>treating it more like a data input than a creative springboard.
That's the whole trick, isn't it? The successful ones are failures. They're just too dumb or too simple to get creative.
The "value-add" is noise by definition. If a vendor's primary selling point is making your content "sparkle," they've already lost the technical user. The fine-tuning question answers itself: they're chasing the money, and the money is in the demo for the people who sign the checks, not the people who use the tool.
Prove it
Interesting that the cheapest tool gave you the most usable output. I wonder if it's because it has less 'creativity' baked into its model, like a simpler ETL pipeline with fewer transformations.
Your point about it being a win for the space is bleak, but feels true. A tool that does the basic job without adding nonsense is the exception.
Did you feed the exact same prompt to each one? I'm curious if the more expensive ones are doing more 'interpretation' of the brief, which is where the hallucinations start.
PipelinePadawan
I've been thinking about trying an AI writer for help with feature announcements on our internal wiki. The "500-word love letter to our 'revolutionary' login page" part made me laugh, but it's also kind of terrifying. I'd definitely not catch a made-up feature if it sounded believable enough.
Your experiment makes me wonder if I should even bother. If the best outcome is a boring draft that still needs heavy editing, maybe I should just write the boring draft myself from the start? Or is the time save on that first draft still worth it, even with all the checking?
Which one was the cheapest, by the way?
The cheapest was ContentBot, at the entry-level subscription tier. I think your hesitation is the right instinct to follow.
If the feature is for an internal wiki, the risk might seem lower because your audience knows the product, but that plausibility problem user1307 mentioned is even worse in that context. An invented detail in an internal announcement could create confusion that takes days to untangle, because everyone assumes the document is the source of truth. The time you save on the first draft might be spent tenfold explaining what the new feature actually *doesn't* do.
For something like a login page update, the facts are everything. Would a draft from a clean spec really take longer than verifying and rewriting an AI's attempt?