🦋 💜 🌿 Hi! How are you?
Last week I was sick with a cold, but I am good now.
I saw a youtube video today that got me a bit energized, so I thought I would write to you about it.
The topic centers around ai writing generation.
I’m going to share my thoughts, and please don’t take it as shaming anyone, but I am a professional writer and I do have some feelings about it.
Actually, I think I have even stronger feelings as a READER than I do as a writer.
Which is saying something.
So let me back up and start at the beginning.
I’m planning to go on maternity leave at the end of the year.
It’s not wise as a writer, or business owner to totally disappear for weeks, or months on end.
I’m not entirely sure how long I’ll be taking off, because I haven’t had a child before, but regardless I want to be prepared.
SO I’m thinking mainly about how to prepare things like my content:
Weekly Funletters ahead of time, as well as blogposts, Linkedin Articles, Youtube videos, social media posts, etc.
It’s a lot and pretty overwhelming to think about producing en mass weeks or months ahead
AND this is all on top of the things I need to do in the present for my business, as well as–you know–preparing for a baby.
I actually realized yesterday that not everything I produce needs to be from scratch because I’ve been in business 10 years, and I have some really cool stuff already created.
I still refer to these articles with my coaching clients.
Those articles could be good to revisit because I really think they could help more people write and make progress on their projects.
I feel good about this direction.
Not This:
Here’s something that never ever occurred to me because I think it would be a terrible solution:
to use ai writing generation to produce pages and pages of stuff to email to you with minimal imput from me.
The reason being that I do not think that the result would be up to snuff, and
it would actually cause more harm than good.
This brings us to a video I saw recently.
”I Trained AI to Write Like Me–Here’s How” by Tiago Forte
Originally it was titled, “This AI Writes 90% of My Content Now (Yours Can Too)”
Yikes, this one got some provocative comments in response…
“Good to know: unsubscribing.”
“I was wondering why I didn’t resonate with your content lately. Now I know.”
“I am one of your customers and you definitely lost me today.”
They might have been a bit spicy…
but reading on to different things people were saying, I realized that they have a point.
Who is Tiago?
Tiago Forte is the author of “Building a Second Brain,” a book that came out before AI generation was widely available so I’m pretty sure he wrote it himself.
That book changed my life in a big way, unlocking new ways for me to use technology to organize my ideas.
I didn’t learn everything I know about digital organization from Tiago,
a lot of it I had to learn through trial and error, and the labor over years of experimenting with technology and systems to find things that worked for me as a writer.
I’ve since developed my own system for using digital organization for ideas and writing.
But Tiago’s book definitely opened the door for me to start to explore a whole new world I didn’t know existed.
After reading, I signed up for his email list and kept an eye on everything he was creating.
Often it was super thought provoking and I would hang on to emails he sent out to ponder them further.
But sometime in the last 6 months? I don’t know… something changed.
I was finding I’d open his emails only to quickly skim them and hit delete.
It just didn’t hook me. This didn’t just happen once, it happened time and time again.
SO when he made the bold claim that he has outsourced 90% of his writing process to AI…it makes sense.
His stuff hasn’t been that great lately, I don’t know how else to put it.
And I guess this is why.
And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
I feel like this is an important to discuss because AI is such a huge topic these days.
Everywhere I look there is a new course about using AI generation–and the thing is I’ve taken some of these courses. I’ve used it and I’ve tried.
THE RANGE
The thing is I don’t see this as black and white.
There’s a range of HOW much you can delegate writing to AI.
A little bit:
-to proofread your writing spelling and grammer (such as using Grammerly, or Google Doc’s ability to spellcheck)
-using ai to transcribe audio materials into written version of your original words (I like Otter.ai for this.)
A little bit more:
-a conversation partner to bounce ideas off of, to suggest improvements to things you have written, or to point out issues (and then you go fix them yourself).
-to analyze your writing and pull out certain elements (For example, I like to feed it a sales page I have written and then tell me what the main benefits of the offer I am selling is. Then I can decide what the strongest way to word something is and make sure it is emphasized through the piece. But I’m changing the text myself.)
A medium amount:
– coming up with title ideas
– to summarize things you have already written
– writing an introductory paragraph or specific paragraphs to insert into a longer piece you wrote
A decent amount (could result in small changes or could be a lot of changes):
– feeding it large amounts of original work like an hour long class transcript and asking it to find clips to turn into stand alone content
-feeding it large amounts of original work to remix into new formats like taking a podcast and turning it into a blogpost
A very large amount
– giving it a few sentences or guidelines for what content should be and then pushing the button to have the ai generate a whole thousand word plus essay that you edit only minimally by hand.
What Tiago was talking about doing is on the far side of the writing generation spectrum.
And that’s why I don’t like it.
Now he did imput some things…
He was supplying “style guides” and templates to the ai. These basically tell the ai what shape to spit something out into.
But he provided little of the actual substance for the essay he demonstrated making in the video, with ai doing 90% of the work.
He told it to produce an article about a book, and then uploaded a list of notable quotes from the book.
He did bold some parts of the quotes but he said he had about 10 pages of quotes he uploaded into the machine, from a book he didn’t write.
This means he hadn’t even isolated the core message from the book that he wanted the ai to focus on exactly, and why it mattered.
He didn’t add any of his own thoughts, really.
This is something he could have done without time, thought and reflection…but he didn’t want to take the time to do that.
Instead, it took a minute to push the button to produce a 3,000 word essay generated by ai that he deemed good enough.
Now, I’m not saying maybe some people would get something out of this article–
but I read Tiago’s previous work and it was really thoughtful and interesting.
THIS ISN’T IT.
This isn’t what I liked about his writing.
Ironically, Tiago’s previous writing in Building a Second Brain led to my changing my life so that it was easier for me to develop my ideas and take them to the next level in my writing through digital organization.
At the time so much of his writing and content was revolutionary for me to think on a higher level.
And now that he’s using AI, for months his writing has just been something I skim and delete.
I do not recommend letting ai do 90% of your writing.
I’m talking about doing things on the far far far side of the AI scale.
Other Issues
For the purposes of brevity, I’m not getting into the other issues with AI like the fact that it uses a ton of natural resources, has resulted in a lot of pollution and waste.
(I really wish google would just let me do a normal search by default so I’m not wasting energy using AI to look up stupid stuff online!! I want to opt INTO using AI when I want to so I can save energy when I don’t want it but anyway…)
I’m also not touching the issue where AI was trained on stolen writing taken from other people’s websites and other people’s books, without bothering to pay anyone for their work.
None of that lands super well with me, but right now I’m basically just talking about something major:
The products are not the same.
Using AI to do 90% of the writing for you is not the same as writing it yourself.
The process of writing is also a process of thinking and refining your ideas.
You get a better idea of what you are trying to say through trying to write about it.
If all you do to write is press a button, the output is going to be a more mediocre, generic and less intelligent than what you could come up with yourself given the time and effort.
And as a READER, I don’t want this crap!
I have seen my favorite sites online get filled up with annoying generic AI written articles
that drown out all the actual original and interesting articles I could be reading.
It’s made my life as a avid reader online more frustrating and less satisfying.
Please don’t outsource all your ideas to ai.
I might be ok with some use of it depending on how it is used and what the product is, but outsourcing 90% of the writing process is way, way too much. It just is filling the world with mediocre writing.
The world has enough noise!!
And you are shooting yourself in the foot because as more and more people use AI generation (which is already a lot), it all starts to sounds samey same.
It will be the people who continue to develop their ideas and skills as a writer that will end up standing out.
The entrepreneurs that continue to invest in creating original content using a chunk of their own brain will build relationships with customers more easily.
–they will seem refreshing and honest compared to the ocean of people who are just phoning it by using ai.
And that is way more trustworthy.
And one day when the AI bubble bursts…
(As I believe it will, since how can the data farms that AI relies on cost billlions in overhead and, yet, become profitable by charging you practically nothing?) In the future Chat GPT and other models may not be as cheap as they are today, and everyone who became totally dependent on them may have to pay up the wazoo or learn to do without.
Those of us who keep our heads by not overrelying on ai to produce writing that is just okay,
and instead write more, edit more, learn more, and
develop our ideas and skills as writers and creators,
WE will be stronger and brighter and more brilliant than ever in the future.
So in sum:
Here is what I am not going to do.
I’m not going to push a bunch of buttons on ai and send you a bunch of emails of stuff,
stuff, that I totally outsourced to ai and spent NO time at all writing or developing the ideas for.
Because I think using ai to write 90% of a piece of writing makes it not fun to read.
There’s no heart, no passion,
no living breathing person behind it and
I can feel something is missing.
I wouldn’t want to read it.
My time is valuable as a reader, and your time is valuable as a reader.
I have a high standard for what I think is good writing, good enough to share with you,
and baby, as a writer, I have my pride.
And P.S.
just because I often use an emdash (this punctuation: — ) does NOT mean I am using AI.
There is an awful and vicious myth that em dashes are only used by AI writing generation bots.
In fact, many human writers love an emdash.
And yet now people are contemplating not using it ever again so they don’t get accused of using AI to write.
But I will never stop using it!
Justice for the em dash!
VIVA LA EM DASH.
