We Tried an AI Content Writer So You Didn't Have To

At Myers Freelance LLC, we get spam messages all the time. One, however, caught our eye in the instant before we could delete it. We were being offered an “exclusive free trial” to try out the beta version of Jasper, an artificial intelligence (AI) program that had been “taught” to write online marketing material.

We had to give it a spin.

We quickly learned that the “exclusive” trial for the “beta” version of the program was the exact same thing that was being offered on Jasper’s website for the publicly-available (non-beta) product, which was equally disappointing.

The trial was for 7 days. We cancelled it after 4 to make sure our card wasn’t charged.

What is Jasper and How Does It Work?

Jasper is an AI program that has been “taught” to write online marketing content. The educational videos provided by the company behind Jasper tend to avoid answering how Jasper actually does this, and instead focus on what you need to do to make Jasper produce content.

Were we to speculate, though, we’d guess that Jasper takes the title and keywords that you want, “reads” the results from search engine queries, and then repeats what it finds in different language.

That’s basically when copywriters do, after all. But the thought of an artificial intelligence program doing it is just concerning. Not because we’re worried about our jobs. It’s because we know there’s so much more to it than that.

But we were interested.

The trial was for 7 days and offered 10,000 words for free. We were also given access to the private Facebook group where other Jasper users could interact.

Jasper, Write Me a Legal Blog Article

In practice, Jasper proved to be less of a writing machine than a writing assistant. A below average one. Like a new paralegal with no experience.

Using “Document Mode,” which we would use for well over 90 percent of our writing content, we tasked Jasper with a simple article to see what it could do: Comparative Negligence in Missouri Car Accident Cases. That went into the “title” field. For “tone of voice”: Professional. Under “content description / brief,” we wrote “How the doctrine of comparative negligence works in assigning fault to drivers who cause car accidents in Missouri” and chose “comparative negligence,” “Missouri,” and “car accident” as our keywords.

We hit “compose” and this is what we got:

In Missouri, the doctrine of comparative negligence is used to assign fault to drivers who cause car accidents. Under this doctrine, each driver is responsible for their own actions and negligent behavior. If one driver is more at fault than the other, then they may be liable for a greater portion of the damages.

comparative negligence allows plaintiffs to

To what? That’s a strange indent for the second paragraph, and “comparative” should be capitalized. But aside from that, okay so far.

A notification told us that Jasper had more to say. Maybe he’d finish the sentence? We clicked it.

comparative negligence allows plaintiffs to recover damages even if they are partially at fault for an accident. In order to recover damages, the plaintiff must prove that the other driver was more at fault than they were. comparative negligence can be a complicated legal doctrine, so it is important to consult with an experienced car accident attorney to discuss your case.

Okay, so we’re not capitalizing “comparative.” But a very basic overview of what we’re talking about. At 115 words, a bit long for an introduction, especially if we’re writing a 500-word blog post, but acceptable.

Now we need Jasper to delve a bit. We turned to some tips from Jasper’s creators (https://youtu.be/cW58Ghe6r2o), added what we wanted the next section to be, and tweaked the title (“When is the Doctrine of Comparative Negligence Used?”) and content descriptions (“Explain when shared fault rules are used to assign liability between joint tortfeasors”). We also added “joint tortfeasors” as a keyword. After coaxing a couple of extra batches of content out of Jasper, we got this:

When is the Doctrine of Comparative Negligence Used?

joint tortfeasors are two or more people who are jointly liable for a single injury. In Missouri, joint tortfeasors can be held liable for their negligence in causing an accident. The doctrine of comparative negligence is used to assign fault to joint tortfeasors. Under this doctrine, each joint tortfeasor is liable for their own actions and negligent behavior. If one joint tortfeasor is more at fault than the other, then they may be liable for a greater portion of the damages.

comparative negligence allows plaintiffs to recover damages even if they are partially at fault for an accident. In order to recover damages, the plaintiff must prove that the other joint tortfeasor was more at fault than they were. comparative negligence can be a complicated legal doctrine, so it is important to consult with an experienced car accident attorney to discuss your case.

If you have been involved in a car accident, contact The Cagle Law Firm today for a free consultation. Our experienced attorneys can help you understand

A whole bunch of reactions, so far:

This… isn’t terrible, though the style is aggressively normal and forgettable, though we’re also using a “professional” tone of voice,
Including only one keyword isn’t a good idea,
Stopping in the middle of sentences is something that Jasper does,
It is either a keyword or it can get capitalized, but not both, and
The Cagle Law Firm is a personal injury firm in St. Louis, Missouri, with this page on comparative negligence in car accidents in Missouri.

Let’s see if Jasper can explain the difference between pure and modified comparative negligence, shall we? We decided to give him some extra room to work with and increased the “output length” to “longer” (110-115 words) from “medium” (50-55 words). Maybe that will reduce the number of times we have to coax Jasper to keep going.

We threw the next section header into the “title” field and, in the “content description” field, told Jasper to “Explain what pure comparative negligence means. Explain what modified comparative negligence means. Tell me which rule Missouri uses.” Modified and pure comparative negligence each got a keyword, as did “Missouri.”

Does Missouri Use Pure Comparative Negligence Rules or Modified Comparative Negligence?

When is the Doctrine of Comparative Negligence Used?

joint tortfeasors are

Oh. This is all we’re going to get.

Not only does this new content look suspiciously like the old content, particularly given the final two lines, but is also counts against our word limit. Our trial is a 7-day, 10,000-word trial. These useless 137 words go towards our limit.

Okay, Jasper, Let’s Try Again

Maybe that wasn’t a great article idea. Asking how comparative negligence works and then asking whether Missouri uses pure or modified comparative negligence uses a lot of the same words. The overlap won’t confuse a legal writer, but they may throw off an AI program.

Let’s try something else. Let’s try insider trading:

Title: Insider trading defense attorneys
Content description: Write an introduction to insider trading law
Tone: Professional (though we’ll play around with that, next)
Keywords: Insider trading

Go.

Insider trading is a serious offense that can result in heavy penalties. If you are facing insider trading charges, it is important to have an experienced insider trading defense attorney on your side.

At The Busch Firm, our attorneys have experience handling insider trading cases and are dedicated to fighting for the best possible outcome for our clients. We will thoroughly investigate

Very little useable content, there. And 29 of your allotted words just got sucked into a strange shout out to this California law firm that does not seem to have any content on insider trading on it. But seeing as Jasper is so eager to talk about the penalties for insider trading, let’s oblige:

Title: Insider trading penalties
Content description: Explain the penalties that come with a criminal conviction for insider trading, including fines and jail time
Tone: Professional but personable
Keywords: Insider trading penalties

Insider trading penalties

can include fines, jail time, and a permanent ban from the securities industry. The exact penalties will depend on the severity of the offense and the accused person’s past criminal history.

If you have been accused of insider trading, it is important to seek legal help as soon as possible. Contact The Busch Firm today for a free consultation with one of our experienced insider trading defense attorneys. We will fight for you.

Jasper, how much are you getting paid by The Busch Firm?

The piece about the permanent ban from the securities industry is a nice little addition to what we were looking for. A range of fines and prison time, however, would have been nice.

At this point, we’re getting a bit frustrated. A lot of this content isn’t useable. The rest is extremely basic. Anyone who has done any research whatsoever is learning nothing new, here. We decided to give Jasper one more shot at it and gave it the following task:

Title: Examples of insider trading
Content description: Write 4 examples of insider trading
Tone: Personable (because the last one didn’t seem any different)
Keywords: Examples of insider trading

Examples of Insider Trading

A company executive who buys or sells stock based on non-public information about the company’s financial performance.
A person who tips off a friend or family member about an upcoming merger or acquisition.
A trader who uses inside information to make profitable trades in the stock market.
An individual who passes along material, non-public information about a company to another person in exchange for money or other benefits.

Okay! Now we seem to be getting somewhere. “Seem” being the key word, though. These 4 examples are all correct, sure, but there’s not a lot to dig into. Jasper, delve! And, while you’re delving, work around some terms of art:

Title: Tipper and tippee liability for insider trading
Content description: Explain whether tippers are liable for giving material and non-public information to others to conduct insider trades. Tell me whether tippees are liable for acting on those tips to do an inside trade
Tone: Personable (let’s try that again)
Keywords: Examples of insider trading

Tipper and Tippee Liability for Insider Trading

Under federal law, insider trading is illegal if the person who is buying or selling securities (the “tipper”) has access to material, non-public information. The tippee then can be held liable for insider trading if he or she knows or should have known that the information was confidential and used it to make a profit.

In order for the tippee to be held liable, the government must prove that the tipper breached a fiduciary duty by disclosing the confidential information and that the tippee knew or should have known that the information was confidential. If the tippee makes trades based on the tips, he or she can be subject to civil and criminal penalties.

If you are facing insider trading

Again, it’s not terrible. But Jasper only begins to scratch the surface, here, covering a broad area of white collar crime law in a mere 120 words. It provides less information to the reader than a Nolo article. It also doesn’t cite any sources, statutes, or cases, leaving that step of the process up to you.

I’ve Seen Enough: 1 Out of 5 Stars, But Reach Out Again in a Decade

Let’s put it simply: Very little of the content that Jasper produced was useable, and what was useable was the kind of thing that we can produce in less time than it took to tell Jasper what to write.

Don’t get us wrong, Jasper is a really cool idea. But the technology isn’t there, yet. We don’t think it will ever actually get “there,” but we’d be willing to take another look in maybe a decade or so to see where it’s at.

With that said, there are four things, three of them important, that made us eager to cancel our “beta subscription” of Jasper.

1. We Didn’t Save Very Much Time

The whole point of Jasper is to save you time by writing content for your law firm’s website. Now, we were still unfamiliar with how it works and had to learn the ropes, so we knew that the process would take some extra time, but even accounting for that we were seriously unimpressed by how quickly this went. From coming up with ways to coax Jasper to write what we wanted it to write to filling out the content fields to correcting its mistakes to cutting off its ramblings to fact-checking and citing its legal statements, the time we spent using Jasper to create an article was approaching how long it would have taken us to do it on our own.

And then we were still left with a product that was far inferior.

From what we learned from the private Jasper Community on Facebook, this does not get better. Lots of writers were claiming (some happily, others despondently) that using Jasper can take around 2 hours to write an article between 500 and 1,000 words.

Maybe that’s an improvement for some writers. It isn’t for us.

2. Jasper Focuses on an Antiquated Idea of SEO

As we’ve discussed elsewhere in our blog, SEO evolves rapidly. Google and other search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to bring you the most relevant and important pages for your search query. Over the years, that evolution has taken search engines away from “traditional” factors, like keywords, article length, and backlinks, and towards signs of user intent, like reader metrics.

In short, Google used to try to determine whether a page was relevant and important by looking at the page. Now, it makes that determination based on how people interact with it.

Readers aren’t going to be satisfied with how Jasper writes. Not only is the writing style aggressively mundane, but the AI program seems to be unable to provide new information for the reader – perhaps because it is meant to distill what is already out there and spit it back out in different words.

But that hasn’t stopped Jasper’s makers from touting its SEO potential. When you actually listen to that marketing, though, you begin to realize that the SEO that they’re talking about is about 6 years out of date.

3. Google Has Already Come Out Against AI-Generated Content

To the surprise of no one, Google frowns upon this new fad of AI-generated marketing content. After all, it doesn’t seem to produce new ideas – it just combines what it sees in the results page, already, using new words.

But Google’s concern with author bylines and its insistence that they matter dig the grave fairly deeply for AI content makers. Google, in its eternal quest for what is relevant and important for every search query, think that the person writing the content is an important factor. We can’t help but agree. If you were cornered with two articles titled “How to Comply With FBAR Tax Requirements if You Have Overseas Assets” and you knew that one was written by a lawyer with 30 experience in international tax law and the other was written by a 14-year-old getting paid five bucks, which would you read?

Who is writing the content matters, Google knows it, and AI has no real answer for it.

So no wonder Google has said that AI-generated content is spam, violates its user guidelines, and could lead to an SEO penalty.

The only question, really, is whether Google has the ability to act on those threats. Can they detect content that was generated by an AI program like Jasper? Are you feeling lucky that they never will?

Using AI programs like Jasper is a risk. When the resulting content is so forgettable, unoriginal, and uninformative, we think that the risk is not worth it.

4. Let’s Not Overlook the Barrage of Emails and Ads

Since accepting the “exclusive” trial, we have been subjected to a barrage of emails and ads from Jasper. We have been getting multiple emails per day from Jasper, one of which claimed that we could write a book with the program, setting off a fierce internal debate about what, metaphysically, constituted a “book.” But Jasper has not just invaded our inbox – its paid advertisements have also become ubiquitous in our personal Facebook news feeds.

The fire hose of outreach has been impressive, and quite annoying. Many of the ads try to explain new and better ways of using Jasper, which begs the question: If this is such a time-saving tool, why do I have to spend so much time learning how to use it effectively?

The Takeaway: Don’t Use It, and Make Sure Your Writers Aren’t Using It, Either

If you’re a lawyer who is writing your own content for your law firm’s website, by now you should know that our recommendation is to not use one of these AI writing “assistants.”

But if you’re a lawyer who doesn’t write your own content, and who contracts out to an online legal marketing firm or copywriter (like Myers Freelance LLC), the danger is more remote but equally severe. Does your content writer use Jasper or another AI writing program? Have they, already?

Would you be able to tell?

We, for one, have to admit that our trial with Jasper forced us to make an important change to how we do business.

We now have a provision in our standard writing contract that promises to never use AI-generated content for our clients. It’s something that we think that lawyers and law firms should demand from their writers, now.

We Tried an AI Content Writer So You Didn’t Have To