4 Free AI Writing Tools to Improve Your Content
By Sarah McInerney | July 14th 2023
By Sarah McInerney 
From coming up with the topics your customers want to read, to undertaking research, and from proof perfecting your grammar to re-toning your work to suit specific audiences, the job of a writer is no walk in the park. Good thing then that Artificial Intelligence has come to the rescue with a range of AI writing tools specifically designed to act as an able assistant to the busy content creator. And the best bit? They’re all completely free to use.
First up, the ethics question… should we be using AI writing tools to create content?
Artificial Intelligence… it’s safe to say an air of nervousness and dubiousness fills the room whenever it’s mentioned. Fears that AI will ‘take over jobs’ and replace humans on the customer service frontline abound. But the truth is that neither of those is likely to happen in the near future. Instead, for the time being at least, people are making use of AI to help them do their jobs faster and with greater accuracy, and improve customer service and client relationships in the process.
AI SEO tools for example have the ability to slash repetitive task time from days to hours. As an SEO agency that strives to give our clients the best possible value, we’ve been using AI for things like research and trend monitoring, so that we can free up our specialists’ time to focus on more strategic tasks that benefit our clients.
Going back to the question of ethics, in terms of AI writing tools, we would never suggest using them to create content from scratch, and then use that content verbatim without any form of human intervention.
By all means these tools can be put to good use as a writer’s assistant, but we believe they should never be used to replace human creativity and personal research.
So before we share with you our favourite free AI writing tools, let’s set out a few best practice guidelines.
Check the facts… AI tools are huge mines of knowledge. But are they fool proof? Most definitely not. They are well known for their inaccuracies, biased or risky output, and sometimes even outright amusing blunders. Which is why fact-checking any output from an AI tool is an absolute must.
Proof read the content… AI writing tools mostly use US English, which means if you write in UK English, you’ll need to translate what they give you. You won’t usually find localised idioms or colloquialisms either, which are an important element of conversational content. AI bots just don’t understand them. So treat your AI content output as a rough draft, and be sure to edit it and tone it to suit your audience. Content should, after all, always be unique, and incorporating your own personal experience and opinions are what make it stand out, both to readers, and to search engines.
Be specific with your instructions… AI writing tools benefit from detailed input. If you are looking for a specific tone of voice, language, level of detail or suitability for a particular audience, be sure to share that with your AI bot. And if you are not satisfied with an answer, you can always go back and ask for a revised response.
So now we have the rules agreed, let’s take a look at some of those free AI writing tools.
1. ChatGPT
We’ve explored ChatGPT a fair bit recently. We’ve looked at ChatGPT and Google and whether using the AI bot is safe for SEO. And we’ve set out what ChatGPT is, how it works and some of its flaws. So let’s now dissect its potential as an AI writing tool.
ChatGPT, or at least ChatGPT-3.5, is free to use. It’s got over 100 million users worldwide, and can help with countless tasks thanks to having been trained on huge volumes of internet data. Just remember though that its knowledge of world and events after 2021 is limited. So it you’re writing about current affairs or emerging trends, you may want to take your research elsewhere.
So how can ChatGPT help with content creation?
Come up with titles
Sometimes, coming up with the title for a piece of content can be more of a challenge than writing the whole thing.
Titles need to capture attention as well as succinctly sum up what the reader can expect, so if you’re struggling to get something together, ask ChatGPT for some ideas.
Generate summaries
Whether you need to precis a piece of writing for a pitch, sum up for an introduction or extract summaries to use as social media posts, ChatGPT can help with all of that. It can also take abstract notes that you may have compiled on the go, and assemble them into an article outline.
Do bear in mind though that there are limits on the amount of words you can input, so you may have to add your content in stages.
Screenshot from ChatGPT July 2023
Keyword research
If you’ve already got your core target keywords pinned down, your next job is to find some related words to give your piece of content that all-important context. And yes, you’ve guessed it, ChatGPT can do that as well. Just give it your target keywords and it will come back with a related set based on its understanding of search results.
You can also use it to back up your traditional keyword research, or to find another perspective.
Find topics to write about
A good content marketing strategy will include topics that are engaging, relevant to your audience, and that do a good job of addressing the very questions your customers are asking. Fresh ideas can be hard to come by if you’ve been covering the same topic for a while, but ChatGPT can help by making suggestions based on your keywords.
Do take care though, because you can pretty much take it as read that you won’t be the only business in your field using AI to come up with content ideas. So before you get stuck into your next ChatGPT-inspired article, be sure to check you’re not duplicating something one of your competitors has recently covered.
2. Wordtune
Wordtune is a popular AI writing tool that’s trained to correct grammatical errors, comprehend context and meaning, and come up with suggestions for alternative content, formality or tone, whilst retaining the original essence of a piece of content.
This tool is free to use, although there are daily limits on the number of rewrites it will give you. Upgrading to one of the paid plans can take away those limits, however, if they start to frustrate you.
Here’s how content writers can use Wordtune…
Assimilating notes
If you’re one of those writers who wakes in the middle of the night bursting with ideas that you quickly scribble down so as not to lose them, then you’ll know what a chore it is to assimilate those notes and craft them into something logical.
Step in Wordtune… this tool has the ability to convert scribbles into meaningful sentences that you can then go on to include in your draft. A real time saver.
Proof reading and editing
Even award-winning writers at the top of their game know that a fresh set of eyes cast over their work is a must. We all say that there’s nothing better than having your content read over by someone else. And Wordtune can be that someone else, with its ability to catch spelling or grammar mistakes, including the ones that are doing their utmost to elude you.
Wordtune can also suggest ways to rewrite parts of your content to make it more engaging or impactful.
Re-toning content
Whether you need to re-tone a piece of content to suit a difference audience sector, or you’re repurposing for an alternative publication to match its house tone, Wordtune can help with that. It will also give you a selection of choices, so you can pick the one that best suits your needs.
It can also precis text so that it suits a given word count, perfect for those award submissions or set-length media publication pieces.
Screenshot from Wordtune July 2023
Creating social media posts
Whether you’re looking for a compelling intro to get followers hooked on clicking on your latest article, or you just need to come up with something engaging for your social platforms, Wordtune is one of the best free AI writing tools to help you do just that.
It can be incredibly time consuming making your social posts fit the character limits of the various platforms. LinkedIn and Facebook allow long form posts, but if you want to take those same posts and put them on Twitter or Snapchat, for example, it’s quite a task to cut them back to fit the limited word count, without losing their meaning. But what could take you several minutes will take Wordtune seconds, which can save significant amounts of time when scheduling numerous posts.
3. Perplexity
Perplexity is a free AI writing tool that gives you the opportunity to ask any question, at any level of complexity, and it will return a fast, detailed answer, complete with cited sources.
Of course, you can ask the exact same thing of ChatGPT. But it doesn’t tell you where it got its information from. Now from a writer’s point of view, that’s risky, because we all know the importance of cross-checking multiple sources before we publish anything.
You can also ask regular search engines questions. And you’ll get plenty of results. But those results are long lists of information sources, some of which won’t be relevant. And then it’s your job to fish through them all and find exactly what you’re looking for. But with Perplexity, the difference is that it returns a conveniently summarised answer, complete with citations, as well as related searches.
For example, you could ask Google the question, “What is current Google best practice for content writing”, and it will return pages of results that could take you an age to navigate. But with Perplexity, you get a succinct answer, summarising everything into one easily digestible response.
What’s more, the information is up to date. Which trumps ChatGPT’s 2021 cut-off.
Perplexity as an AI writing tool is a time-saving research assistant. It can give you useful statistics, helpful research findings, relevant quotations and up to date guidelines and legislation. Just be sure to tell it which country you want your research findings to apply to, and you’re good to go.
Screenshot from Perplexity July 2023
4. SciSpace Copilot
SciSpace is a free AI writing tool that helps you better understand complex research and scientific data. It is able to explain most academic texts in plain English, cutting out infuriating jargon and delivering the information in a much more palatable tone.
With SciSpace, you can drag and drop complete files for analysis, as well as adding a Chrome extension to your browser so you can easily highlight text on any web page for an instant explanation of its meaning.
How to use SciSpace?
Rewording complex concepts
If you’ve been given the task of explaining something technical to an entry-level audience, you’re going to be grateful for SciSpace. Just highlight the web text you want dumbed down, or upload a file, and the AI tool will get to work rewording it into reader-friendly content.
Summarising in-depth research
Research is great to incorporate into articles and whitepapers, but if it’s overly in-depth, it could take you hours to get your head around it and extract the meaningful parts. Step in SciSpace, with its innate ability to quickly summarise complex research into engaging content that everyone can understand.
Screenshot from SciSpace Copilot July 2023
Free AI writing tools – summing up
We’ll sum up this insight into free AI writing tools in the same way we’ve summed up our other AI posts.
We like AI tools. They save us time. They help streamline repetitive jobs and free up our time to concentrate on more valuable tasks. But they are not human. And they all have their limitations.
We wouldn’t have shared these AI writing tools with you if we didn’t think you’d benefit from them. But please, please apply the best practice rules. Think of them as an assistant ready to help, rather than a replacement for your role. Personal creativity, insight, reasoning and experience will always conquer. There is just no replacement for the human brain.
Looking for a London SEO agency that welcomes the many advantages of emerging technologies, but never loses sight of the human touch?
Here at Figment, we use AI tools to enhance the value of what we do for our clients, but our service remains fully personalised. If you’d like to talk to us about boosting your online visibility with an SEO campaign, please get in touch.