How To Use AI To Become a Better Writer

Everywhere you turn—on social media, the news, at work, and even right here in Upwork’s resource center—artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic.

Many of these discussions are about AI for writers—both how writers use AI and whether or not the technology will reduce the need for human-crafted content over time. If you’re a content writer or a creative writer, you might be wondering what the rise of AI means for your livelihood.

Will AI eventually replace human writers? Do we need to fear it? Or is AI a tool that can help anyone become a better writer, even those who already write for a living?

The answer is nuanced, but ultimately, it all comes down to one thing: recognizing that AI writing software is just a tool—and that you’re in control of how you use it.

What is an AI writing assistant?

AI writing assistants are tools that use generative AI to take user prompts and create rough drafts and mockups as output. To do this, generative AI tools draw upon programs called large language models (LLMs). An LLM is trained to:

• Analyze the prompts it’s given
• Organize information from its programming and training into patterns
• Replicate those patterns to create readable outputs that are relevant to the prompt, using natural language processing (NLP)

When you prompt an AI writer or chatbot to produce content, its output isn’t intended to be insightful, witty, or even correct. It’s simply the most probabilistic grouping of words as determined by a computer.

You can then use the generated outputs to develop characters for your short story, start building an outline for your book, write a landing page, or rephrase a single e-commerce description to cover an entire line of products.

Types of AI writing tools

The number of AI writing tools on the market right now is rapidly increasing; picking the best one can feel overwhelming. Understanding use cases, like the difference between a chatbot and a tool that's meant for high-quality content writing, can help you choose the best AI writing tool for your projects.

Many freelance writers now specialize in specific AI tools like Jasper, Writesonic, or Copy.ai, especially for marketing or content creation roles. Hiring freelancers with this expertise gives businesses fast access to AI-powered writing talent, without needing to invest time in training or onboarding new tools internally.

AI chatbots

AI chatbots are multipurpose apps, and they can be helpful for brainstorming and generating content. Because these platforms aren't purpose-built for writers, you may find you have to fine-tune your prompts to get what you need (or be prepared to handle formatting and style changes on your own afterward). Popular options include:

• ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a user-friendly AI tool that works right in your browser. It can generate text-based responses to your prompts on a wide range of topics. If you have a ChatGPT Plus subscription, you can ask the AI to search the internet, scan webpages, analyze documents, and even generate complex images. ChatGPT is multimodal, and is able to work through text, image, video, and voice prompts. If you have the desktop app installed, you can even share your screen with it so the AI works with you in real time.
• Claude. Claude works similarly to ChatGPT—you can ask it questions, upload documents for context, and have the AI generate or edit content. And, as of March 2025, Claude can connect to the internet.
• Gemini. Gemini is another multimodal, browser-based AI chat tool that can generate text or images. For many, Gemini's biggest benefit is its integration with the Google ecosystem and apps like the Google search engine and Google Docs. If you write mostly in the Google ecosystem, then Gemini's a good option for you to explore.
• Poe. Poe is a multi-chatbot interface from Quora. You can use it to access Quora's own Poe AI as well as ChatGPT, Claude, and other generative AI tools. If you aren't sure which AI interface you'll like the best, Poe can be a good way to try them out side by side.
• Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft Copilot is similar to Gemini, except that rather than integrating with Google products, it works right in your Microsoft Office suite or Edge browser. You can use it directly in other web browsers, too, though, and create text or images.
• DuckDuckGo AI Chat. DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a free, privacy-focused tool that gives you access to basic versions of ChatGPT and Claude. While you don't get access to the most recent version of either, you get a little added privacy this way—with DuckDuckGo as an intermediary, your chats aren't used to train the AI models.

AI writing software

As well as the more generalized chatbots we just covered, there are also dedicated AI-generated content-writing apps. These typically include a document editor (similar to Google Docs) and prompt templates or organizational features for writers. Many writers enjoy using AI software platforms like these as part of their workflow:

• Jasper. Jasper is an AI content generator that's purpose-built for marketing. You can train the tool on your brand voice, use Jasper templates to jumpstart quality content generation, repurpose blog posts, or chat with the Jasper AI.
• Strut. Strut is an app that lets writers take notes, draft documents, and chat with an AI assistant. Unlike Jasper, Strut doesn't include templates or a prompt library, so you'll need to develop your own prompts for the AI chat.
• Writesonic. The Writesonic app includes several AI tools for writers, including an SEO assistant, AI chat, and content generator.
• Sudowrite. Unlike Jasper and Writesonic, which are more geared toward marketing, Sudowrite is a platform for creative writers. It's a story generator, outline builder, and AI writing tool all in one.
• Copy.ai. The Copy.ai platform is a marketing and sales writing tool that can generate ad copy, summarize leads' LinkedIn profiles, produce press releases, and help you conduct research before targeting a competitor's audience.

How to pick the best AI writing tool

Conversational chat tools like ChatGPT are great if you want to use AI for a wide variety of tasks. For example, a freelance content and copywriting professional might want an AI tool they can use to:

• Come up with new business offerings
• Develop marketing copy for their own business
• Research and outline client content
• Create LinkedIn posts
• Summarize and answer client email

If that same writer were really only interested in using AI for client projects, though, then a dedicated AI writing tool might be a better option. In this case, they could use something like Jasper to:

• Create content briefs in line with a client's style
• Draft blog posts or product descriptions
• Repurpose long-form content into social media captions
• Create AI-generated draft content for entire marketing campaigns, from blog content to Facebook ads

The decision is a little easier if you have a talent account on Upwork. By signing up for Freelancer Plus, you'll get access to Upwork Chat Pro, powered by Uma, Upwork's mindful AI with GPT-4o. You can use Upwork Chat Pro to help you:

• Write great proposals
• Streamline routine processes that are part of your writing projects
• Answer questions and act as a research partner

And, because Upwork Chat Pro also draws upon proprietary Upwork data, it's a great AI companion for anyone working as a freelance writer. (Note: Upwork Chat Pro doesn’t use any of your information to source content [unless you enter it yourself]).

Use AI to stand out—not just speed up

If you’re using AI tools only to write faster, you’re missing the bigger opportunity: using AI to create better, more differentiated work.

Anyone can use generative tools to crank out basic blog posts or social captions. But the writers who will thrive in an AI-enhanced future are those who blend human insight with AI-generated structure, speed, or research.

Think about what you, as a writer, bring to the table:

• Experience your clients don’t have
• Unique tone, voice, or lived perspective
• The ability to synthesize complex ideas and craft narratives that stick

Now, imagine pairing those strengths with the efficiency of an AI co-writer. You can use AI to structure your thoughts, brainstorm creative angles, or generate starter content—and then you can layer in what only you can provide: clarity, nuance, and originality.

Here are a few ways to elevate your AI usage:

• Start with your own outline, then use AI to fill in blanks or expand certain sections
• Add commentary or lived insights that the AI couldn’t know from public data
• Use AI for A/B testing—ask it to write content in multiple styles, then combine the strongest parts into something fresh
• Train a custom GPT on your writing or your client’s brand voice to make the output more tailored and consistent

The takeaway? Don’t just use AI to be faster—use it to be distinctive. That’s how you’ll stay competitive, creative, and in-demand.

13 ways to become a better writer using AI

Ready to experiment with AI? Use this list of ideas to get you started—each entry includes examples of a specific way that AI can help you work. Try opening up your AI tool of choice in another window and customizing each prompt as you move through the list. See how your outputs compare to ours!

1. Brainstorm ideas

Because developers trained ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools on large portions of the internet, they can be a great source of article idea generation.

These aren’t new ideas—they’re probabilistic sentences that draw upon existing content—but they can get your own creative juices flowing.

Rather than saying, “Give me five ideas for an article about email marketing,” you can improve results by giving the AI additional context about who your audience is and how you plan to write the article.

The AI tool can then use these data points to improve its predictions and come up with ideas you can use as a jumping-off point during the text generation process.

2. Conduct research

While AI writing tools can hallucinate or provide answers that aren't factually accurate, they're still a useful partner when it comes to sifting through your research. Once you locate text sources, such as webpages and PDF documents, upload them to your chat tool of choice and start asking the AI questions about the docs.

ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools can:

• Summarize multi-page PDFs
• Extract data
• Answer your questions about uploaded files

OpenAI even has “data analyst” and “document assistant” GPTs available to help make this process even easier. You can find them by logging in to your ChatGPT account and clicking “Explore GPTs” in the left sidebar.

3. Conduct basic grammar editing and proofreading

AI copywriting tools can also help you self-edit your work, which can boost your grammar and writing skills.

You can get editing and review help from AI in three notable ways:

1. Engage in an ongoing conversation with a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. Because these tools keep your conversation history, you can use the same chat thread from initial ideation all the way through the final review. This way, the AI has solid context around what you’re writing, its tone, and how it should sound.
2. Start a quick conversation with your generative AI tool of choice and ask it to parse a sentence, act as a grammar checker, or provide dictionary and thesaurus results.
3. Build a custom GPT (this requires a paid ChatGPT Plus account) and tell it to look for your most common mistakes, errors, or words you don't want to use.

4. Write headlines

Even experienced writers can get stuck when it comes time to write a catchy heading. For many, it’s one of the hardest parts of the job.

AI writing tools can help with this. Here's an example of how it looks:

Seeing a variety of options and versions can help narrow down the best final copy.

5. Generate blog outlines

Once you've figured out what topic you plan to write about—or even have a headline ready to go—you can then ask an AI writing tool to generate an outline.

You can also ask the AI to expand on an existing outline and add more details—and even references, if your tool of choice connects to the internet.

6. Explain complex topics in new ways

Generative AI can even help you better understand the topics you’re writing about, especially if the tool you’re using is connected to the internet. In this way, it functions similarly to a search engine—but one that can create a summary of, and answer questions about, the search results.

All you need to do is type your question into a new chat with the AI and begin “discussing” all of your related questions.

You can even ask it to do tasks you don’t know how to complete, such as creating an example code block for an article.

That said, remember that when an AI tool doesn't connect to the internet, its “knowledge” only goes up to the point at which its training data ends.

If you aren't sure whether your AI writing assistant has up-to-date data or internet access, just ask it!

7. Repurpose existing content

If you're a writer who's responsible for creating lots of different kinds of copy—from long-form guides to email headlines—you know how time-consuming it can be to create every asset you need.

AI writing tools make this process easier. It often makes the most sense to start by creating the longest piece of content first (either independently or with the help of an AI writing tool) and then use AI to break it down into shorter pieces like:

• Instagram captions
• YouTube scripts
• LinkedIn posts
• Email newsletters

For marketing teams or small businesses managing multiple content channels, AI-assisted repurposing can significantly cut down production time and cost. Instead of assigning separate writers for every format, you can start with a single long-form asset and use AI to quickly generate variations for email, social, and blog. 

Simply upload scripts, such as from a podcast or speaking event, to repurpose snippets to infuse into your content creation. This speeds up workflows and helps ensure message consistency across platforms—especially helpful for content ops teams with lean resources.

You can also use AI to upload scripts, such as from a podcast or speaking event, to repurpose snippets to infuse into your content creation.

8. Speed up repetitive tasks

If you repeat the same time-consuming tasks over and over as part of your work, you may be able to use AI to speed up the process.

As a writer, you may ask AI to do things like:

• Create a content brief template you can use for all of your projects
• Draft the template for a weekly client update email or Slack message
• Write the copy to explain various metrics you’ll include in a report

You can take the core functionality of a tool like ChatGPT further by building custom GPTs or using custom prompts developed by a machine learning pro or prompt engineer.

9. Localize your content for different audiences

Besides reformatting your content for different media or channels, you can also use AI to help localize your writing.

If you or your clients have a global audience, localization can help you better connect with readers, customers, and users in a variety of countries.

Localization may look like asking a generative AI tool to:

• Update a document from British English spelling to American English
• Replace all dollar amounts listed in an article with the equivalent amount in euros
• Replacing an FAQ section with new questions specific to a new country
• Edit your document for the correct grammar, slang, and spelling used by speakers of a particular dialect

For businesses expanding into new markets, AI localization can save translation costs, accelerate content delivery, and help maintain brand voice across geographies—without needing to build in-house localization teams.

10. Create character profiles

AI tools aren’t just useful for content marketing—they can help in the creative writing process, too.

One great way to use generative AI in your creative work is to ask it for help with creating character profiles.

Whether you’ve got some loose notes on a character that you’d like to solidify into a profile, or you’re completely starting from a blank slate, a tool like ChatGPT can help you work through the ideation process.

For example, you could ask the AI to take your notes on a character idea and turn it into a full-fledged profile, complete with family tree and physical description.

11. Simulate dialogue between characters

You can also use generative AI to simulate dialogue. This can be helpful both from a creative and marketing perspective.

For example, you could ask ChatGPT to create a conversation between two personas that represent your target audience—and then turn the output into a short commercial.

If you’re writing creatively, you could ask an AI text generator to develop an example of a conversation between two fictional characters. This can be helpful if you’re experiencing writer’s block when it comes time to write an important conversation in a story.

12. Add unique images to your work

You can use AI to boost your writing in ways that don’t even involve words, too. If you have a great blog post that you’re ready to publish, but aren’t finding the right stock image, you can explore using AI. A number of AI writing tools—including Jasper, Gemini, and ChatGPT—have the ability to generate images.

Once you know how to prompt an AI image generator, you can create all kinds of graphics—including images that are sized for social media posts, blog headers, and more.

13. Get feedback on your writing skills

AI writing assistants can also give you feedback on your writing quality, readability, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. Purpose-specific tools can be helpful here. If you write a lot of SEO content, you may find that a tool like Clearscope or Surfer (which integrates with Jasper) gives you the most detailed feedback.

Creative writers might like ProWritingAid, as its analysis compares their writing to a favorite author's—and provides feedback on things like plot structure and pacing.

If you're looking for more general edits and feedback related to your writing style, you could use an AI chat program. Some, like ChatGPT, can even read your work aloud to you so you can hear how it sounds.

To enhance your AI usage even more, check out Upwork’s complete guide to ChatGPT prompts that you can use right now.

Where AI writing tools fall short

AI writing assistants have come a long way thanks to advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, but they still can’t replicate the full depth of human creativity.

While large language models (LLMs) are skilled at predicting word combinations and mimicking tone, they don’t actually understand what they’re saying. They don’t grasp emotion, nuance, or context the way people do. This becomes especially clear when you ask AI to generate something poetic, symbolic, or emotionally layered—it often misses the mark.

Here are a few areas where generative AI tools still struggle:

• Originality. AI pulls from patterns in existing content—it doesn’t originate new concepts in the way human minds can.
• Emotional depth. While AI can describe emotion, it doesn’t feel it. That makes it harder for AI-generated content to resonate on a deep, personal level.
• Subtle humor, irony, or metaphor. AI might generate jokes or figurative language, but they’re often clunky or off-base because the model doesn’t understand subtext.

This doesn’t mean AI isn’t useful—just that it needs a creative partner. As a writer, your instincts, experience, and emotional intelligence are what bring the human touch. AI can support the process, but it can’t replace your voice.

Good AI output means there’s a human in the mix

No matter how you decide to use AI in your own writing process, be sure that you personally are always putting the finishing touches on everything, not unquestioningly using what the AI has suggested.

Fact-check AI output for hallucinations

One of the biggest reasons that AI needs a human touch is that its outputs are often riddled with inaccuracies. These are commonly called “hallucinations” and can include:

• Incorrect information about events
• Mixed-up details about people and companies
• The wrong answers to math problems
• Buggy code
• Completely fabricated statistics and case studies
• Old, outdated, or incorrect links
• Unrealistic images

Any AI tool can hallucinate—even those connected to the internet—so it's important to always double-check your outputs.

Add your voice and personality

AI is great at replicating different, famous voices—just try asking it to rewrite your latest blog post like Shakespeare—and can even adjust your tone of voice so the content sounds professional, conversational, or serious.

It's not, however, always great at sounding just like you or your client. Using AI writing tools like Jasper, which supports brand voice training, can help. And if you have a ChatGPT Plus account, you can build a custom GPT that's trained on your prior writing or your client's brand guidelines.

Use AI ethically

There are definite ethical questions around the use of AI, including whether AI-powered tools are plagiarizing the material on which they were trained.

As a writer, if you take what an AI produces and use it verbatim, only to find out that part of it was copied directly from another source, you could be on the hook for plagiarizing someone else’s work, or even for copyright infringement.

This is why tweaking output, including editing AI-generated images, is key. You could also run your AI-generated text through a plagiarism checker like the one available to Grammarly users.

AI outputs can even show bias gleaned from training data. Keep a close eye on what the AI output says, and adjust it accordingly if you notice a bias showing.

Make sure your clients are OK with AI

The information you feed into tools like ChatGPT may be used to train more advanced AI models. This can create privacy issues if you’re using the tool to do work for a client.

Before you use AI as part of a client project, make sure you’ve cleared it with them. Your client may request that you limit the information you provide to the AI, change the outputs, or refrain from using such services altogether.

Also note that training policies can vary between paid plans and free plans. Make sure you read the terms and conditions for any AI tool that you use to write content for clients.

Why AI-savvy writers are in demand

AI tools may streamline the writing process, but businesses still need professionals who can use them well. That’s where AI-savvy writers come in. These freelancers understand both the capabilities and limitations of AI, allowing them to produce content that’s faster, more scalable, and still rooted in human voice and strategy.

Demand is growing across industries, from startups creating blog content to enterprise teams managing global campaigns. Writers who know how to guide AI tools, fine-tune outputs, and align content with brand standards help companies get the best of both worlds: AI speed with human-level quality.

They’re also uniquely positioned to support fast-moving marketing teams, editorial operations, and creative departments where volume, consistency, and turnaround time all matter. In short, AI alone isn’t the answer—but writers who know how to wield it effectively are.

AI writing job opportunities

While some companies may indeed prefer that you not use AI in your work, increasing numbers of businesses are excited to embrace this new technology.

Start by experimenting with tools like Jasper or Upwork Chat Pro in your work. If you find that you like the impact it has on your writing and workflow, you can then look for clients who are looking for the help of an AI writing professional. All it takes is an Upwork account—sign up or log in today to begin exploring new AI writing job opportunities.

Upwork does not control, operate, or sponsor the other tools or services discussed in this article, which are only provided as potential options. Each reader and company should take the time to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.