Top 5 Best AI Essay Writer Tools to Try in 2023

Writing is a quintessential creative pursuit. It’s challenging. It’s rewarding. It can give you anxiety and tickle your ego. It’s a never-ending seesaw for your self-esteem. Yet what if you want a bit more balance in it? Moreover, what if you aren’t that fond of writing but have to create a lot of text? Say, you are a student or a marketing copywriter struggling to stay on top of all the tasks.

In that case, free automatic essay writer tools might be helpful for you. AI-powered text generation became a game changer, yet it also created controversy concerning originality, copyright, ethics, and whatnot. Let’s dive headfirst into this topic and analyze some of the most popular AI tools writers use.

Does Good AI Essay Writer Exist?

The real magic behind YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok recommendations is AI, so I’m not going to lie – I’m grateful to the gods of algorithms that I don’t have to watch things that aren’t my jam. However, I’m a bit more skeptical when it comes to writing. Not because I’m a humble scribe myself and AI is supposedly after my job, but because natural language is the most human thing there ever was. To emulate that in full, you must be sentient.

Our huge and very energy-costly brain that creates so many problems for us as a species grew along with language development. Anthropologists believe the human brain grew because of language – not the other way around, and I tend to trust them. AI can emulate, fake, and parrot, but can it really create? If you believe it can, I dare you: go and ask any AI of your choice to write a good joke. Fully automatic essay writing will always be around the corner but never quite there. If you need something inventive and genuinely original that takes creativity, critical thinking, and thoughtful analysis to write, you should come to a human. 

If you struggle with writing for whatever reason (dyslexia, ESL, writer’s block anxiety, lack of time, etc.), your money will be better spent on professional writing assistance from a service with papers written by human writers. To spark your creativity, works by free essay writers on any topic are available online as well. I’m sure you will get from it more original thoughts than from an AI-generated text. 

That said, AI is a valuable instrument that can help you with various writing tasks. Yet to use it effectively, you need to know what it can – and cannot – do. Read on for the overview of the five most popular AI paper writing tools with all their pros and cons.

ChatGPT for Essay: Automatic Writer with Imagination

Built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language processing model, ChatGPT is free for all and open to the public, so go ahead and play with it while you still can (I suspect they might put restrictions on free use quite soon).

ChatGPT uses dialogue to get feedback from users and cater to them exactly what they ask for. A poem about your girlfriend in the adoring style of Shakespeare’s sonnet? – Check. A piece of code in Python? – Check. A summary of Paradise Lost? – Check. An explanation of how AI works? – Check. It’s a beautiful and flexible tool that can produce human-like responses. Yet it took center stage of public attention when students started claiming that ChatGPT could be used as AI that writes essays for them.

From what I’ve learned, it can be used for creative and stylized marketing copy, although it still needs extensive human editing to really work. It’s also great to cut corners in research. However, it isn’t an appropriate tool for academic writing. Even for entertainment purposes, you must fact-check everything carefully and trace every claim ChatGPT makes back to the original source.

One of the most controversial things about ChatGPT is that it can concoct compelling, lifelike lies. For example, Marc Burrows, a journalist for the UK media The Independent, talked about his experience using ChatGPT for research and fact-checking. He asked the AI to give him information on the editing of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that Roald Dahl allegedly did himself after accusations of racial stereotyping. ChatGPT returned a direct quote, citing the interview that the author gave to The New York Times in 1983. However, it turned out that no such interview existed in reality! ChatGPT fabricated the quote because it thought that was what the journalist asked for. It faked the date, the article’s title, and the tone of Dahl’s voice to make the quote sound plausible. Yikes.

Sudowrite: AI for Creative Writers

Sudowrite is not as versatile as GhatGPT but still has impressive features, especially for authors who write fiction professionally. After all, it was founded by the Sci-Fi writer and Twitter superstar Amit Gupta.

Sudowrite suggests new content based on the old samples you feed it. It can help you brainstorm new ideas for writing, solve plot problems, and develop character concepts. It can also rewrite the drafts that you think aren’t working the way they are, generate detailed descriptions, and expand on shorter passages. It can also generate contemporary poetry, which is an excellent solution if you are not a poet, but your character needs to be.

It’s the most straightforward and user-friendly AI I have encountered. The service is paid with three subscription tiers depending on how many words per month you need to generate: Hobby, Pro, and Max. Monthly word limits seem arbitrary, and the price is higher than some alternatives online. Unfortunately, there is no unlimited access subscription. 

Still, the Max plan should serve you well even if you write novels for a living. You still need to create at least something yourself, don’t you?

Rytr: AI Essay Writer Free to Try

Rytr is an AI tool for bloggers and freelance writers that must produce a lot of content in various topics and niches – and fast. Rytr can suggest ideas for your articles, generate first drafts based on the tone and word count you set, and personalize your content if it seems a bit bland and generic. It also has built-in grammar and plagiarism checkers to ensure your copy is well-written and original.

Being trained on an extensive library of historical data in 30+ languages, Rytr is good at simulating style and tone. However, when it comes to relevance and up-to-date issues, you need to fact-check it and add your personal touch to the topics you write about.

It’s a helpful and affordable tool for beginners. You can try Rytr out with a free plan: it has some functionality limitations and allows generating up to 5,000 characters per month. Still, it’s enough to get the feel of AI-powered writing. Other subscription plans are Saver (up to 50k characters per month) and Unlimited (with no cap on generation and some premium features, such as a dedicated account manager). 

Jasper: AI Essay Generator to Get Past Writer’s Block

Jasper (formerly known as Jarvis) is one of the more robust AI tools. Its versatility makes Jasper an essay writer AI, article creator, book editor, robot blogger, and many other things. All this with a caveat: the content it generates is very helpful but not instantly good, so editing and tweaking are still needed.

Jasper can create social media content: from clever Instagram captions to catchy TikTok scripts and help edit novels, blogs, articles, and other short and long-form documents. 

It has several modes: speed writing, automatic writing, and content generation based on custom templates created by the user. Speed writing is completely automated content generation that jots drafts in minutes. This is handy when you need to get over writer’s block and jump right into editing. Automated article creation is the closest you can get to an essay writing generator. You set the parameters, and Jasper creates copy following your request.

Unfortunately, Jasper doesn’t offer a free mode or even a trial period. It has two pricing models: Starter Mode and Boss Mode. The final monthly price depends on the word limit and any additional services you choose. For example, there is a possibility to add SEO Surfer tool to make your text more searchable depending on the topic and current trends.

Grammarly: AI Power for Effortless Editing

Grammarly is my personal favourite. It doesn’t generate essays but allows you to edit them using AI capabilities. It checks grammar, spelling, readability, style, word use, and other text parameters suggesting improvements you can accept or decline. Unlike many other editors and checkers, Grammarly can pick up on dated, exclusionary, or insensitive language and offer more neutral and positive expressions to use instead. Another feature I particularly appreciate is context-sensitive synonym suggestion that allows you to avoid repetition while still sounding natural.

One more cool thing you can do with Grammarly is formatting. It hunts down tiny inconsistencies that easily escape your notice, such as abbreviations with or without periods, capitalization, double or single quotation marks, straight or curly apostrophes, etc. Such inconsistencies often happen when you cut and paste your quotes from other documents making your formatting into a bit of a quilted blanket. Grammarly alerts you if anything is off. 

As a rule, Grammarly makes your texts more readable, clear, and expressive. However, you still need to use your better judgment instead of just accepting everything on autopilot. The app has free and subscription modes, but you still need to sign up with an email to save your edits.

These are my top five picks for today. If you are interested in the intersection of tech and humanities and wish to know more about the exciting tools and startups that will change how we learn and write, I recommend reading this article.

There is no point in running away from the future. AI is a new technology that lets you write easily and effectively – if used mindfully. However, I wouldn’t advise you to outsource all your thinking to it, especially if you want to stay unique and have your own voice.