What can be said about AI that every news outlet, blogger, website content strategist, and influencer hasn’t already said? It’s here, and it has fully infiltrated the creative space in ways that many thought were a decade away. There are countless arts AI is now being used for, including writing.
Why would you want to use AI for writing?
In a content-driven world, writing is more powerful than ever, but it’s also time-consuming, soul-sucking, headache-inducing, etc.
Writing is hard. It is something that almost everyone struggles with in one way or another.
Even writers. Sometimes especially writers.
The power of AI brings about a seemingly impossible promise: the ability to easily write something that is high-quality and to do it almost instantaneously.
This possibility has left countless people scrambling to discover how they can use platforms like Chat GPT to solve their writing woes. But before we ask the question “how can we use AI for writing”, we need to ask a far more important question…
Should We Use AI for Writing
AI platforms like ChatGPT work by being trained on the creations of others. This includes an endless stream of books, articles, blog posts, images, videos, and more. Some of this information is free and fair use material, but a lot of it is not. This is where the problems begin to form.
When you give an AI tool a prompt, it pulls from this massive well of learned information to provide the output that you’ve asked for. Despite what movies on AI depict, these artificial intelligence programs don’t actually think for themselves. They simply regurgitate the content they’ve taken in.
In some cases, they regurgitate this content word-for-word from the original source.
This is part of why OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, is currently being sued by The New York Times. OpenAI’s tools have taken information from countless NYT articles. OpenAI refers to this as “trained data”. The problem is, there are times when their platform uses exact phrases from this trained data without citation.
This is just one of countless examples of AI being caught using copyrighted materials, including text, images, and more. But AI tools don’t just plagiarize content. They copy style as well.
You could ask AI to write a novel in the style of Cormac McCarthy or a screenplay in the style of Quentin Tarantino, and it will plunder their body of work to create a Frankenstein monster of written words stitched together in something that vaguely resembles the original inspiration.
At best, it’s a poor pastiche. At worst, it’s theft.
The pro-AI argument is that this isn’t any different from what humans do. We absorb content, study what came before them, and produce our own work accordingly. There is some truth here, but it removes a lot of nuances.
And that, I would argue, is the biggest issue with AI writing: the loss of nuance.
The late filmmaker Albert Maysles once said “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
If that’s the case, then an AI-dominated world is a tyrannical one.
When a person writes something that’s overly similar to the work of another writer, they’re criticized for being derivative and unoriginal. They may even be accused of outright plagiarism.
When AI does this, it has simply done its job.
A person takes what they’ve absorbed, and they iterate. They refine. They make it their own. They may go in a completely different direction from where they were originally planning. AI simply and coldly follows the prompts.
I’m getting a little too romantic here. Let’s get back to the point…
Does This Mean We Avoid AI Altogether?
I fully respect the decision of anyone who outright refuses to use AI in any remotely creative space. I understand if you want to boycott products or platforms that utilize AI.
That said…
For better or worse, Pandora’s Box has been opened. Even if you’re not seeking AI out, it’s being added to almost every piece of software we use. In many cases, it was already there. It just wasn’t as flashy or brandable, and so, it stayed behind the curtain.
It’s important to remember that AI is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for bad.
So, is it possible to utilize AI as a tool for writing without being a part of the problem? I suppose it depends on who you ask. For the sake of this article, let’s say you can.
Let’s say that AI can make writing easier without devouring the creative soul of humanity and destroying our economy.
How can this be done?
Using AI (Like ChatGPT) for Writing
If you’re going to use AI for writing, you should never approach it from the mindset of “this program is going to do all of the work for me.” Especially if it’s for professional or academic purposes. Using AI for a piece of content from start to finish will result in something that’s generic, possibly inaccurate, likely copied from other sources, and unreflective of who you are as a person.
In simpler words, it’s bad.
Instead, you should see AI as something that can make it easier for you to write. It can remove some of the mundanity. It can potentially unblock your creativity. It can provide a starting point that gets you going. It might even make you a better writer than you were before.
Sound promising? Just create a free account on a platform like ChatGPT, and then try some of these ideas…
Topic Generation
If you’re trying to create a blog post or an essay, sometimes the most difficult thing is thinking of an actual topic. This is where something like ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful. Simply go to the platform and ask it to provide you with ideas for a specific subject matter.
The more specific you are, the better results you will receive.
Don’t just give a subject; provide a demographic. Describe the current situation of your target audience and the problems you’re trying to address. Experiment with prompts, and eventually, you should get at least a couple of useful topics you can springboard off of.
Outlines
If you want to take things further, you can ask AI to create an outline for you based on a subject. Again, you should be specific with the prompts that you give so that it creates an outline that’s relevant to what you’re doing. Otherwise you’ll be boxed into something that’s fairly generic.
Don’t necessarily take the first outline it gives you. Experiment and iterate.
Research
Some people love research. Others hate it. Either way, it can take a lot of time. AI can speed things up by finding relevant information and sharing helpful citations for any topic imaginable.
Just make sure you ask for the citations. And also make sure to verify that this information is accurate.
There have been a number of situations where AI has actually made up sources of information or cited real resources that don’t actually contain the information it has provided you.
If that sounds like more work than just doing it all yourself, you may just want to do it all yourself.
Grammar
Modern AI tools have proven effective for grammar. Once you have something written, you can feed it into the AI platform and ask it to make corrections. You can even ask it to follow a certain style guide such as MLA. Of course, you should always do a final readthrough yourself once this is completed.
You can also ask simple grammar questions like “What’s the difference between advisor and adviser.”
It should also be mentioned that once you feed something into a platform like ChatGPT, it will hold onto that information and leverage it as part of its “trained learning”. This isn’t a big deal if you’re sharing a blog post that will soon be published on the internet.
But if its something personal or proprietary, you may want to exercise some caution.
Use AI as a Tool, Not a Crutch
Do you struggle with writing? Does it cause frustration, insecurity, and other negative emotions? Using AI to do all of your writing for you is not actually going to fix this. It’s just going to create a dependency that will cause your skills to regress further.
Even if you’re using AI to create sentences or paragraphs, you should rewrite anything it gives you. This not only protects against potential plagiarism, but it flexes your writing muscles while ensuring the final product is true to your voice.
I like to think that if someone uses AI correctly, they could actually grow their writing abilities and discover their voice.
Want to know another way you can make it easier to create content specifically for brands and businesses? By establishing a “brand voice.”
What is a brand voice? Think of it like a visual grand guide for your content strategy. It is the foundation of how a business/organization communicates with its audience. It not only sets the tone for how you talk (or write), but who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about.
It’s surprising just how much easier writing can become when you have a cohesive point of reference to work from. Click here to learn more about what a brand voice can do for you.
And if you have any thoughts on AI, feel free to connect and share with us here.
