Updated May 2023
Writing product descriptions can be really easy for some people, but for others, it’s like pulling teeth.
A lot of people will choose to either write a very basic description or just outsource it to someone else, but there’s another option now as AI (Artificial Intelligence) writing programs start popping up.
There are a few reasons why you might want to use AI for product descriptions.
AI can help you generate descriptions quickly and efficiently, which can save you time and effort. AI-generated descriptions can be easier for people who speak English as a second language since it’s doing the writing for you. And using AI for product descriptions can help you update your descriptions quickly when you need to, which can improve customer satisfaction and increase sales.
Do I think that you should be using AI for everything? No. AI writing still feels stiff and kind of personality-free, and the times that I’ve seen it try to inject humor into the writing it hasn’t been the best experience, shall we say.
But it can make writing things that are fairly basic and straightforward a lot faster and easier.
Table of Contents
- What is AI writing?
- What is Chat GPT?
- Can you use AI text for things like social media posts?
- How are people using AI writers now?
Some of the links in this article are affiliate links that will pay me a small commission if they’re used to purchase something. To see the entire affiliate policy click here.
What is AI writing?
AI-generated text is text that has been created by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. This can include anything from short phrases and sentences to entire documents or articles.
I would suggest that you always rewrite AI text to a certain extent to make it more human, because it’s basically learning from whatever source the programmers are feeding it and predicting the next word that should come in the sequence. If those sources are bad, the output will also be bad.
It’s important to always check to see what the AI wrote to make sure it’s factual and accurate and to correct anything that might be wrong.
The goal of AI-generated text is generally to produce output that is similar to human-written text. AI-generated text can be used for a wide range of purposes.
A good amount of what you find online these days is probably AI-generated or assisted.
You can usually tell the 100% AI stuff because it’s often pure crap, and it’s clear that some people don’t read what the AI writers are spitting out, they just copy and paste the text and then publish it.
If you go in and edit the output, though, some AI generators do a pretty good job of covering the basics, and since product descriptions can be pretty basic, AI is good for that.
What is Chat GPT?
I asked the Chat GPT text creator to answer that question, and this is what it said about GPT.
“GPT is an acronym for “Generative Pretrained Transformer”. It is a type of large language model that uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text. GPT models are trained on a massive amount of data and can generate text that is difficult to distinguish from text written by a human. They are often used for natural language processing tasks, such as text summarization, machine translation, and text generation. GPT models are typically trained using unsupervised learning, which means that they are able to learn and improve over time without explicit instructions or guidance. This allows them to generate more human-like and context-aware text than previous generation models.”
Now, the interesting thing is that I asked it “what is Chat GPT” first, and it told me that it wasn’t familiar with that tool. Uh, okay.
So the text creator is definitely not 100% yet, it’s looking at the specific terms that you type in.
One of the things it says in the About pages is that if you enter a different phrase for the same question, you might get a different answer, so this is something that they know about.
It just shows that the AI text generator is relying on what the person types in, it’s not “thinking” for itself.
As they get more data for the program, the machine learning language that it creates will be better, but you should always check for accuracy.
This video shows a walkthrough of me using Chat GPT to make some product descriptions.
I’ve tried it for a few things, and I think the strength of it is that it creates basic descriptions quickly and pretty accurately.
The downside is that if you want it to do something more complex, like writing a recipe, it leaves out a ton of information that would come from human experience.
It gave one person in my blogging program a recipe for sourdough bread, but it also left out all information about letting the dough rise or proof. If you followed the recipe it would end up being a hard, flat glue brick that you pulled out of the oven, it was not good.
So it’s not good on experience or instructions that are “how to” or “tutorial” style articles, but for a basic product description, it’s fine.
Can you use AI text for things like social media posts?
Yes, AI-powered text generation can be used for social media. In fact, many companies and organizations use AI text generation to create posts and engage with their audience on social media platforms already, whether you know it or not.
The technology can be used to generate creative content, respond to customer inquiries using chatbots, and even create personalized messages for individual users.
You might think that you’re talking to a person, but you’re probably not, at least until halfway through the conversation when the robot can’t figure out what you want.
How are people using AI writers now?
Since I originally wrote this article 4 months ago, there’s been a huge increase in people talking about AI and using the ChatGPT API to design their own apps to use it for social media, Etsy titles and descriptions, and a bunch of other things.
There’s no reason to pay for a service if you only need short things like descriptions, because you can still use ChatGPT for free at this point.
The benefit of handing these basic tasks off to a machine is that it saves you time to spend on things that actually make you money.
Something that you’d be paid $15 an hour for can be shortcutted, and you can move on to the $50-an-hour tasks, if that makes sense.
It’s also good for people who speak English as a second language and who aren’t completely comfortable writing in English if you want to do your listings in English.
AI is more of a timesaver than anything else at this point, it’s not going to write super-complicated novels with interesting plots, but that day might come.
For now, use it to write your product descriptions to save time, and maybe experiment with some social media posts.
But remember that personality is important, so rewrite the basic text that comes out of the generators to include your own personal perspective and experience. Nobody likes talking to a robot.
Recent Posts
When I fill orders on Etsy I try to get things in the mail as quickly as I can, but I've slowed down on that a little recently. Etsy wants us to ship things fast even, but is that the best...
Whether you're looking for a Christmas gift for new grandparents, a pregnancy announcement, or a gender reveal gift to let your parents know that they're going to be grandparents, our Artisan...