I use free AI writing tools religiously, but I think of them less as "automatic quality improvers" and more as dedicated brainstorming partners. Their real value isn't in replacing my voice, but in breaking me out of my own patterns. I'll write a draft, and it's fine, but it sounds like everything else I've written. I pop a key paragraph into a rewriter, and it gives me three different angles: one more concise, one more persuasive, one with a different metaphor. It doesn't do the thinking for me, but it shows me options I was too mentally tired to see.

That said, the crucial caveat is that these tools require a strong editorial hand. They can make things sound fluent while accidentally stripping out nuance or introducing vague phrasing. I never use the output verbatim. My process is: My Draft → AI Spin → My Heavy Edit. They save me hours of staring at the screen trying to manually rephrase a clunky sentence, but the final judgment on clarity, tone, and accuracy has to be mine.

For anyone creating content regularly, not having one in your toolkit is like refusing to use a spell-checker.