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      Generating text with help from AI Assist

      Understanding a tool to help you start writing, as well as its limitations

      Written by Adam Marcus

      AI Assist is a feature that helps you start writing text for your website and emails. Since AI for generating text is a relatively new technology, you should not publish its output without editing and fact-checking, and you should understand the technology's limitations.

      You can use AI Assist anywhere this box appears, such as on a page, section, service, team member, or a whole blog post:

      1. Click Generate text
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      2. Select a tone (e.g., Informative).
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      3. Enter details. For the details field, either include keywords or include a short description. For example: “Payroll and cash flow management services, manage accounting for small businesses” or “We specialize in payroll and cash flow management services for small businesses”. You generally don't have to include the name of your business, your industry, or location, as these are already provided to our algorithms. Nonetheless, including them should not negatively affect the output of the AI.

      This video shows how a blog post can be generated using AI Assist:

      You can also click the lightning bolt icon in any text box. Then:

      1. Select a use case (e.g., email or Paragraph content).
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      2. Select a tone (e.g., Informative).
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      3. Provide a prompt (e.g., Describe our architecture firm's site planning service).
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      4. Click Generate text, and AI Assist will present you with a draft for further editing and vetting.

         

      This animation shows AI Assist using the lightning box to edit text in action:

      If you select text before clicking the lightning bolt icon, the selected text will be replaced by AI Assist. If you don't select text before clicking the lightning bolt icon, AI Assist will insert the text at the current cursor position. This behavior is a bit different for generating blog posts, as blog post drafts are longer than any other generated text. Therefore the entire blog post, not just the highlighted text, is replaced when a user regenerates it.

      Where you can use AI Assist

      Some applications of AI Assist include:

      Email marketing announcements

      Writing a blog post


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      Writing a description of your business

      Be mindful of current limitations

      The latest generation of AI-powered text generation tools is quite powerful. Used responsibly, the tools help support your creativity and save you time. While it's hard for people to distinguish AI-generated text from human-generated text, you shouldn't publish the output of an AI text generator. Ultimately, you should view the text generated by AI as a rough draft for you to critically review, fact check, and edit.

      We have evaluated our tool across several scenarios and have published the biases and limitations of the implementation. Here are some considerations for when you review AI-generated text:

      • Your voice. While it's convenient to have a nice starting point for your content, the content you publish to your website is a reflection of you and your business. Your website is sometimes the first impression your clients will have of you. For clients that make time to learn about your business, make sure your own philosophy, values, and advice make their way into the content you provide them.

      • Bias. Since the AI that powers this technology is trained on content that can be found on the web, the technology is susceptible to various biases (e.g., gender and race). For example, an AI generating text about a male lawyer's skills might use different language than it would to describe a female lawyer's skills.

      • Fact-checking. The AI that powers the technology generates text, not facts. While the text might be believable, it might not be factual. You should check any fact in the text generated by the AI, as it might be entirely invalid.

      • Plagiarism. By virtue of being trained on text from the web, the text that is generated might be similar to other content on the web. You should vet that the text isn't too similar to other text on the web before publishing it. A free tool like Grammarly's plagiarism checker is a good place to start.

      • Search engine optimization (SEO). It's possible to detect machine-generated content, and search engines might penalize such content. Publishing your machine-generated draft without making it your own will not only underserve your visitors, but might also reduce its likelihood of your content being highly ranked in search engine results.