Citation rich AI writer for SEO friendly content writing.

Hello and welcome today to Fabian Langer, who's joining me from Germany. Fabian, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Thank you for having me.

Now, Fabian, you're on the show as the inventor of a great app called aiwriter.com. So can you just tell us, how do you help entrepreneurs to get noticed?

Well, it's actually quite simple. If you want to get noticed, usually you need to be found on Google. How do you get found on Google? By writing content that Google is able to find on your sites so people can find you. And that's where AI Writer can help you. It can help you to create this content more efficiently, more SEO-friendly. So that's the whole point.

Okay. Now you make it sound simple enough, but I've used AI Writer and it's ai-writer.com is the website. How is it How is it different? I've got some of my own opinions, but can you, as the founder, as the creator, explain how is it different to all of the other AI writers that are cropping up?

So the whole approach is a bit different and what you as the end user see, you will get citations. So everything the AI is writing can be traced back to the original source. And that's my main difference because most of the other AI writing tools, they just make stuff up on the fly. They, they pull all their knowledge from one length, from one AI, and the, the AI just keeps on writing. And with my tool, you can verify everything that is written by going to the source where the information comes from. So that's the, my difference to the other tools. So you, you can trust, basically you can trust what the AI writer is, is writing.

Okay. Yeah. And I have to say, I've found that really useful because especially if you are finding things for journalists for stories.

Yes, absolutely. If, if you have a perfect guard level, but you cannot check what is written there, can you even use it on a website? In my opinion, you can, because you do never know if it's true. Only if you're an expert in the domain, but then usually you don't need an AI writer to write for you because you can just write it yourself.

So Fabian, for those people that aren't familiar with AI writing, can you just take us through the steps of what one would need to do on your platform in order to get an article?

Well, the only thing you need is your headline, the topic you want to write about, and then the AI does the same thing that you would do as a human. If you start writing about a topic you're not familiar with, it goes to Google. And then it puts in the search query and it gets the sources and it reads up on the topic and then it creates an article. But the AI can do it a lot more efficiently than you can. It takes the first 100 results and it goes through all this information and then it tries to get the quintessence of the topic for you. So it tries to write a final article. There was a lot of research in that, but it's That's not, that's far from perfect. What it really does well is it gives you some kind of brainstorming. It helps you do research faster. So you're up to speed about the new topic a lot faster than if you would go there and just read all the articles and all this. So that's what, so you give me a headline and you get back an article. So it's a very simple process and this article is basically a draft. It is helping you to get up to speed faster. So you have something to start from, not from scratch. That's the main selling point.

Okay. And so the idea, and I like that because it saves you a lot of time of scrolling, becoming a subject matter expert, especially if you're in a PR firm or a writer, a career writer, how much, if you like, alignment can you help someone get with, say, the corporate view on a topic? Because often, you know, companies ask someone to write, but actually they have a perspective, for example, on the environment or 5G. Fabian, how can AI Writer help with that?

You mean how you can help with getting someone who is not knowledgeable up to—

If you've got a company that wants to write about a topic from their own perspective.

Yeah.

So they have an attitude towards something, let's say CSR.

Well, you, that's, that's a hard, hard thing to, to get right, to be honest. So if the company has a lot of stuff published already and it, it can be fed into the AI as source material, but in the end, it's, as I said, it starts all with the Google search. So if you can tweak this search, if you want to write very favorable about a topic, for example. Um, you need to, to adjust the query so it yields source material that writes in the, in the perspective you intend to. So it's a bit like Googling. It's a, it's an art form. You need to know what the query needs to look like, you know? So it's a bit of try and error, but usually you get a feeling for it pretty fast.

Okay.

Yeah.

As you say, you get a draft, don't you, of, of, if you like, a synopsis. For a topic.

Yes.

And so what guidance do people have on AI Writer to help them narrow down the headline that they should be writing in order to get an article that's worth having?

At the moment, so that there is a very new feature, it's still in early beta testing. It's called the keyword report. So the tool can, can go out to Google and if you, if you type in a topic in Google, it's It does some suggestions for you so you know what other people are searching in the, in this field. And it takes all these suggestions and then it analyzes who is ranking for these keywords. How hard will it be to rank for this keyword? How much traffic is this keyword? So it can analyze all the different subtopics in your domain and see which one you're able to rank in Google. So, and how much traffic these are getting. And by analyzing these, it can tell you what to write about to get the most out of your time, the most traffic, but that's a very new feature currently in the test phase. So I can't tell you if it's perfect already or if it still needs a lot of work.

I'll look forward to trialing that. And then Fabian, then in terms of the article length, for example, sometimes People want to do a short blog post, 500 words. Sometimes it's a long-form article for a contributed piece to a magazine of 1,000. How does AI Writer help to control length, for example?

That's a hard point. A lot of people ask for it and it is quite hard to get right, to be honest. So at the moment, the AI decides itself. So if it finds a lot of information, it writes 1,000, 1,500 words, the maximum. I got from experiments after that, it just, the quality degrades because there is not enough information usually from one search to write more. And if you, if the AI decides it does not find enough sources to write a lot of text, it just cuts it short. So you do not have a saying in that because the AI is trained in a specific way to maximize quality. And yeah, so if, for example, if you train it to write 1,000 words and then the user says, okay, I just want 500, it's not as simple as just to cut it. You would have to train it to know what is the most important 500 words. So it's harder than you think.

Yeah, that's very interesting actually, that it's having to synthesize that information. And how does it decide what is of value? You mentioned Quality of that content?

Yes. I trained it on hundreds of thousands of articles in the past. So it basically, that's the AI part. So it learned it and I, it's a black box for me, even as a developer. It's a, I give it a lot of information about the sentences and how they are connected and how they look like and all this kind of stuff. And then there is a huge model that learned it basically. So I cannot even tell you, even if I wanted to. That's the AI part, the black box, the magic basically.

Wow. Does it have a name then? Do you give it a name, Fabian, if it's sort of got its own personality like this?

Not yet, but I'm open to suggestions.

Okay. So you put in, if you like, your sentence and then you get back the content and you can use that cited. What about plagiarism? Fabian, is there a control? Because I know that plagiarism is a big issue if you use AI.

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. So first of all, there is the fair use laws. America, for example, you can use like 10% of a source, still fine. So that's the first cutoff that I will never use more than 10% or so from a source. But on top of that, everything that the AI writes. As I said, I'm using sources, so there is potential for plagiarism, but everything that comes out in the end is heavily rewritten. So there is no, nothing that is just copied from anywhere. It is always written in the own words of the AI, and there is a huge focus in the research that there is no plagiarism in the final article. So usually if you, if you take a very good, uh, plagiarism checking tool like Copyscape, it is only able to find like 5%, uh, 5% of the whole article. It can trace back to any source at all. So it's very, very heavily unique in the end. Yes.

Okay, great. Because you don't want to find yourself being shut down and having your article blocked, or even I think YouTube and so on now are checking that in the titles, aren't they? And the, and the show notes and so on.

Yes. I'm using my articles on my own website as well. So I have trust in what the AI writes, that it does not bring you any problems. So yes.

David, then tell me what's the sort of pricing model for ai-writer.com? Because there are different ways, aren't there, that people can charge for this?

It starts very cheap, $29 a month. You can get the, the first package and basically it goes all the way up. So there are people that, that need thousands of articles every, every month. They can get a, a, a huge package, but usually you pay me on a monthly basis, on a subscription basis. And yes, that's basically the pricing model. You, you get, uh, yes, you, you can get up to—

You get, you get it. Sorry. And if I'm not mistaken though, it's not a sort of a, A fixed price for all you can eat, is it? There's like a, an amount of storage or something that you have as a model. Do you wanna just explain that?

You, you can get 40 articles for the $29 subscription, so you can draft 40 articles. It's very cheap compared to, to what you spend on time to write an article yourself.

Yeah. So it's less than $5 an article actually for 1,000 words, which is—

Less than 50 cents an article.

Less than 50 cents. Yeah. My math, mental arithmetic. I need your AI to help me, I think, with mental arithmetic.

So it's, and it usually saves you around 20 to 30 to 40% of your time. So it's price point-wise, it's very, very affordable.

Absolutely. Now, what about language, Fabian? Is it across only English or, I mean, you're German, although you live in Dubai, can it do, you know, Arabic, for example, or is it all in English?

Only English because the, in these kind of AI models that work for language, you usually have to train all the models from scratch again to get into another language. And in English, you have the big advantage that you have a lot of data. You have a lot of soft— of open source libraries, a lot of open source models. that you can build upon. So for example, it takes, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train some models from scratch, but there is research and open source models that you can build upon in English that is not available, for example, in German. So you, it's all a matter of, and also, AI Write is a one-person company, so I need to focus on the by far biggest market.

Yeah.

It's just a matter of resources and their allocation.

No, that's very interesting though.

I have a lot of customers actually that use some translation like DeepL or Google Translate on top of the articles to get it into a target language and they are pretty good at the— so in the last years they became pretty, pretty good in translating stuff. Yeah.

So that's interesting. So you'd write it in English, although I guess if your topic was in a local language domain, that may prove harder, right?

But yes. Unfortunately, but that's okay.

So tell us about you though. You mentioned that you're a one-man entrepreneur, but I've looked at the product and used the product and it's really impressive.

Thank you.

How are you getting yourself noticed as an entrepreneur?

Well, I do the same as, uh, as, so, so I'm using SEO myself. So that's the whole thing. Most of my traffic comes, comes from Google directly. I use my own AI-written articles. I use my my keyword research, and that's basically my, the main source of, of how I get noticed is by people that are looking for a solution like, like mine. As my AI, they go to Google first, then they find me, they try it, and I have a very easy process of, of getting into the trial to, to see if it works for you. And that's basically my, my, my marketing, if you can say so. It's SEO focused.

Okay. Well, that, but that really works. That's how I found you as well.

Yes.

What about for people that just want short snippets like headlines? For example, there are some tools like Headline Analyzer. How are you helping people to make shorter posts or even tweets?

At the moment, there is unfortunately no solution I can provide in this because as you said, this, the small kind of stuff, there are a lot of other startups that That, for example, use GPT-3 and that works quite well for this small kind of, you don't need my technology for that. You can cite anything you, that's just, yeah, nothing that I'm actively researching.

Oh, I see. So GPT-3 is this AI sort of almost available tool that I've heard some other entrepreneurs are using.

It's an API. Everybody can tap into it and get his own AI writing startup up. Basically in a few days if you want to. But it's, that's, that's a solution that just makes stuff up from thin air. As I said, that's nothing you can use on your website because you can never trust it. And it makes a lot of stuff up that are, that's just false. So you, you can never trust it. You need to fact-check your own AI, which is a lot of work. So it's, in my opinion, it's useless.

You know, that's a really good point because I used one AI writer and the grammar was so shocking that it was taking me longer to, you know, correct it because it creates a huge volume very quickly.

Yeah.

And that was really a, really a problem actually with, with the AI, with the content that comes out from your proprietary platform then, Fabian, is there some kind of a grammar checker? How does that work for people?

There is no grammar checker, but there is a model that is trained to write English. That's the same thing as by choosing what information to put into it. There is a huge black box. I tried my best to train it. I'm still working on it all the time, so it's getting better and better, but in the end, it's never perfect. I mean, you might have seen it, but as I said, that's not the main reason to use AI Writer to get something out that's perfect, but something to help you be more effective. In perfect writing.

Yeah. So, yeah. So what I found was I used it to create the first draft and if you'd like do the resource investigation and then add in my own quotes and localize, for example, that content, that seemed like a really good function, the way to work that. Okay. And what's in the future for you then, Fabian, for AI Writer?

Well, it's basically, I'm always working on the model, so I want to make it better and better every few months. So that's my It's the only product I'm really working on and it's the one I want to get perfect. So perhaps in the future you can just take it and post it on the website and it's perfect. That's my goal, but that's a really hard goal, so I don't know if it's achievable.

Well, I think that for now what you're offering and for the price point, it's a really handy and intelligent tool. I personally love the citations and that seems like a real point of difference, which is why I was so keen to speak to you because It means that if I supply that to a client or to a media, it shows that I've actually got somewhere to go back to. Fabian, if people want to come back to you, how can they find you?

They can find me on my website, ai-writer.com. Test the tool. And if you want to drop me an email, you find my email address there as well. As I said, one-person company, so everything reaches me. You can just reach out by email.

But as an entrepreneur that's leveraging You know, AI, I'm really impressed with the product that you've produced, Fabian. So Fabian Langer, thanks so much for joining me today from Germany, part-time Germany, part-time Dubai. Thank you so much.

Mostly Dubai. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me, for my, for the opportunity to get my, get, get heard, get noticed, right?

To get noticed. Listen to Fabian Langer, who's the creator and entrepreneur behind the AI-Writer platform, and I'll include all his details in the show notes.