Can AI Write Anything Vaguely Human-Sounding?

An honest review of Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, Article Forge, and Rytr.

I tested four of the most popular AI text generation tools to see which can truly claim to be the “best.” I measured each tool based on its score for three factors:

I asked each of the four tools to write a blog post on boredom vs burnout, and also to draft a short fictional story about Nedward, a conscientious vampire, and Della, a foolish romantic human. (Don’t judge me.)

Here’s my conclusion.

If you prefer to watch, you can catch the video here:

1. Honest review of Jasper.ai

Jasper.ai sells itself as a tool that helps you create: amazing blog posts, art and images, marketing copy, sales emails, SEO content, Facebook ads, web content, love letters, captions, video scripts, blog posts, [deep breath]10 times faster with AI.

Allegedly.

(For comparison, it takes me about an hour to write a decent 1,000-word blog post. Can Jasper.ai help me do it in 6 minutes? Let’s see.)

How easy is Jasper.ai to use?

I would give this 4 out of 5 stars. It’s a little overwhelming, but Jasper.ai has got some onboarding wizards that are set up to help you understand what you’re trying to do. As soon as I logged in, I was pointed in the right direction.

I think I was most confused because there were almost too many things that I could do. I could do Facebook stuff, I could do blog titles, I could do blog sections, I could do blog posts, I could do web copy, etc etc.

There were tons of options and not a huge amount of guidance on where to start. Jasper.ai required you to kind of go into it already knowing what you want it to do.

It also requires a credit card to get started. And it does charge you. I mean it also refunds you, but I was very much charged $29 for my free trial (which will be refunded) but still.

How versatile is Jasper.ai?

Next, I tested the versatility of Jasper.ai. I actually give Jasper.ai 5/5 stars here. It could do almost everything I tried.

(One caveat: I did notice in their marketing copy, they said that they let you do love letters. However, when I tried to look for the Love Letter tool, I could not find it. I couldn’t even find a letter functionality. So that felt like a little bit of the stretching of the truth.)

Alongside blog posts, Jasper.ai claimed that it could do “wildly creative” fiction.

It could write fiction. The fiction was boring. The fiction was bad. I didn’t enjoy reading it.

Is Jasper.ai worth it?

Let’s get into quality. Is Jasper.ai worth the price? Is Jasper.ai any good?

I would LOVE to tell you yes. Regrettably, that is not my answer.

Honestly? It’s fine. It’s the best of the four for sure. But it’s not original, it doesn’t sound like me, even when I gave it training material from my blog. I got bored using it because the writing was so shoddy and dull.

I originally gave it a 2/5 for quality, which I have since upgraded to a 3/5 because it’s better than the rest, but the bar is low.

• It didn’t invent studies or research, which other tools did.
• It didn’t repeat itself in the article too much.
• The sentences flowed more or less logically.

This should maybe give you an indication as to how bad the others were.

Final thoughts on quality: If you took a thousand blog posts, put them in a blender, and got a robot to spit out the amalgamation of those thousand blog posts with zero personality, creativity, or ingenuity, this is what you’d get. A bland, dull, generic, mostly OK article.

You tell me — is that worth $29 a month?

Review of Jasper.ai

In summary, Jasper.ai can do just about everything you’d want an AI tool to do. It just can’t do it very well. It’s the best of a bad bunch, but I thought it was frankly substandard.

(And it would take me much longer than six minutes to use it to write a blog post because I would generate it, and then I would have to spend about an hour punching it up to sound like me and be a blog post that I would be happy and proud to publish into the world.)

2. Next, let’s do a genuine review of Copy.ai.

Their promo: “Say ‘goodbye’ to the blank page for good.” Let’s see if that holds up.

Copy.ai markets itself less as this end-all, be-all AI text generational tool. It’s more like something specific to help you write copy. (Copy is persuasive — it’s supposed to sell stuff.)

Let’s dive in.

How easy is Copy.ai to use?

It was fine. I got along with it okay. I’d rank it better than Jasper.ai because it didn’t require a credit card, and it had fewer options which was good. Maybe because it’s not trying to do everything, it felt a little bit more streamlined.

How versatile was Copy.ai?

You had some versatility — not as much as you did as with Jasper.ai, but there was enough there that you could get it to do almost everything you wanted to.

Copy.ai can generate some fiction, it can write some blogs, it can do outlines. I’d rank it a 3 or maybe even 4/5 for versatility.

Most importantly: how good is Copy.ai?

OK…remember when I was saying that compared to other tools, Jasper.ai was actually half decent?

Well, this is one of those tools. Copy.ai actively:

• made studies, institutes, and statistics up
• repeating itself
• not flowing logically

The “Soulful Work Institute” does not exist. Also, it’s just one thing, not three.

And where to even start with this paragraph… A bullet point, then a number? Why are lists on this list of ways to tell if you’re burned out or bored at work? What do groceries have to do with anything?

It wasn’t just boring. It was bad. It was inaccurate. It made no sense. I could tell a robot had written it, not just a boring and uninspired and untalented writer. I mean. What even.

Want to see something really laughable? Here’s the fiction that Copy.ai generated:

I’m honestly getting irritated all over again as I write this, lol.

2/5 stars for quality. Do better, Copy.ai.

Summary review of Copy.ai

Well… much as it pains me to admit this, it did live up to its marketing promise. The blank page was gone.

Instead of writer’s block, I was fueled by rage and anger at this insufferable service that wanted to charge me real dollars to spit out a bulleted/numbered list of five things with just two nonsensical items. So there’s that.

3. A real review of Article Forge

Wouldn’t you love to “Get HIGH QUALITY Content In One Click”? I know I would. That tagline inspired me with positive emotions. Even after two disappointing experiences, I thought maybe Article Forge would be the AI text generation tool for me.

How easy is Article Forge to use?

The simplest of the four. It’s not quite the “one click” as promised in their promo, but it was just a few clicks. The main downside was that once again you did need to put in your Paypal details or your credit card info to score a free trial.

4/5 stars.

How versatile is Article Forge? What can Article Forge do?

It’s in the name, reader. Article Forge can forge articles and nothing else. 2/5 for versatility.

Is Article Forge any good?

I could forgive the lack of versatility if Article Forge was good at the one thing it says it can do.

It cannot. It can only produce quite bad blog posts, worse even than Jasper.ai. Plus, you should expect to wait between 6–7 minutes before you see the article it forges. Very slow.

How bad was it?

It wrote nonsense. For instance, it wrote, “Another reason that boredom at work weakens your sense of meaning is that it affects your ability to understand your own emotions. For example, some people will answer ‘good’ when asked how they are doing, while others may reply, not so good.’”

What does this mean!! The boredom inspired by this article has weakened my sense of meaning tbh!

It created non-sequiturs. For example, it generated: “Moreover, it can also lead to serious problems for your career and health. So, how do you deal with it? There are several reasons why you may be feeling bored at work.”

There was no answer to “how do you deal with boredom at work.”

Finally, it wrote bad sentences, like, “It’s important to understand that boredom at work is more serious than simply being dreading your job.” (Emphasis mine.) I’m “simply being dreading” this article.

Summary of Article Forge

Want to hear something funny? I actually lost the original article I generated. Their support team reached out to me after I canceled to send me an improved article. Those examples are all from the “improved” article. The original one was much worse, but even the improved one was awful.

So yeah, click of a button, but not so much on the high-quality content.

Don’t waste your time or your money.

4. Finally, let’s give an honest review of Rytr.

I am losing my will to live at this point. But I persevere for you. For my readers. For anyone who worries that AI is here to steal our jobs.

Let’s start with Rytr’s promotional tagline: “A better, 10x faster way to write blogs, Facebook ads, landing page copy, product description, story plots, Instagram posts, SEO titles, YouTube descriptions, taglines and headlines, interview questions, testimonials and reviews, profile bio, emails.”

Sounds a little like Jasper, and I think that’s intentional. I believe they’re trying to set themselves up as a direct competitor. Let’s see if they can.

Was Rytr easy to use?

Rytr shines in ease of use. It was very simple, the best so far. The options were limited but very intuitive. I could easily see how to generate text, rewrite the text, or just “improve it.”

It was also free to use at first, and didn’t require a credit card or payment information.

Could Rytr do multiple different writing tasks?

Rytr could handle:

• blog posts
• blog titles
• outlines
• social media copy
• and even fiction

So it’s fair to say Rytr was versatile. It had the same limitations as Jasper.ai, so I’ll give it the same score: 4/5.

Now we get into the real meat of the question: Is Rytr any good?

Is Rytr a good AI text generation tool?

No, in short. Worse than Jasper.ai. There was a lot of repetition in the ideas. Many of the sentences were confusing or downright nonsense. The content was bland, uninspired, and unoriginal.

The fiction was funnier, but worse:

Just try reading two sentences in a row. Just try it.

Which AI text generation tool is best for writers?

What’s a “good” AI writing tool?

A good AI writing tool:

• saves you time
• creates quality content, or at least helps you create quality content
• is worth the price

None of those tools ticked any of those boxes.

If you want to create soulless work that ranks well for SEO, I guess Jasper.ai is the best AI writing tool. It at least made the fewest mistakes and made the most sense.

But if you want to write something good, original, and valuable for your readers, you’re better off writing it yourself. These may help with idea generation or structuring, but all of these AI writing tools leave out the quality that makes a piece of written work good.

And don’t even talk to me about the fiction.

Maybe these tools are OK for rewriting or generating very basic content. But they’re not useful for people who already write well and want to do less work. It will never be as good.

If that’s the best use case for it, then the marketing is downright misleading. These tools all bill themselves as a way to generate quality content with a click. None of them do that. I also found the process of canceling a trial manipulative in certain cases.

Of course you recommend “exploring other options” rather than letting me cancel without a hassle! You want me to stay on the hook for $29/month for a shoddy writing tool!

I say Jasper.ai is the best writing tool, but the truth is that it’s best to write it yourself. Good writers are good writers because they enjoy creating written work that provides value and meaning. Robots can’t do that yet, and I don’t know if they ever will.

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