Understanding AI in Writing: What it Means for Freelancers
The writing world is overrun with talk of artificial intelligence, but these conversations seem only to happen at the extreme ends of a spectrum where AI is either useless or taking your job. The truth, like most truths, lies somewhere in between the extremes.
AI isn't replacing writers; it's supporting them. Now, you—a freelancer—might consider yourself the Lone Wolf type. You might think you don't need support. And, sure, you might not. Writing, after all, is typically a solo effort. But also: you're thinking about it wrong, because there's more to your job than just writing. The same is true about AI.
Yes, artificial intelligence can help you write, but it's not all that it can do for you. The trick is understanding that AI tools are just that: tools. They're more like sophisticated spell-checkers than sentient writing machines. They can help you brainstorm, research, and polish your work. They can help you stay organized, handle your repetitive tasks, and manage your workflows. They cannot replace your humanity, though. That's what jobs are for.
The Rise of AI in Creative and Professional Writing
Despite the doom and gloom predictions, the freelance writing market is actually expanding in the AI era: Writing jobs on Freelancer.com saw a remarkable surge of over 20% in the third quarter of 2023. Copy typing jobs increased by 28.7%, Microsoft Word projects by 24.7%, and copywriting by 23.8%. Even creative writing and content writing projects saw significant growth at 22.4% and 19.4% respectively.
However, it's worth noting that some areas have seen decline since ChatGPT became mainstream, particularly in translation and customer service writing. This makes sense for customer service writing—literally operator's manuals, warranty information, phone tree scripts, and other completely noncreative prose where a machine does the job just fine. Honestly, good riddance. Nobody got into freelance writing dreaming of crafting warranty disclaimers.
So what does this mean for you, the freelance writer who's still on the fence about AI? Well, it means the market is adapting, not dying. The jobs that require actual human creativity, insight, and experience still constitute nearly all of the jobs.
AI Solutions for Content Creation and Efficiency
Did we just spend several paragraphs telling you that AI tools for freelance writers are about much more than writing? We sure did.
Are we about to tell you about the best tools to help you with your writing? We sure are.
Type.ai: The Freelancer's All-in-One Editor, Intern, and Writing Workshop
Type.ai was conceived as a comprehensive solution for freelance writers who want to streamline their content creation process. It can help with everything from initial research to final polishing, as much as or as little as you want. As a fully functioning word processor with a built-in AI writing assistant, freelancers who juggle multiple projects simultaneously will very much appreciate the efficiency boost Type gives them.
And, while Type can't replace your own creativity, one of its standout features is its suggestions for Content Ideas: as a document aware AI, Type analyzes what you've written and then gives ideas on where to take it if you get stuck. All of its features offer a balance of creative and operational support.
Key Features:
- AI-Powered Document Editor: Type.ai integrates advanced AI capabilities directly into a user-friendly document editor, allowing for seamless content creation, document reviews, and editing.
- AI Models: Speed mode utilizes models like GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude Haiku for rapid responses, suitable for general writing tasks. When you need to give more complex prompts and get high-quality results, Power Mode uses more advanced models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
- Type Chat: A chat-based writing assistant embedded within the editor, similar to ChatGPT, designed to assist with research, provide feedback, brainstorm ideas, and rewrite content as needed.
- Content Ideas Sidebar: Offers dynamic suggestions and ideation support, evolving as you write to enhance creativity and content development.
- Blocks-Based Editing: Utilizes a system where each piece of content (text, headers, images, etc.) is treated as an individual block, allowing for easy rearrangement and formatting within the document.
- Inline AI Commands: Enables users to interact with the AI directly from the cursor's position, facilitating a more integrated and efficient writing process.
- Rewriting and Transformations: Allows for the selection of text to be rewritten or transformed using various "Brushes" for tasks like grammar correction or text shortening, as well as custom transformations based on user instructions.
- Multilingual Support: Automatically detects and responds in the language used within the document, with GPT-4 capable of generating text in over 200 languages.
- Export and Sharing Options: Supports exporting documents in multiple formats, including PDF, DOCX, HTML, and Markdown, and allows for sharing via view-only URLs or publishing as posts on a Type blog.
- Save Prompts: Save a variety of different prompts, tailored for different purposes and brand voices, for quick creation of content.
Writesonic: Crafting Content with Style
Writesonic is more marketing centric, an AI-powered writing tool designed to assist businesses, marketers, and individuals in creating blog posts, social media copy, ad campaigns, and more. With a focus on ease-of-use, it offers a wide range of templates, customization options, and multilingual support, making it suitable for both personal and professional content creation.
Its ability to optimize content for SEO and provide tools for idea generation makes it a versatile and powerful resource for anyone looking to enhance their writing process.
Key Features:
- Content Generation: Creates long-form blog posts, social media copy, product descriptions, and ad copy.
- Templates: Offers 70+ templates for emails, landing pages, headlines, and more.
- SEO Optimization: Integrates keywords and generates meta titles/descriptions.
- Integrations: Connect Writesonic to other apps in your marketing stack (Wordpress, Google Drive, and Ahrefs, to name a few) and automate your workflows.
- Multilingual Support: Writes content in over 25 languages.
- AI Editing Tools: Rewrites, expands, or improves text for clarity and engagement.
Rytr.me: Budget Friendly AI Writer
Rytr is an affordable AI writing assistant that's good for freelancers who want to dip their toes into the world of AI without breaking the bank. While it may not have all the advanced features of premium tools like Type, it offers similar functionality at a fraction of the cost. With a limited free plan that's like a perpetual free trial, it's an excellent entry point for writers who are curious about AI but hesitant to make a significant investment.
The platform provides a straightforward, no-frills approach to AI-assisted writing. For freelancers who are just starting to explore AI tools, Rytr offers a gentle learning curve and enough capabilities to get a real sense of how AI can enhance their writing workflow.
Key Features:
- Content Generation: Supports various use cases, including emails, SEO meta titles, and call-to-action prompts, while providing templates for diverse content types, streamlining the writing process.
- Tone and Language Customization: Offers multiple pre-programmed tones of voice, as well as a Tone Match feature to mimic the style of your exiting content.
- AI Editing Tools: Features like 'Continue Writing' and 'Rephrase' help refine and expand existing text, while the included grammar checking and text improvement functionalities to enhance clarity and correctness.
- Plagiarism Checker: Ensures content originality by detecting duplicate content.
- Browser Extension: Allows users to generate and edit content directly within their preferred platforms.
Tailored AI Tools for Research and Editing
While it's the generative writing tools that grab most of the headlines, some of the most powerful AI applications for writers actually focus on the bookends of the writing process. From streamlining research and fact-checking to polishing your final draft, these specialized tools handle the heavy lifting before you write your first word and after you type your last period. Let's look at some standout options that make the entire writing process smoother and more efficient.
Grammarly: Your Virtual Editor for Polished Writing
Grammarly has evolved from a simple, albeit well-known, spelling and grammar checker to a sophisticated writing assistant. Rather, it's less of an assistant and more like a teacher looking over your shoulder. Beyond catching basic errors, it now explains them and their fixes and can offer style suggestions or tone adjustments according to what you're writing.
The educational aspect of Grammarly makes it ideal for students, but even professionals can use the help. Being successful at writing doesn't automatically mean you're good at spelling. Or grammar. Or writing, for that matter (looking at you, Dr. Phil).
Key Features:
- Grammar and Spelling Checker: Detects and corrects grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in real-time.
- Tone and Clarity Suggestions: Offers suggestions to improve tone, clarity, and conciseness, ensuring the content aligns with the intended audience.
- Plagiarism Checker: Compares text against billions of web pages to identify potential plagiarism.
- Style and Consistency Enhancements: Helps maintain consistent style and formatting, such as ensuring proper use of formal or casual language.
- Vocabulary Enhancement: Suggests synonyms and word replacements to make writing more engaging and impactful.
- Writing Goals Customization: Allows users to set goals (e.g., audience, tone, intent) to tailor suggestions.
- Multilingual Support: Offers corrections and suggestions for English dialects (e.g., American, British, Canadian, Australian).
Hemingway App: Simplifying Complex Concepts
Hemingway's most famous advice to writers was to "write drunk, edit sober." Given that someone who displays no personality changes between drunk and sober is called a Hemingway Drunk, one has to wonder what the point was for him. Regardless of what he imbibed while writing, Hemingway is renowned as the master of clear, concise writing.
The Hemingway App helps you achieve that same clarity in your own work. It's particularly valuable for technical writers or anyone who needs to explain complex ideas in simple terms. Think of it as your personal clarity coach, helping you avoid the dreaded "purple prose."
Key Features:
- Readability Analysis: Highlights sentences that are hard to read or overly complex, suggesting simplifications.
- Adverb and Passive Voice Detection: Identifies excessive use of adverbs and passive voice, encouraging stronger, more direct writing.
- Sentence Structure Suggestions: Flags overly long or complicated sentences and offers suggestions for concise alternatives.
- Grade-Level Scoring: Assigns a readability score based on U.S. grade levels to help writers gauge the accessibility of their content.
- Offline Desktop App: Provides a distraction-free writing environment with an optional one-time purchase for Mac and Windows.
- Color-Coded Feedback: Uses color highlights (e.g., yellow for hard-to-read sentences, red for very hard-to-read) for quick identification of issues.
Perplexity.AI: Ensuring Textual Accuracy
Perplexity.AI is your fact-checking companion. Given that AI is prone to hallucinations/flat-out makes things up, it seems counterintuitive to rely on AI to fact check for you. But Perplexity was built with this task in mind, with the proper guardrails to ensure that you're only getting accurate information.
Perplexity is one of the few AI tools that actually understands the nuance of facts. Claude has the same kind of safety guardrails against misinformation, but when confronted with a question it can't answer it just, well, won't answer it. That's better than making things up. Even better than that is how Perplexity responds to a fact check of a ChatGPT hallucination:
Perplexity can also be used as a straight fact finding tool—it's not just a way check other tools. Skip Google and go to Perplexity next time: you'll get your questions answered conversationally, with each fact sourced to a specific link.
Key Features:
- Conversational Search Interface: Engages users in a dialogue-like manner, allowing for natural language queries and follow-up questions, enhancing the search experience.
- Real-Time Information Retrieval: Provides up-to-date answers by accessing current web data, ensuring responses reflect the latest information available.
- Citation and Source Tracking: Offers responses with citations, allowing users to verify and further explore the origins of the information provided.
- Summarization Capability: Distills large volumes of information into concise summaries, aiding in quick comprehension of complex topics.
- Multimodal Capabilities: Allows users to upload documents and images to inform searches, providing a more comprehensive understanding of queries.
DeepL: Advanced Translation for Multilingual FreelancingDeepL is an AI-powered translation service that goes beyond simple word for word translations. Unlike traditional translation tools, DeepL uses technology advanced enough that it wouldn't help to explain it to you (because we don't understand it well enough to explain it to you). The upshot of this is that DeepL provides context-aware translations that capture the nuanced meaning of text. It supports translations across over 30 languages, with a strong focus on European and Asian languages.
Key Features:
- Text Translation: Offers high-quality translations that maintain context, tone, and style across multiple languages.
- Document Translation: Beyond simply translating, DeepL maintains original formatting when translating entire documents.
- API Access: Integration with other software and content management systems means you can keep your existing tools
- Browser Integrations: Plugins for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other platforms are available to integrate DeepL into cloud apps.
- Glossary Customization: Enables users to add specific terminology for more precise translations.
- Multilingual Support: Covers languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and more
Maximizing Productivity with AI Tools for Task Management
Being a freelance writer means you're wearing a dozen different hats. If you're writing about hats, that number goes way up. The fact is you're not just writing—you're kind of a business owner, and the manager of your team of one. Managing projects, tracking deadlines, organizing research, and trying to keep your sanity intact are all part of the job. AI can help with three of those things.
Notion AI: Organizing Workflows and Ideas
Notion AI is a powerful suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to enhance productivity and streamline repetitive tasks. This innovative feature set allows users to leverage AI capabilities for summarization, translation, editing—as well as acting as the single source of organizational truth for businesses. For freelancers juggling multiple clients, this kind of assistance means they can treat each client as their only one.
Key Features:
- Custom Autofill Options: Tailors autofill suggestions based on stored data for enhanced efficiency.
- Action Item Creation: Extracts action items from meeting notes for better task management.
- Text Summarization: Automatically generates concise summaries from lengthy documents or meeting notes.
- Q&A Feature: Allows users to ask questions about their documents and receive contextual answers.
- Wikis: Enables teams to create and maintain comprehensive knowledge bases with AI-assisted organization and updates.
Asana Intelligence & ClickUp AI: Streamlining Project Management
Asana is a leading project management platform, a known and respected cloud based PM solution that pre-dates the current AI boom. But now that we're in that boom, Asana has integrated advanced AI capabilities to enhance productivity and (and, let's be honest, stay competitive).
Asana AI, also known as Asana Intelligence, provides context-aware assistance across the platform. Introduced in 2023 and continuously evolving, Asana AI aims to automate tasks, generate insights, and facilitate more efficient collaboration.
Key Features:
- AI Teammates: Customized AI assistants that can automate tasks, orchestrate workflows, and answer employee questions.
- Smart Fields: Automatically generates and populates custom fields based on project context.
- Smart Summaries: Creates concise summaries of tasks and generates subtasks from detailed descriptions.
- Smart Goals: Helps define more effective and realistic goals based on past performance and organizational standards
- Smart Digests: Generates project updates highlighting recent changes and priority items.
- Smart Workflows: Creates optimized workflows based on natural language instructions.
- Smart Answers: Provides insights and answers questions about projects using natural language queries
- Smart Projects: Builds project structures based on user descriptions
Zapier: Automating Repetitive Freelance Tasks
Zapier's another well known company that made its name before AI became so ubiquitous. For a company that built its reputation on no-code automation of tasks for just about any app, the introduction of AI to their ecosystem comes as no surprise. These new AI tools are designed to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and make automation more accessible to users without coding experience.
The integration of AI into Zapier's core functionality allows users to leverage natural language processing, machine learning, and large language models to automate complex tasks, generate content, and optimize business processes.
Key Features:
- Zapier Agents: AI-powered assistants that can access business data, work across multiple apps, and handle tasks autonomously.
- AI-powered Zap Builder (Copilot): Generates Zaps from natural language descriptions and guides users through the creation process.
- Canvas: AI-assisted diagramming tool for visualizing and optimizing business processes.
- AI by Zapier: Built-in AI tool that integrates GPT-4o mini into workflows without requiring a separate API key.
- Zapier Chatbots: Allows creation of custom AI chatbots based on knowledge sources and web scraping.
- Code Generation with AI: Creates JavaScript or Python code for custom Zap steps
- AI-powered Troubleshooting: Explains errors and suggests solutions for Zap runs.
- Zapier Agents Chrome Extension: Brings AI assistants to any webpage for in-browser actions
These AI features collectively transform Zapier from a simple automation tool into a comprehensive AI-powered workspace, enabling users to create more intelligent, adaptive, and efficient workflows across their entire tech stack.
Concluding Thoughts: Future-Proofing Your Freelance Writing Career
AI's capabilities are evolving rapidly, but don't let that intimidate you. If you stay informed, you'll be less likely to become overwhelmed. Follow industry blogs, join writing communities, and experiment with new tools as they emerge. At least, experiment with the tools that seem like they can help you.
The statistics tell an encouraging story: 98.9% of freelance writers who've lost clients in 2023 lost them to budget cuts, not AI replacement. Only a tiny fraction—0.6% of writers—reported losing significant business to AI tools. This reinforces what we already know: good writing requires human creativity, emotional intelligence, and authentic connection.
As we move forward, the most successful freelance writers will be those who find the sweet spot between leveraging AI's efficiency and maintaining their authentic voice. So go ahead, give these tools a try. You might find that they're not so scary after all – and they might just help you become a better, more productive writer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will AI replace freelancing?
No, AI won't replace freelancing. It will, however, transform it. AI functions—and shines—as your powerful assistant rather than your replacement. While AI can help with research, outlines, and basic content generation, it can't replicate the strategic thinking, deep subject matter expertise, and nuanced understanding of client needs that professional freelancers bring to the table. The idea with adoption is to adapt and integrate AI tools into your workflow where they make sense, using them to handle routine tasks while you focus on high-value creative work and client relationships.
What is the best AI tool for freelance writers?
It really depends on what you need it to do. There are a number of AI tools that handle all kinds of business tasks, far more than writing. Freelance writers are deploying AI more for the tasks that aren't actually writing related, like project management, organizational tasks, and automations.The "best" AI writing tool really depends on your specific needs and workflow. While tools like ChatGPT have grabbed headlines, specialized writing assistants like Type.ai or Jasper might better serve your particular niche.
Are any kinds of freelance writing jobs vulnerable to AI?
Basic content like product descriptions, simple news summaries, and customer service related documents (think help files, warranty cards, etc.) are at risk, though these aren't exactly the kinds of gigs freelancers are clamoring for. Translation services—at least in a professional setting—will also see a shift. However, high-value writing that requires deep subject matter expertise, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking remains largely AI-resistant. This includes areas like thought leadership content, technical writing for complex topics, and creative storytelling.
