As AI becomes more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, it also becomes more helpful. Writing essays can be an arduous and difficult process. Writer’s block is all too common and many times, essays can become a big burden. Now with AI generators and content creation tools, creating essays can be quick, fun, and easy.
Many different use cases can apply to AI essay generators. If you’re a student working on a last minute paper you can leverage this to be more efficient. If you’re a professional creating a write up based off of novel research and information, you can use an AI as a generator to quickly generate a first draft.
A few years ago, the only thing that these tools were good for was sentence and paragraph creation. The output would need to be heavily edited as it would sound robotic and impersonal. Fast forward to 2023, and many of these tools have evolved to powerful suites that not only generate content but also help with research, fact checking, personalized writing, and more.
In this article we will take a detailed look at the leading AI essay writer tools and applications. Based on a combination of factors like ease of use, pricing, originality, and more, these are currently the best offerings on the market.
6+ Best AI Essay Writers
Jenni.ai
This is by far the best AI essay writing tool, period. Not only does it generate great content, but it also comes with helpful features like in text citations, plagiarism checking, and more. It’s used by businesses and universities like Harvard, Google, MIT, and many more.
Jenni AI Editor
You’ll be surprised to not see this in many other list articles, and that’s because those articles are written by people who don’t actually use these tools every day, unlike us.
It’s multilingual, and uses the latest AI models including GPT 4. It’s also truly intended for students who are writing essays; you won’t be able to generate a bunch of generic content from one prompt, instead it will augment the writing process of an essay with high quality suggestions based on legitimate sources, and then superpower the writing experience with additional tools.
For example, if you have a lot of PDF documents that you must reference in an essay, you can upload it to the tool, quickly chat with the content within the PDF to find the best sources, and then automatically inject this content directly into your essay.
If you’re looking to write more of the essay, it can also be used as a helpful research assistant and AI essay outline generator.
Jasper.ai
Jasper AI was one of the first major AI writing platforms, and still offers one of the best products on the market.
Jasper in 2023
It’s much more business oriented, so if you are writing personal essays or using AI for academics, there are better options out there. However, if you are a brand looking to retain your brand voice when writing business essays (blog posts, reports, content like that) this may be a great option for you.
All you do is upload all of your brand documents. This could include website copy, business mission statements, brand book, and more. Then, the underlying AI learns about your company and understands the tone and voice that you typically write in.
From there, it will generate highly accurate content specific to your individual brand.
It starts at $39 a month and includes one brand voice.
Caktus.ai
This is an AI assistant built specifically for students and academic use. It helps you write essays, offering citations and academic sources built in. However, it also helps you with math and science questions, coding, and more. It’s an all in one platform, but if you’re looking for a great AI essay writer in the academic arena, this is definitely one to consider.
Caktus AI in the process of writing an essay WITH citations.
When writing essays, one of the biggest considerations is accurate data and cited sources. The last thing you want is an essay that is inaccurate and plagiarizing from other papers and people. Caktus solves this issue by integrating with a database called CORE. CORE is a global aggregator of Open Access repositories and journals. That means, the essay writer has direct access to high quality information from peer reviewed papers that can be cited when generating an essay or content.
You can also upload a sample of your real writing, which will tune the AI output to sound much more like you.
Once the essay is generated, you can leverage the built in text editor to format everything the way you’d like, and export it as a PDF, Word document, or something else. It truly is a tool built for students, so if you’re looking to generate an essay for school, this one may be the best option for you.
Pricing wise it comes in at $3.99 a month.
QuillBot
QuillBot has been around for a long time, before even the release of ChatGPT and the popularization of AI essay writing tools like Jasper. There are actually three tools that this platform has to offer one being Co writer, the second being paraphraser, and the third being summarizer.
Quillbot CoWriter platform
If you’re a student, there are additional tools like translation and “citation generator”.
All of these can be used in tandem to quickly create essays leveraging the efficiencies of AI. The primary tool is the paraphraser tool. It will take writing and offer alternative versions that you can then use in text.
The summarizer will take large quantities of text and summarize it identifying key sentences or writing a summary paragraph. This won’t necessarily help in the actual writing of an essay, but by leveraging AI to distill the key points from research information, you can then use it in an essay. It’s much quicker than needing to read everything!
The Co-Writer is a more defined application that’s billed as a next generation word processor. It comes with summarization, writing assistance, web search, citations, and enhancement tools to quickly research, write, and check for plagiarism and AI detection.
This is a free tool, but has a relatively limited demo. If you expect yourself to be using it a lot, the premium plan comes in at $8.33 per month if billed annually (58% discount compared to monthly billing).
ChatGPT / Google Bard / Claude / Coral
We will lump these tools together as they are intended to be publicly accessible chat bots that leverage LLM’s to fulfill many different purposes. However, because they are free, many people successfully use them to write essays with ease. The two biggest options in 2023 are Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s BARD chatbot.
Coral by Co:here
Claude by Anthropic
Bard by Google
ChatGPT by Google
Other options from smaller startups are Claude.ai by Anthropic and Coral (still in waitlist) by Co:here.
These are not the most traditional writing experiences as they are done in a conversational manner but you can use them to output entire essays at once or single paragraphs that then can be edited and formed into an overarching essay. However, there are some drawbacks when using these tools.
First it’s a conversational interface and not a traditional document editor. This isn’t incredibly helpful when it comes to actually writing content, and you’ll likely find yourself copying and pasting into Microsoft Word or something similar.
Second, there are no traditional tools for essay writing like revision history, the ability to edit inline, comment in, collaboration, and stuff like that.
Third, because they are free and some of the most popular AI tools available, everybody uses them and the outputs, if not edited, can be very easily identified as “written by AI”. This can be done using popular AI detector tools or just an eyeball test.
Google BARD is free with no paid plan. ChatGPT Is also free but comes with a paid option that allows you to access GBT 4 which has much improved writing capabilities (compared to GPT3) that not only are more accurate but also just sound better.
Claude is free for limited usage, and Coral is still behind a waitlist.
In terms of generating a lot of content and AI essays for free (ie you’re on a budget), ChatGPT and Google BARD may be the best options for you.
Other Options
There’s no shortage of AI Essay Writers (it seems like multiple launch every day) but many of them are just leveraging the same APIs and user interface. This article lists several tools that do things a little bit differently than everybody else, offering value where others don’t.
If you’d like to take a look through the hundreds of other tools available, this is a great website that lists pretty much every AI as a writer out there, alongside pricing and additional facts:
Using AI Writers For Academic Essays – our thoughts
If you’re a student looking to write an essay with AI, especially if you’re using a free tool, you should consider a few things. First, AI writing is relatively detectable, especially if you are using a free tool (though it can be made undetectable).
AI writing will be the future, and it’s important to begin learning how best to leverage this new technology to be the most efficient version of yourself. However, using an AI tool to write a complete essay without fact checking or editing is a poor idea for a few reasons.
First, there is a question of academic integrity and plagiarism. Each institution takes that different approach when it comes to AI writing. And, as we mentioned above, AI writing itself shouldn’t be penalized. But low effort output should, which consists of typing in a single sentence and then submitting whatever output comes from it with no additional work.
That’s why we really like the tools that incorporate additional features like research and fact checking features.
Second, if everybody is using these same general prompts and tools to write and generate their essays, many of the essays will sound similar. When the teacher goes to review these essays, it becomes very apparent which ones are written by humans and which ones are written by AI. Therefore, we always suggest using AI when writing essays as an ideation tool, and for only a first draft. Then, go back over with a fine-tuned comb. Fact check and edit to make it much more human.
Third, AI is wrong, A LOT. LLMs will do something that is coined as hallucination. That’s when they will make up a fact, but it will read in a convincing manner. For example, they may state that America was founded in the 1600s.
AI hallucination via Wikipedia
Obviously this is wrong, but the AI may still hallucinate this. This is a very blatant example, but hallucinations typically occur when you’re writing about something that isn’t well known and documented.
So, if you’re trying to write an essay about a little known historical event, a new scientific discovery, etc… be very diligent when it comes to fact checking because you will find hallucinations everywhere you look.
Conclusion
AI is the future of writing, and you could see that with the quality of the tools in 2023.
In this article, we covered several different AI essay writers that each bring a different approach to the table. Some, like Quillbot, offer multiple tools under one platform, while others (Caktus) integrate directly with academic databases to include and cite the right information.
Jenni.ai Is at the top of our list due to the user interface, built-in citation machine, and general approach to leverage AI and human writing together to result in the best possible output.
We hope that this article is helpful, and if you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.