators to edit DeepL’s output.

AI copywriting FAQs

What is an AI copywriter?

An AI copywriter is a term that refers to copywriting software generates articles, landing pages, website copy, social media posts, and more based on prompts and instructions you give it. AI copywriters use machine learning algorithms to produce human-sounding content at scale.

Is AI replacing copywriting?

AI copywriters aren’t replacing real human content writers. Smart marketers use AI copywriting software to take care of smaller tasks, including idea generation and researching, so they can focus on what really matters: Writing engaging content. Any copy generated by AI still needs a human to edit it for style, substance, and factual accuracy.

Which AI tool is best for content writing?

The best AI copywriting software for you depends on your writing process and goals. Some AI copywriters excel at content repurposing, or adding SEO keywords in a natural-sounding way, and others produce on-brand drafts that only need a bit of editing before publishing. First, decide which part of your process to automate, then seek out the best AI copywriting tool for the job.

AI copywriting isn’t the only way to maximize your productivity. Manage all your social media scheduling, publishing, engagement, analytics, and more — across all your accounts — with Hootsuite. Try it free today.

Get Started

Better content in half the time

Boost engagement and save time with a hashtag generator, post templates, Canva, and Grammarly Pro in Hootsuite.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *