It’s Been One Month Since Using AI: Here Is What I've Learned
Yesterday, I wrote two blogs in 40 minutes - no, one of them is not the one you are reading right now. For the past month, I have been using ChatGPT and Google’s newly released BARD to come up with content and it helped me speed up my turnaround time in delivering new blogs, posts, and thought pieces.
The key takeaway:
Use AI as the assist, not the starting player.
Here were my initial concerns:
I didn’t want to lose the voice and tone of the brand, whether it was my own personal brand or that of another company.
I didn’t want misinformation
I didn’t want to create more work for myself if the AI content was subpar
Initially, I would ask things like “Write me a blog post on..” or “Give me a paragraph about…” and ultimately I was disappointed because it wouldn’t help me add to my own work. It would sound plain or disingenuous with the brand I was working with. I wanted to use it to its max potential but I started with the wrong questions. Once I came to that conclusion, I went back to Chat GPT and BARD and treated it more like an extra colleague whom I would go to for extra brain power. I asked questions like “What’s a better way to say this paragraph” or “Give me 3 key points for why…”. Then I would compare it to my own word salad. I used it to create initial thoughts on blog post titles or captions. Essentially, I played! I had fun typing in anything that I got stuck on as a way to get my own creativity flowing. Sometimes, it came up with great content and sometimes it missed the mark. Usually, I could grab at least a strong sentence or two. As I continued to play, I used it for:
Blog titles
Alternative options to repurpose paragraphs from past blogs or find a different way to say something that felt clunky in my own words.
Adding more depth when all I had was a strong sentence
Creating key points around a central point of view
Listing. When I needed a number of reasons for something, I could ask for a list and pull the ones that resonated
AI didn’t replace my own expertise or knowledge. I still wrote more than 50% of the content but the helpful part of AI was its ability to summarize and pull the content together in a way that flowed. In the world of better, faster, stronger, I would say AI helps create content quicker but not necessarily better or stronger. I could turn out content twice as fast, knowing that I had an extra brain to help me solidify ideas. Because of this, I wasn’t as intimidated or reluctant to sit down at my computer and write(type), knowing that I had some great collaboration at the click of a button. Does it completely obliterate writer's block? Probably not. But it certainly helps take the edge off.
All in all: Give it a try. Practice using it next time you get stuck on a word or need help creating an email, blog, or post. Don’t use it as complete truth but rather as an extra coworker who has some great thoughts. As we’ve read in almost every Linkedin post these days… "AI won’t replace your job, someone who knows how to use AI will".
