I used Jasper.ai to write a blog post. In the video below, I take you on a tour of what I did and what I learned from it — and what I think the future looks like for writers in a world of AI.

High-level takeaways:

• The output depends on the input you give your AI tool. Here is the input I gave Jasper:

Using AI for writing content.

AI works as a starting point. You still need to edit the output to make it human ready.

AI content works best for top-of-the-funnel content. To make a connection with the reader at mid- and bottom-funnel, you need a more experienced writer who understands the customer.

• AI-generated output could be a good starting point for thinking BUT it’s generic. It still needs a human touch to add nuance, narrative and soul.
• You have to fact-check your output! 🚨 AI can’t tell you if the content it’s giving you is accurate, up to date, and true within the context of your input. You risk losing customer trust if you publish AI-generated content without thoroughly fact-checking it first.
• You also need to check your output against your input and your objective. Jasper left out huge chunks of my input, so I had to manually add those points into the draft.
• AI did not 10x my writing speed, but it gave me a little kick-start.

0 – 2:48: Intro

2:48 – 13:19: How I edited the Jasper output to be “human ready,” and the surprises I found in the output content

13:19 – end: What I learned from this process, and what I believe the opportunity will be for writers

Transcript:

00:01 If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know, when it comes to technology, I’m a total nerd.

00:07 I love technology. I love working with technology companies. I love writing about technology. I love all things technology. And of course, as a technology junkie and a writer, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:25 Especially in the last two years since G P T three was out of beta in October of 2020. New AI tools have come on the market specifically around writing and art.

00:40 So there’s new AI tools for writing and for creating art, and there’s of course, a lot of con conversation around how that’s going to impact the world of marketing, writing creativity in general.

00:57 And I’m an optimist, when it comes to this, this technology. I don’t think that it’s going to replace human writers.

01:06 I don’t think it’s going to replace human artists. I think that humans are still very much needed in marketing, but I do think there’s a lot of opportunity here to look at our processes for creation and maybe make some changes and improvements.

01:23 So with that in mind, I signed up for the free trial of Jasper. It’s jasper.ai. It’s a content writing tool, and I’m excited to show you the results.

01:36 , I didn’t have high expectations going in. I’ve seen, I’ve seen enough AI generated content to have lower expectations. Let me just put it that way.

01:47 The stuff that I’ve seen is pretty generic. And of course, then there’s the narrative element, which machines machines don’t have the human capacity for narrative.

01:57 So there is just no narrative elements of AI generated content. So again, I, I didn’t have high expectations going into this, but it was such an interesting process of coming up with the inputs.

02:14 And then it gave me the choice between two outputs. So I, I chose the output that was closest to what I was going for, and then to get it human ready, this is what I’m calling Human Ready .

02:28 So we have our AI generated content, and then we do the edits to make it human ready. That process of editing was not what I expected either.

02:38 And again, I’m very excited to show you what I’ve done here. I’m gonna make my, I’m gonna make myself small so you can see my screen.

02:48 Here we go. Me move my face up here. Okay. Here we go. This was my input into Jasper. So when you go into the Jasper tool, depending on the content type that you choose, it has different input fields where you input certain information that the AI engine will then use to create the content.

03:13 And this was the input that I used to create this blog post. I, on the topic of using AI for writing content, it’s a little bit meta up, but there you have it.

03:25 Now, the output from Jasper was pretty simple. I did not change the formatting on this at all. This is directly copied from Jasper.

03:33 So it’s got the blog title, it’s got the body, it’s got one cross head here, it’s got one cross head here, and then a conclusion.

03:43 And you can go ahead and pause the video. I’m gonna scroll real slow here so you can pause the video and read this.

03:50 But also, if you would like a copy of this, this document for yourself, I’m gonna drop this into gdrive. So just send me a note and I will send you a link to this document in Gdrive so you can see it for yourself and, and spend more time with it.

04:07 But here is the, the Jasper output blog post based on my input. And then here is what I did to make it human ready.

04:23 And I’m gonna walk through this line by line so you can see exactly what I did and why. First thing I did was I gave it a more compelling title.

04:32 I’m a writer, that’s what I do. I make headlines a little more compelling, . So I I changed it to give you a head start instead of help with, and it’s just a little more exciting. But also, I, I marked out, or I crossed out the word strategy, and I had an issue with the word strategy here, because the topic is using AI in your content marketing.

04:55 Using AI for content creation. AI cannot help you with your marketing strategy. Strategy is, is your, your, it’s more than a plan. It’s your, it’s your end goal and your process for getting to that end goal, including all the plans for all the pieces along the way.

05:15 AI cannot do that for you. So I, I had a problem with the word strategy in relation to this topic. AI’s not gonna help you with your strategy. It will help you execute on your strategy. So I took out the word strategy there, and in the first paragraph as well.

05:33 Now the third paragraph, what I did here, I crossed out the first sentence and the first part of the second sentence, AI stands for artificial intelligence. People know what AI stands for at this point in the game. So I didn’t think we needed to waste space explaining that acronym.

05:52 And then this first part where it says, or the first part of the second sentence where it says, it may sound like something out of a science fiction movie. It’s not out of a science fiction movie anymore. AI is becoming more and more mainstream. So I thought that was just a little outdated, and I went ahead and removed it.

06:11 I made the cross head and H two, that’s just a formatting change in this first paragraph in the, in the first section here.

06:20 I removed a little bit of unnecessary wording here and just kind of rewrote this a little, improve the flow. Get help with heavy lifting. I mean, I’m not entirely sure that’s true. So , I went ahead and removed that and just replaced it with a strong head start, which is what I believe that AI will help us do. It will give us a head start.

06:45 This is where things get interesting. It’s this third paragraph in the first section.

06:57 Now, Jasper, in the output of the blog post named specific AI tools that you can use for your, your content marketing. And this is a point of integrity for me and maybe some other writers out there. Don’t give it the weight that I do, but I wanna make sure that any content that I create, whether it’s for my own business or for my client’s businesses, is accurate up to date and attributed to the correct source. So when I, when I saw these tools mentioned, my first instinct was to go research those tools, make sure they still existed, and get the link so I could hyperlink the text to the source.

And what I found is BuzzSumo’s Story generator doesn’t exist, at least not with this name. There are some different BuzzSumo features that more similar to this possibly like the content ideas generator, maybe similar to this, but there was no mention of natural language processing or artificial intelligence. As far as I could tell. BuzzSumo’s story generator just doesn’t exist. So I went ahead and deleted this whole paragraph.

08:28 I think that was the most surprising thing in this little experiment, was just that I, I really had to double check everything that Jasper produced to make sure it was accurate. I mean, right out of the gate, I have doubts because this tool that it lists does not exist. To be fair, AI tools are only as good as the data that they’re trained on.

08:57 So maybe somewhere in the data this tool was mentioned. I don’t know, I couldn’t find any hint of it. , I don’t know where it came from.

09:10 But I did go ahead and do some research and find some other AI tools. So the first one being this Neuro Flash. It has tools to help you generate ideas for listicals campaigns and blog posts. So I replaced BuzzSumo’s Story generator with Neuro Flash.

09:29 Quill is another one where when I, I looked it up to make sure it was still in existence and accessible and get the link for it. Yeah, I, as far as I could tell, there was no Quill AI tool for creating content. There’s several tools with the name of Quill, but nothing current and accessible that had anything to do with creating content.

10:00 So again, I had to just delete this whole paragraph because Quill didn’t exist in this context. I replaced that with Jasper. We know Jasper is in existence and currently working because that’s what I used to produce the original blog post here. So I went ahead and wrote up a paragraph about Jasper. So we would have a current and accessible tool in this section to replace the two tools that don’t exist.

10:31 I also added in Copy Smith, which is another AI tool that I came across in my research just to, you know, give another example in this section of a content creation tool.

10:42 Another thing I should point out is that I broke up this content into paragraphs, whereas in the original Jasper output blog post, it was, these were lumped together into bigger paragraphs. I broke them up here just to improve the flow.

11:08 The next section, editing and optimization. Pro writing aid was mentioned in the original output. That is a current tool that works very well. Novelists use that. I use that when I’m writing novels. It’s a, a really great tool with some really powerful features for for editing.

11:20 And I broke the I broke up that paragraph into two to mention Grammarly in the second paragraph, or I guess third paragraph of this section.

11:29 And then I also mentioned the Hemingway app, which is something that has been around for a while that writers could use to make their writing CRISPR and more concise. I just thought that was a good addition to this section.

11:42 But moving on the conclusion, the, the last section of this blog post, you’ll see that I added quite a bit to it. Of course, I gave it a proper subhead as well, but I added, I wrote all of this in red. The, the black hair was the original output from Jasper.

12:03 And the reason that I, I had to write all this for the conclusion is because the bot, the Jasper bot, completely left out big chunks of my input. So in the input I had talked about how AI can work as a starting point for content writing, and how, in my opinion, AI tools were better used for for top of the funnel content versus mid and bottom funnel content that was, that I believe is better suited to human writers who are more experienced and can understand the customers and the audience on a deeper level than a machine can. So I had to add all of that in because the, the bot completely left it out.

12:44 And then the, the final paragraph here, again I don’t necessarily think it’s improving anything that the AI is not improving our writing, but it is, it could speed things up. And I don’t think it’s helping with strategy , but it can help with writing process or, you know, content creation. So I removed strategy there.

13:05 My final conclusion after using Jasper to write this blog post and then doing the edits to make it human ready, is that while Jasper claims to 10 x your writing speed, I didn’t think it 10 Xed my writing speed.

13:34 And a big part of that was I just had to double check everything. Once I realized that some of the output was just incorrect, I had to do extra research to make sure everything was verified and accurate and linked up properly.

13:51 And then of course, I had to make edits for flow and had to add in the pieces that the bot for some reason left out of the content.

14:01 So I wouldn’t say it 10 x’d my writing speed, but the analogy I’m using is that it’s like, if I want to create a vase and somebody hands me a lump of clay, now that clay will eventually turn into a vase if I know what I’m doing, and I have the diligence and patience to turn that lump of clay into a vase, but I, I have to have some knowledge of how to turn clay into a vase to take that lump of clay and, and do this, and this Jasper output is like a lump of clay. And to turn it into a vase, I, I have to have some idea of what I’m doing. I have to have some experience, expertise around what makes good content so I can, I can craft it and also have to have some sense of, of, you know, what maybe to look for like the tools that no longer exist. I don’t think that just anybody off the street would know to double check that kind of thing. So again, I, I think that there’s always going to be a place for human writers in the mix.

15:13 Humans just, there’s a nuance to the content that we create that at this point, machines can’t replicate. Don’t get me wrong, these AI tools are just getting more incredible by the day. But when you think about narrative and storytelling, and knowing what to look for in terms of research and accuracy, and knowing the customer and what language the customer uses, and how to weave that language into the content, machines can’t do that.

15:45 Machines can only output based on their input. This AI generated content is only as good as the data these machines are trained on.

15:58 So I think there’s always going to be a place for human writers in the mix. That said, there could be a place for us writers to be using these tools in our processes as well.

16:11 Now, the edits that I did here got the post into, you know, pretty good shape, human ready shape, at least it was accurate, and the flow was improved. And I corrected some incorrect language. I wouldn’t necessarily use this for a client project. If for some reason I ever felt like this could be part of my process for a client project, I would do a lot more to the blog post to make it client ready and customer ready. I would make the post much more robust. I would do more research, and I would create a lot more connective tissue between those, you know, the, the listed out tools and what they’re used for. I would give a lot more context around when these tools might be used and how to use them. That said, this, you know, the, the end result here, the edited post, it, it could be fine for, you know, maybe my own website for an SEO post. This isn’t something that I would go promoting. This isn’t necessarily something I would be proud to put my name on, but it was okay. The end result was, was, okay, , which I was honestly surprised by considering the AI generated content that I’ve seen in the past.

17:39 It didn’t take as much work to get it human ready as I was expecting. So kudos to Jasper for creating a tool that actually produced something I could work with, but that’s how I’m looking at this.

17:54 It’s something I can work with. It’s this clay that I can then create a beautiful vase out of with diligence and patience and experience and expertise.

18:05 And this could give me a starting point for future content. Again, probably not for client projects at this point, but for my own projects. If I’m just having a low energy day and the blank page is giving me a hard time, maybe this is something that I use just to give me something to start with, something to to work from, just to get my brain in gear. I don’t wanna completely discount it. I also don’t think that AI is going to completely replace humans anytime soon. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. Humans have this, this narrative, this storytelling capacity that is unique to us. And machines cannot create narrative. It’s just not possible. Machines output based on their input. And that’s really all there is to it.

19:07 Storytelling, narrative, the elements that really connect us, human to human still take a human touch. And that’s exciting to me too, because as amazing as these AI tools are and will continue to be, there’s still opportunity for us human writers to make them better and to create more out of, of what these machines are producing.

19:41 And I really believe that the process of inputting. So if we scroll back up to the top of this document, my input here, this is what I put into Jasper. I had to write that. And that I wrote that because I wrote that based on my own experience, my own expertise of being a copywriter for over 20 years and being in technology marketing for over 20 years. So I, I have a sense of of the landscape and the language, and I have opinions that, that I thought were important to include in this blog post.

20:29 I wrote this input, and that’s a skill set. And that could be a future skill set for writers. There may be, you know, new types of writers emerging from this prompt. Writers, input writers who knows, who knows where this will take us. I do see writers partnering with AI tools more in the future.

20:53 I do not see us being replaced by them, but still, the possibilities are exciting. Again, if you wanna see a copy of this draft, you wanna just sit with it, read through it, DM me, email me. I will send you a link to the Google Google draft, Google document that I’m about to create out of this.

21:15 Have a wonderful day.