The Best AI Writing Tools in 2023

Since ChatGPT came out last year, AI writing tools have been the talk of the town. Even though they aren't taking over the world (yet), they are now good enough to be useful. In the right situations, these AI text generators can help you work better, faster, and make copy that fits your business better.

Of course, for the best results, all AI writing software needs to be overseen by a person. When left to its own ways, it tends to make content that is pretty generic and often wrong, even if it looks like something a person wrote. I thought about using an AI text generator to write the beginning of this story, but it seemed like a cheap way out. This new breed of AI writing tools can write a decent first sentence, but they can't tell you how good it is. This is what people are for. (From what I've seen, most of these AIs are pretty full of themselves and exaggerate how important they are right now.)

As a person and a writer, I've been writing about this kind of generative AI technology for almost a decade. Since AI is meant to be trying to take my job, I'm interested in what's going on because of my work. I think I'm safe for now, but I have to say that these AI writing tools are getting amazing, especially when you work with them instead of just letting them write whatever they want.

So, if you're looking for an AI content generator that will help you write compelling copy, share blog posts a lot faster, and take some of the slow typing out of writing, you've come to the right place. Let's start.

Best AI writing software

• Jasper: An AI-powered copywriter and content generator designed to create high-quality content efficiently, offering versatility with 29+ languages, 20+ templates, and a Chrome extension for seamless integration into workflows.
• Copy.ai: An AI-powered writing tool that revolutionizes how writers, marketers, and business owners create content, generating high-quality written material in a fraction of the time it would take using traditional methods.
• Writesonic: An AI writing tool that specializes in generating high-quality written content across a variety of formats and styles, quickly producing SEO-optimized content that is free of plagiarism.
• Rytr: An AI writing assistant that simplifies blog posts, product descriptions, sales copy, and more for business owners, offering different ways of writing your text and understanding different tones.
• Grammarly: An AI-powered writing assistant that helps you check your writing for grammar and spelling errors while also highlighting areas where you can strengthen your writing style.
• Quillbot: A paraphrasing tool that fixes your writing by finding grammar and punctuation mistakes, providing suggestions for better clarity and more creative wording, can paraphrase content and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone.
• DeepL Write: An AI writing tool that helps you perfect your writing by offering suggestions on phrasing, tone, style, and word choice.
• Notion: A single space where you can think, write, and plan, offering organizational tools including task management, project tracking, to-do lists, bookmarking, and more.

How do the AI writing tools work?

If you search Google for “AI writing software,” you'll find dozens of choices, all of which have features that look suspiciously like each other. This is important because: The back end of 95% of these AI writing tools is the same set of large language models (LLMs). Most of these apps are really just shells that connect to OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4 APIs and add a few extra features on top.

Now, this doesn't mean that none of these writing apps that use AI are good. All of them are easier to use than ChatGPT or OpenAI's lab, which both let you use GPT to make text. But the quality of what these apps make is not what makes them different. Almost every app will give you very similar answers to the same question, with a few exceptions. The apps on this list stand out because they make it easy to add AI-generated text to an existing process.

As for the GPT model itself, it works by taking a hint from you and figuring out, based on the data it was taught on, what words will best follow your request. This training data includes books, articles, and other documents on a wide range of topics, styles, and genres, as well as an incredible amount of material scraped from the open internet. Basically, GPT was given permission to use all of human information to make a deep learning neural network, which is a complicated algorithm with many layers and weights that looks like the human brain. Yes, you have to do things like that to make a computer tool that makes bad poems.

Let's just say that GPT and other big language models are already very powerful, which means that these AI writing tools have a lot of promise.

What makes an AI text generator the best?

We know that most AI text generators use different versions of GPT, so they won't stand out because of a big difference in how well they work. Text that works and sounds like it was written by a person is now a given. It was needed to be on this list, but more was needed on its own.

When I was trying these apps, I also looked for the following:

Tools that work well and are driven by GPT or a similar large language model. In reality, this means that only AI writing tools that use GPT made this initial list, though some that use their own models, like Writer, were very close to making the cut.

A way to interact with the text output that gives you a lot of power. The tone, style, language, material, and everything else will be better if you have more ways to change them. I didn't want tools where you just put in a headline, and the AI did the rest. These are all tools that you work with, so you can write great copy quickly.

Simple to use. It would help if you didn't have to fight with the AI to get it to do what you want. Working with AI writing software like this will always require some tweaking and reworking to get the exact result you want, but it should feel like something other than handling a wild horse. Also, having great help documents and a good way to get started were both big pluses.

Affordability. ChatGPT is currently free, and all of these tools are built on top of an API that costs pennies. There was no set price limit, but the more expensive tools had to have better features and a nicer app to make up for the extra cost. After all, most apps will give pretty similar results no matter how much they cost. 

Applications that are not designed to send spam. Text-generating tools used to be able to “spin” content by changing words to their synonyms. This allowed dishonest website owners to steal copy-protected content and make a lot of low-quality, low-value content. That's not on the list.

Even with these requirements, I still had to try 40 different AI writing tools. Remember that a skilled developer can easily build a shell around the GPT API, so I had to dig deep into each one to find out if it was good or just had a flashy marketing site.

I tried each app by asking it to write a variety of short and long pieces of copy. As expected, there were few big differences in quality. Instead, the apps on this list were chosen based on how well they worked generally, how many features they had, and how much they cost.