There is much debate around using AI for content.
I get it. AI content looks and sounds generic.
I do think AI is beneficial when trying to trying to communicate, especially through writing. For me, writing is a way of thinking through problems, looking at them from different angles, and then settling on an opinion. Sometimes I don’t see the contradictions in my own writing. Other times, I miss valid counterpoints. Asking AI to evaluate and take contrarian viewpoints is productive and can elevate thinking.
Sometimes when writing, I get lost in the weeds, or get way too abstract. While the writing makes sense to me when I’m writing, I forget to include the full context or scenario. Nowadays, once I write anything, I run it through Claude or ChatGPT, and ask “if I read this one year from now, with no context at all, where would I get confused?” My own process for getting to ELI5.
Sometimes, my writing reads like text diarrhea. All my points are there, but it needs better organization, better flow, simplication, or more details. That’s where AI is helpful.
Some find any AI in content as losing authenticity, losing proof of work.
It’s almost the last vestiage of authenticity.
I look around me and everything I see or use is mass produced. The bed sheets, the TV, the laptop, the car, the food I eat.
Still, content was always hard to automate. And that is no longer true.
But the benefits of AI generated content is hard to beat. An example: having bought and subcribed to plenty of tools for work, I realized I needed a checklist of how to evaluate vendors. Every enterprise is different, every vendor is different, every tool is different. I wanted one document which I could go through to identify processes and things to look out for.
I asked Claude to generate such a document, iterated, handed it ChatGPT and told it to poke holes, gave it back to Claude and asked if it agreed with the holes ChatGPT pointed out, why or why not, iterated, handed it back to ChatGPT, and went back and forth a couple more times and ended with a workable document. Is it perfect. Not even close, but it’s a good starting point.
All that is to say much of what I’ve posted here in the recent years have been touched by AI in some form or another.
And I’m fine with that.