ShortlyAI Review

Running a blog or a website can be challenging when you can’t afford a team of writers. There are plenty of good SEO tools out there that give you endless content ideas but someone needs to put those ideas into writing. ShortlyAI is one such product that helps to do this for you with the power of AI, but is it any good?

I decided to purchase a one-month subscription to see if this AI, which I have heard good things about, could help me get through the backlog of content ideas that I needed to get written.

I started out with ShortlyAI writing a few sample pieces and I was quite impressed with how well the sentences were written. The sentences and paragraphs were well-formed and were using a good level of English that absolutely did not sound like a bot.

Fact-Checking Costs Time

Everything was going great, I had 10 or so articles written in an hour. Then I hit a massive problem that made me lose all faith in the tool. I did some fact-checking about what it had written and it seems a lot of what it was saying was not correct. The AI was writing out paragraphs of factual content that was often wrong or slightly incorrect that rendered it completely useless. It would make me look like a total idiot if I were to post it.

This fact-checking ended up costing me time as I not only had to gather the correct information but then I had to rewrite a lot of the false information again. It would have been faster for me to just write the article at this point.

The fact that the AI can come up with statements and facts that are untrue had me lose all faith in it being able to help me. From this point, I was only able to use this tool to write about things I was already knowledgeable on. At least then I could spot the mistakes immediately. This was the first strike for the tool saving me time.

The AI Has Some Very Obvious Bugs

So from what I gather, this tool will crawl the web for information, summarise it and then write about it. This is why it sounds so clever. I encountered bugs on several occasions though. Very bad ones that really should have some rules to prevent it from even reading content on a page that is not actual content.

Social media links were the biggest issue I had to deal with. The snippet below was something It ended up suggesting for me. Like how does this kind of garbage even make it through the system’s filter as valid content?

Share this: Google

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Facebook

Twitter

Again, this was another time-wasting issue as I would have to go back and fix it. It would sometimes include links to other websites, often which did not exist. You could also tell when it was ripping content right out of Wikipedia as it failed to remove the little citation markers (the little square bracket links after facts e.g. [1]).

I was now at the point where the system was coming up with lies and gibberish that I had to waste my time fixing.

Is English Your Second Language?

I am by no means an English expert but it is my first language. I make my fair share of grammatical mistakes but it is easier for me to spot mistakes with this AI. Any garbage level grammar, context issues and instances where what the AI says just doesn’t make sense at all.

The problem with this tool is it can be so convincing when it writes something. If English was not your first language, you could fall into a trap where you just straight up believe what ShortlyAI says and not have the ability to spot the mistakes.

This tool is going to become a massive thorn in the side of those looking to purchase articles from freelance writers. Cheap prices are likely going to result in you getting something written by Shortly, which is going to end up straight in your recycle bin.

If you are looking to write some articles in English and are hoping this tool will help you write better English, chances are it will actually make things worse.

The AI struggles To Understand What You Are Talking About

After a week of using Shortly, I pretty much gave up on it as it was costing me so much time compared to if I were to write things by myself. The final nail in the coffin for me was the tools inability to understand what you are writing about. It will often pick one word in the title or description that you provide for context and focus on it.

Think of a word like “ice cream”. A hyphen would put some better context onto it for an AI but ShortlyAI could read a word like this and write about ice or cream which are not the same as ice cream.

I decided to play around and I have found the perfect example of this to show just how useless this tool was for me. I got ShortlyAI to write a review about itself. Not only did it have no idea what I was talking about, but the content was pure garbage.

We all know that an AI is going to need some help to write a good article but if you read over the 500 word review below, you will get a pretty good idea of how much effort it is going to take to turn what it writes into useable content. This entire review is useless because the tool failed to identify what I was even writing about.

ShortlyAI Review Written By Shortly AI

There’s no denying that AI is transforming the world we live in and powering many of your favorite new technologies. While it may still be early days, it’s clear that the technological transformation happening right now is quite profound and far-reaching!

This article will review the basics for what AI is and how it works. We’ll also discuss some recent breakthroughs in deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, neuroscience-inspired learning algorithms…and more!

It doesn’t matter if you’re a newcomer to AI or an advanced practitioner; these are conversations worth having about this exciting field we call artificial intelligence.

1. What is AI?

2. What is machine learning?

3. How does AI learn?

4. What’s a neural network?
5. What are other ways to train AI systems?

1. What is AI?

Simply put, artificial intelligence (AI) is software that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making [1]. It’s sometimes referred to as machine intelligence, computational intelligence or cognitive computing [2], and has been the subject of intense research for decades (you can find some of the earlier work here).

In this article, we’ll focus on various forms of machine learning and deep learning.

1. Machine Learning (ML) [3] is typically a form of AI that uses statistical modelling to help computers learn and improve at performing tasks. For example, removing spam messages from your email inbox, or automatically tagging images with their locations or subjects can be done through ML techniques like decision trees and neural networks [4].

2. Deep Learning (DL) [5] is a technique that brings the power of AI to the forefront by training neural networks in layers on very large datasets to build more sophisticated “deep” features (such as features within speech recognition systems). DL is one of the fastest-growing fields in the AI world, with DeepMind, Google’s AI business, recently beating top Go players and claims that it can be applied to any problem. Generally speaking, AI is more accurate at tasks that can be described as a set of rules that are input/output based.

2. What is machine learning?

Machine Learning is an area of ​artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed [6]. Machine Learning uses algorithms and statistical techniques to give computers “learning” capabilities. Basically, ML algorithms allow you to capture knowledge and information about the world, and then use it on new data.

Machine Learning algorithms can “learn” this information from different kinds of data such as text, images, audio, sensors or even from other computers. In computer science terms, we refer to this set of capabilities as a “learning algorithm”. These algorithms are now used in many AI applications across a wide variety of industries and areas.

3. How does AI learn?

AI systems are created to be highly flexible. They have the ability to sense their environment and interpret it into meaningful signals that they can act upon [7].

Thoughts On ShortlyAI’s Review

As you can see from having read over the review above. ShortlyAI got the context wrong and decided to write about AI in general and not itself. This is a common problem when you are hoping it will help you write detailed pillar posts about a specific topic. Time and time again, it fails to write about the exact item and shoots wildly off-topic.

You can see many examples of the Wikipedia citations being left in the text. This is cleanup for you but also a risk as I often worry whether it has adequately spun the content enough to make it sound unique or whether Google will just completely ignore my article because it does not contain enough unique content.

I really do not know enough about AI to validate everything it wrote about is true, so this is a heavy amount of research required for me. Chances are, after doing all this work, I will end up rewriting it myself to sound much better and informative.

The Verdict – Is ShortlyAI Any Good?

There is no denying that the technology behind ShortlyAI is incredibly impressive. I tried my best to find an example of plagiarism and could not. All of the content it produces appears to be completely unique. So +1 for ShortlyAI in this regard.

Unfortunately, there was very little else of value with this AI for someone who needs content to publish on a website that people will read and value. The AI is just not good enough at figuring what you are talking about and goes off-topic.

Even when it is on topic, the content can often be repetitive. I had one example where it provided a paragraph that sounded familiar. Do you know why it was familiar, because it was the opening paragraph to the article that I had written to give the tool some context as to what I was writing about.

As good as the tool can be at times, you spend far more time cleaning up the mess and useless content it produces to save any time from using it. If you are running a PBN or something, this tool might be gold for you but for anyone running a regular site and needing some help writing content, this AI is not going to be the silver bullet you are looking for. A day will come when AI is up to the job but right now, ShortlyAI is not much use for those looking for an AI writer to join their editorial team.