Andriana BoyrikovaAs generative AI is supposed to take my bread and butter, I am professionally interested in the whole situation. Over the past two years, I have been testing hundreds of AI writing tools, and I am relieved to report: they won’t take the writer’s job anytime soon. What they are good at is taking the tedious work off your plate, so you can focus on creating. That said, there are five AI writing tools I turn to as they help me produce content worth waiting for—hint, ChatGPT isn’t among them. I like ChatGPT, but there are other tools that deserve the spotlight, and I think it is time to grow out of the ChatGPT bubble.
When I started doing research for this article, I came across ten—bland, formulaic, soulless—articles that said the same in more or less the same wording. I saw this as an opportunity: how can I create something fresh, something personal, something original?
To write meaningful content, you need to do the heavy lifting: researching sources, interviewing experts, pre-writing, and fact-checking. AI content generators can support you in brainstorming, outlining longer pieces of content, summarizing and extracting key points from large pieces of content, filling gaps, and editing the content you have written.
A word of caution
“If you don’t use generative AI, you will be replaced by someone who does,” is being shoved down our throats from every corner. But let’s slow down for a second. Just because something is repeated a thousand times, does it become the truth? Let me ask you this:
- Will you lose your customers if you don’t use AI writing assistants? Or can you produce quality content without them?
- Do you have skilled creators in your team who value originality, accuracy, and industry knowledge?
- What is your backup plan if the AI tool underperforms or is disrupted by factors out of your control?
It is easy to profit from the craze. Creating value is the challenge. And AI writing tools aren’t built to solve this challenge on their own.
I saw so much fast and cheap content being glamorized as good writing in the past two years that at a certain point I limited my online reading to the bare minimum. Then I thought: something can change.
I had already written about the strengths and weaknesses of AI content generators. It was time for a closer look at the mistakes people make when using those AI writing tools. To write my ebook Success with AI Content, I tested over 30 AI writing tools over 18 months. I unearthed a lot of insights and distilled them into a compact ebook helping you create content that adds value rather that extracting value.
AI writing assistants in moderation
What happens if you regularly find solace in AI content generators when facing a blank page? Research shows that people who are dependent on ChatGPT for assignments lose their ability to express their thoughts and viewpoints over time.
To me, a writer with a linguistic and journalistic background, this isn’t surprising. I know that writing a text from scratch involves the most important step in the process: doing the thinking, refining the perspective, considering all possibilities. When you skip this step, you hand in your thinking to someone else—in this case, to the company that built the AI tool.
There is also evidence that AI-assisted articles on a given topic tend to be less diverse than those independently written by humans. Sure, your AI-generated blog post “5 Tips for Better Data Management” might rank high in search results thanks to keyword density, but it contains no fresh hooks, no unexpected angles, and no surprising facts. People will click away quickly. So, you get high traffic but no meaningful engagement and conversions.
Recently, I spoke with a solopreneur who said he uses generative AI tools for brainstorming all the time—when he is stuck or just feeling lazy.
I asked him: Did the tools challenge your thinking by providing counter-arguments or radically different approaches? Did they place your ideas in the context of other ideas? Did you ask yourself what assumptions they rely on?
His answer was, ” Not really.”
Now, imagine you sell project management software. Without drawing from customer feedback or industry conversations, you generate a blog series “10 Productivity Hacks for Remote Workers in 2025” based on suggestions from your AI writing assistant. Meanwhile, your customers struggle with poor team collaboration across time zones. How do you think the gap between the audience’s needs and content deliverables will play out?
Your content should reflect conversations with your customers, emerging research, discussions with people outside your field, books you have been reading, and conferences you have been attending: all insights AI can’t generate.
AI writing assistants to watch in 2025
AI writing assistants aren’t going to create your best work. Hopefully, you know that. They are called assistants for a reason: they aren’t a replacement of your in-house or freelance writers, editors, and content creators. With all that in mind, here are five AI writing tools I recommend you to try.
I am never paid for links to any site or for placement of any tools on my blog or in my ebook Success with AI Content. I think it is important you know that as you continue reading.
Frase IO
Frase IO helps you optimize articles for search engines. It scurries the web for articles related to your chosen keyword or title and offers a breakdown of what is already out there. For example, when I type in “AI writing assistants”, Frase IO shows me all top-performing articles that rank for this search query, including their word count, headings, statistics they refer to, and news articles they link to.
I particularly like that Frase IO shows questions people ask about the topic, pulling from content on Quora, Reddit, and Google’s People Also Ask (a SERP feature that provides additional questions related to an original search query and quick answers to them). These insights can inspire not only your article structure but also social media posts, newsletters, and video content.
I use Frase IO to check what ranks high and use this information to optimize my content. The goal isn’t to plagiarize others’ work. I focus on my ideas, prioritize original research, and add personal experiences.
As a final note, I tried its AI generator—the generated content is an insult to any writer. If you decide to use it, make sure you read more about how Google is taking a hard stance on AI-generated content used to primarily manipulate search rankings.
Paid or free? Frase IO offers a free trial, so you can explore it at no cost and decide for yourself if it is worth your money.
De-Jargonizer
“You would often be surprised to find that what is obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else,” Steven Pinker, a linguist at Harvard University, said about the curse of knowledge. We wrongly assume others understand the words we use and know the obscure facts we perceive as common knowledge. And this assumption plays against us.
De-Jargonizer helps make your writing more accessible, especially to a non-specialist audience. It analyzes the vocabulary in a text, categorizing words into three levels: common words (frequently used and familiar to most readers), mid-frequency words (less common but generally understandable), and rare or technical words (specialized terms that may require specific knowledge to understand).
It might be confronting to see most of the words you have written flagged as jargon, but take the feedback with a grain of salt. For instance, if you write for healthcare professionals, you may keep medical terms. But if your audience is business owners interested in sustainable innovation, ditch the “thermochemical depolymerization“.
Start with the audience in mind. Only in this way can you craft a message that caters to their information needs and expectations. And, when in doubt, simplify.
Paid or free? De-Jargonizer is freely accessible.
Capitol AI
Capitol AI generates articles, slide shows, and summaries backed by charts, tables, relevant quotes from the web, stats from data sources, and even AI-generated illustrations. It also adds source references to each paragraph, so you can easily double-check the information.
One standout feature is the ability to choose the data sources: Perplexity AI, peer-reviewed journals, and Google search; plus, you can add your own web sources and PDFs. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t always hit the mark. When I selected peer-reviewed sources only, Capitol AI threw in some LinkedIn posts written by marketers. That’s why it is crucial to verify everything instead of taking it at face value.
Paid or free? Capitol AI offers a free trial, so you can see if it is the right fit for your needs.
Elicit
If your content requires solid, research-backed information, Elicit is your go-to tool. It helps you find relevant papers without needing an expert’s knowledge of keywords and publications. In the results, you get a summary of abstracts, and you can even summarize the main findings or ask questions within the results to further break down the findings. Moreover, you can apply a “Has PDF” filter, which is useful if you look for full-text papers.
One feature I especially appreciate is the clickable results. You can click and read the paper, which saves you hours of searching for the right journals.
That said, Elicit isn’t perfect. First of all, it isn’t immediately clear how many papers are returned. It is also possible that key papers weren’t included in the results as Elicit can’t access full-text papers behind paywalls. The “top 4 papers” summary includes the gist of the papers that were included after the filters were applied. However, without having reviewed the texts, I can’t be confident this summary is correct.
The final responsibility for accuracy is on you. Always double-check Elicit’s results and summaries before using them in your work.
Paid or free? Elicit has both free and paid plans.
Undermind
If you need to wrap your head around a complex scientific or technical topic, I recommend Undermind with both hands. On its website, you will read it covers all fields of science using the Semantic Scholar database of over 200 million articles including sources such as PubMed, ArXiv, and others.
What makes Undermind stand out is how intuitive it is. After you input a query, it asks follow-up questions to help refine your search. Then, it delivers a detailed list of papers, complete with summaries, a publication year, citation counts per year, a link to the respective journal, and even a topic match score.
One of my favorite features is the discovery process. Undermind doesn’t just hand you a list of results—it explains how it found them. For example, it might say, “I have closely analyzed 140 of the most promising papers, and I have found ~2-11 papers with relevant abstracts, which is probably ~82.2% of all that exist. To get this estimate, we do a statistical analysis of the discovery process.”
Paid or free? There is a free version with limited searches and paid plans.
Conclusion
There is too much poor content muddying the waters of trust and leaving people drifting away from your brand. It is time for a change: adding real value. When used thoughtfully, AI writing tools can complement your writing process by handling the repetitive stuff—brainstorming ideas, organizing outlines, or summarizing research—so you can focus on creating. But don’t let them overshadow your brand or replace the heavy lifting only you can do: adding industry expertise, telling authentic stories, and sharing unique viewpoints.
AI writing tools like Frase IO (content optimization), De-Jargonizer (jargon simplification), Capitol AI (data-backed content creation), Elicit (academic research), and Undermind (in-depth topic exploration) can be valuable allies. Just remember: the real magic comes from human creativity and connection to people.
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I hope you have found my tips helpful. Which AI writing tools are you using? Let me know in the comments.
Featured image: Shutterstock
