AI, Robot: Where does writing go from here?
TL;DR: I'm actually excited
Have you seen I, Robot?
It’s that Will Smith movie (and short story before it) where the robots look uncanny, become sentient, and start doing weird stuff even though its against their “laws.”
Bad graphics aside, you can probably guess how it turns out.
I watched the other weekend, spurred by the need for something dumb but also perhaps with a clairvoyant sense of impending doom???
Just a few days after rewatching it, tweets like this appeared:
The Bing chatbot had started calling itself Sydney (a name Bing apparently didn’t name it) and threatened humanity.
It really is something out of the movies.
My favorite piece on the kerfuffle was by the normally levelheaded and tech-friendy Ben Thompson from Stratechery.
He had a wild retelling of his own experiences with Sydney. Thompson was so shaken that he commiserated with the Google engineer who was fired last year for thinking that Google’s own AI-bot was sentient:
“Again, I am totally aware that this sounds insane. But for the first time I feel a bit of empathy for Lemoine. No, I don’t think that Sydney is sentient, but for reasons that are hard to explain, I feel like I have crossed the Rubicon. My interaction today with Sydney was completely unlike any other interaction I have had with a computer, and this is with a primitive version of what might be possible going forward.”
Something is off the rails, right?
Not all AI is bad, especially for writers.
I don’t really know what to do about the upcoming robot revolt, but it really clarified something for me:
There are multiple use cases for AI.
Some uses will be bad, some will be good.
Search may be or may not be one of the best use cases for it — this article from Napkin Math does a good job breaking that down.
In this newsletter, I want to break down the helpful ways I’ve seen AI work and also address some of its limitations.1
Copywriting
Rewriting is what I’ve found most useful. Let’s say you have sales copy with benefits. And then you can prompt it to create better copy. A few tools like Jasper, Writer, Frase, and Conversion.ai have templates with pre-sets to help you do this.
In the below example, I’ll use Frase2 because it’s a tool I’m already familiar with from my marketing work.
In this case, I gave it a prompt about this newsletter and used the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) copywriting framework to make it more exciting.
Here’s what the Frase UI looks like:
This was the output:
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Not half bad, but not the greatest thing ever.
If you think of AI-generated writing as final, then you’re doing it wrong.
You can tweak and edit it. It will usually give you something fairly obvious.
Think of it as a first draft.
Research and blog posts
As someone who is very invested in content marketing, I’ve been asked about the impact of AI on search and SEO quite a bit.
You can ask AI programs to write you a whole blog post.
Here’s an example. I entered a title prompt that said: “What are the best headphones for 2023?” and it spits out this 400-word article about top headphone choices:
I won’t copy and paste the whole thing, but it lists certain brands and functionalities.
I have no idea if this is correct or not — several of the AI models haven’t been updated since 2021.
You would need to go back and verify each of these headphones, their prices, and maybe even the current models.
But there are no citations or research for any of it. That, you do yourself.
An article like this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but it’s a lot like how I’ve told students to use Wikipedia. It’s interesting. But don’t fully trust it. It’s a place to start, but it shouldn’t be in your blog post.
You have to do more research than that.
The AI output is a rough draft.
As an editor or content strategist, this is sometimes useful for me because it gives me the points that need to be included and then I can ask a writer to complete it.
I wouldn’t hand this directly to a writer. I would still need to create an outline from it. Frase has some other capabilities that do that, which is why it’s one of my preferred tools.
The Idea Autocomplete Machine
I don’t quite know what to call this, but this is the way I enjoy using AI the most. Think of it as autocomplete, but as an autocomplete of a thought.
If you’re stuck on a topic or idea, AI can be used to continue writing for you. You can see where it would go next and this often spurs a different approach or idea.
I’ve even done this with some fiction writing as an experiment, and it’s really interesting to see what it suggests.
For example, you could ask AI to keep writing in the voice of Edith Wharton and it may or may not be able to do it…let me try it.
The three steps are the process I followed. Sorry for the messy annotations:
This is a new AI writer in the style of Google docs called Lex.3
On the right side, it offered a chatbot to help generate ideas. I asked for a fictional conflict to write about it and suggested two siblings that join a cult.
I then added this as a prompt and asked the AI to write about it in the style of Edith Wharton.
It won’t be able to write a full novel from that simple prompt, so it summarized the paragraph in the style of Edith Wharton.
Is that really Edith Wharton’s style? I haven’t read Ethan Frome recently, but if we’re looking for vaguely Victorian sounding then yes, that works.
This is my favorite use case for using AI in writing. It improves on your ideas, helps you develop new angles, and then you can carry on from there.
It takes the context of what you originally wrote and then it extends it from there.
It’s an idea autocomplete machine.
When I use this functionality, I rarely ever use the exact output. Instead, I’m looking for the next idea and then it’s up to me to expand on it.
Writing Coach
I hadn’t thought of this use case but it makes sense.
The writer Nat Eliason shows how he does this by asking the AI to rewrite his writing in the style of other writers. This also gives him different word choices and amps up the style and suspense.
I haven’t tried this as much, but it makes sense. If you could have a personal writing coach that could immediately critique your writing, then that puts you miles ahead. Like an experienced editor right by your side who can develop your rhetorical abilities.
Overall, I’m Excited
Ultimately AI is a tool, and we adapt to tools. The use cases are only now being mined and discovered. Some facets of writing aren’t going away.
But there’s no doubt, things are harder now. Competition has increased. Writing is even more of a commodity. Like any shiny new toy, we’re discovering its full range of capabilities.
As a writer, I’ll keep using it. Refine my methods with it. And become a better writer because of it.4
In that way, it’s exciting. There’s no other choice than to persist and learn more about the craft, and to improve.
More Things:
Here are the articles mentioned above: From Stratechery, from Napkin Math, from Nat Eliason.
Person doing the nostalgia thing by a person who probably said they would never do the nostalgia thing! (Why the 90s were great). This article is not by me.
I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately: The Fabelmans, Banshees of Inisherin, and Last Night in Soho.
Pickleball looks dumb on TV, though I’ve started playing.
Last Week
Last Thing
“True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.” — Edith Wharton
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-Josh Spilker
Sidenote: It’s no longer adequate to lump all AI functionality together.
The chat functionalities are different than using AI to help you rewrite something.
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And designer! I create the newsletter images with DALL-E from OpenAI