Writer’s block gets the best of us so I thought it was time to start exploring the possibilities of AI in blog writing. AI has been the rage for some time now and with the introduction of my new mentor, best friend, therapist, idea man or woman, ChatGPT, AI is tough to ignore. Like just about all the other geeks I know, I’ve tinkered with ChatGPT for varying reasons with varying degrees of success. It is indeed super cool and quite useful.

I’ve also begun helping my wife with her side business. In helping her, I’ve been looking around at other AI related services to see what is available and what they can offer. While there are quite a few of them, I decided to focus on testing out three of them:

  • Rytr
  • Jasper
  • Writesonic

I have no specific reasons why I chose to focus on these three but we are.

Exploring the Possibilities of AI in Blog Writing

This is where the previous mention of writer’s block comes into play. I thought that the best way to tinker with these was to see what they offered in the realm of blog writing.

Jasper had a feature called “One-Shot Blog Post“. Rytr has a use case called “Blog Idea & Outline“. Writesonic has “AI Article Writer“. Credit goes to Writesonic for having me write this article because of their blog writer’s response to my blog idea (more on that below).

With AI being all the rage and everyone loving product reviews, the only that came to mind was to have each product with a product review. I decided to ask each vendor to write a product review

Artificial intelligence in blog writing product review of <insert vendor here>

I wasn’t sure what would happen but figured it would be fun to see the results.

Jasper

First up was Jasper so I told it to write a blog post on the topic at hand. I set some other minor settings like a tone of casual. I then hit the Generate button and waited. On the first attempt, I got an error Not Found. I suspect this had something to do with my session timing out so I just clicked generate again and waited less time. The result was a reasonable looking blog post sectioned off showing what was the title and what was the body. Each section in the body also had its own heading.

Rytr

Next up, Rytr. The process here was a little more manual but still pretty user friendly. After entering the topic, i just click Ryt for me. The system thinks for a little bit and then I get my blog outline. Similar to Jasper, everything is clearly divided up by section with headings and paragraph placeholders. In addition to the outline, you are provided with an additional set of instructions on writing the blog from the outline. This is where the manual part comes in.

I’ve been a little more biased towards Rytr because I think the UI is interesting. The outline is setup with a heading and then a paragraph placeholder full of keywords. The additional set of instructions tell you to highlight the heading and placeholder keywords. After that, you click their paragraph tool to generate content.

This is where I show my bias towards Rytr. Once you generate each paragraph, you can highlight more words and sentences inside of the paragraph and use additional tools to write more information, less information, or rewrite the content. Another neat tool available for highlighted text is the image generator. The tool will generate an AI generated image based upon the highlighted words.

Writesonic

As I stated earlier, this product was the one the caused me to write a blog post on this subject to begin with. Aside from writing a blog post for you, why did this product cause you to write a blog post? Did I mention that this blog is about my battles with technology? Out of these three products, this was the most entertaining. I had started with this product when trying to tinker with the blog writing idea.

So get on with it! What was so entertaining about Writesonic? No matter how many times I tried to use the AI Writer for my predefined topic, it wouldn’t write the blog post. I had tinkered with other topics and they worked just fine. This one was a no go so I have no review here.

The Post Game Wrap

I’ll first start by saying that I did end up getting a paid Writesonic account. Despite my little moment of entertainment with trying to get it to write a review about itself, I’ve been happy some of my initial use case results. The same goes for Rytr. I ended up nabbing a subscription there too so I can tinker some more. Jasper has some super cool tech as well as a nice UI but I’m cheap and will wait to invest in a paid account there for now.

Finally, here are the two blog posts that I had each AI engine write in case you wanted to see what they thought of themselves. Also, the results are 100% raw and unedited. I simply copy, pasted, formatted, and posted these articles. Maybe next time, I have them write about each other?