ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and AI text generators are raking in millions internationally. A lot is also happening on Dutch soil. With Schrijven.ai, entrepreneur Sjoerd de Kreij is developing an AI assistant that has mastered the Dutch language like no other.
What is Schrijven.ai and what problem do you want to solve?
Schrijven.AI is the first Dutch-language text assistant based on artificial intelligence. Text generators are indeed popping up like mushrooms. They are mainly proficient in English, Spanish or Chinese. These are the languages that can mainly be found on the internet. We have trained the models on purely Dutch-language content, so that our model gives a better result for anyone who wants to generate or rewrite Dutch-language texts. It is also very easy to use: we build a tool that every writer can use.
We also solve another problem. Many language models often give uniform, sometimes somewhat boring, answers. We offer a model that can mimic the writing style of an individual author or even that of a brand. In this way, brands and copywriters still distinguish themselves from each other and retain their corporate identity.
Which professional groups are already using this?
It is a broad target group that includes journalists, copywriters and content marketers. The main reason why our target group uses this tool is to generate headlines, introductions, conclusions, but also full articles. Users then have a basic document, which they can further tinker with.
How will this change the world of content?
Many copywriters and journalists wonder whether such tools will make their profession obsolete. It’s complicated to predict the future, but I’m sure investigative journalism will live on. Such tools can help to make research more efficient, but ultimately it is people who filter the right information.
Most of the texts that are still completely written by people, such as e-mails, summaries or seo articles, can work much more efficiently. If we really look a bit further into the future, it’s not just about writing, but also about adding images, for example.
Either way, this will change the field. Content creators can focus on what is interesting: doing the research, making texts clear and attractive to the target group. Although we hope eventually to build a model that can generate a text in such a way that final editing is no longer necessary.
Text generators require instructions from users, the so-called ‘prompt’. What are tips for writing the right prompt?
But if you want to write a good prompt in a tool like ChatGPT, you need to provide as much context as possible. Try to tell as precisely as possible what you want the algorithm to do. The more clues you enter, the better the output will be.
Because prompt writing takes quite a lot of creativity and not everyone is skilled at it, we try to overcome that at Schrijven.ai by offering templates. We ask the user a number of questions, such as ‘what is the article about’ or ‘who is the target group’ to simplify its use.
Text generators are not a panacea. In what situation would you advise against its use?
Source research is not the best purpose for which you should use such tools. These models are very good at predicting what the next words will be based on a limited set of available words. A model can even hallucinate, in other words, the model sometimes confuses fact and fiction. I would be careful not to connect factual information and I would always double check sources.
What are creative use cases for which people use text generators?
When we just went live in the first test phase, I of course first sent it around to get feedback from different people in my network. A family member turned out to be using the tool to generate sleep stories starring his children. It now appears that the whole family is now using Schrijven.ai for this.
In addition, the tool is also able to rewrite classical literature in a newer style, for example a Shakespeare story in the style of Quintin Tarantino. That output is truly phenomenal.
Is the system also suitable for converting press releases into a new article?
Several people at major news media have already used our tool for this. If you are dealing with time pressure, this can greatly help to optimize your workflow.
What kind of features would you like to add?
The question of source research is the most common, such as whether the user can trust the text and a source. In addition, the model has been trained on data from the internet until the end of 2021. So a lot of data is missing, for example the model does not know who won the World Cup in 2022. So adding up-to-date information is one of the first features we want to add. You can already see that happening with a few platforms, but the quality is not yet fantastic, but that is definitely something we want to build. This is also a feature that journalists and content marketers will find very useful, because the output is then completely up to date.
How do you think the development of text generators will change the future of content marketing?
Google has already announced that full AI-generated content may receive a “penalty.” Your page will then be shown lower in the search results. The more AI-generated content you put on your website, the less visible you are. So don’t randomly place a thousand AI-generated blogs on your website, but try to give your users information that is distinctive. AI can help you with that.
How do you think education should deal with this development?
We notice that there is no answer yet, except that essays will soon have to be written with pen on paper. That’s a short-term solution. You also hear stories that teachers with AI are going to check these texts again. In the end, it becomes a bit of a cat and mouse game to get teachers to find out whether a text is AI-generated or not. Ultimately, society must learn to deal with technology. The nature of work and education must go along with this.
Where do you want to go with Schrijven.ai?
We currently have over a thousand users in a few months. We naturally want to conquer the whole of the Netherlands and Belgium, because we believe we have the best Dutch-language output for the market. This means that we will fully commit to ensuring that this tool is as user-friendly as possible and that ultimately everyone who writes content in the Netherlands can use this copywriter as a tool, because it will only make your life easier.
How do you view a possible other party that will develop the same tool for the same market?
We want to show that we listen to the users and look closely at the market. So you see that ChatGPT cannot solve all questions that we can solve. So we try to get ahead of that by developing as complete a product as possible, specifically for people who only write texts. So we won’t dive into the corner of images or video anytime soon. In addition, we want to adopt a completely personal tone of voice in the management. That means there will be no generic output, but anyone can write with their writing style. With this we hope to be ahead of the big parties.