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As someone who spends a lot of time working with companies and people to navigate disruption, I've had a lot of friends ask me how they can leverage AI chat bots IRL - specifically, with writing. I've sent many of them a version of this article, and so now I'm sharing it here.
Before I dive in, I want to begin by saying I’ve always envied people who make outlines. It must be so empowering to have all that structure already created when you start writing. As you may have guessed, my method looks more like madness. I start with a bunch of half-baked ideas, maybe a sentence or two I think would sound good, or interesting or thought provoking, and that’s about it. After that, its just a highly inefficient, keyboard-driven exploration in the hope that, eventually, I will land on an idea worth refining before I get tired of whatever it is I’m trying to write. It works most of the time, but stated bluntly – it is about as inefficient as it gets.
Which is where ChatGPT has proven to be a game-changer for me. Look, there are whole threads devoted to prompts you can use to maximize utility of AI. But for people with control issues, like me, a single prompt isn’t enough. I want it how I want it and for that, I needed a complete workflow. Which is why I thought I’d share a sanitized version of the prompts I recently used to help generate content for one of the companies I advise:
Rapid Exploration
- Can you write me a paragraph about…
- I don’t like that. Can you give me a different version?
- Can you shorten it and refocus on this idea…
- It needs to be shorter
- I need you to add a sentence about this idea, “…”
- Can you cut 2 sentences out of it?
Rapid Iteration
- Can you rewrite it and open with this statement, “…”
- Can you shorten it
- Now can you improve on this paragraph?
- You lost my idea, “…”
- Better. Can you write me a closing sentence but keep the same tone?
What you can’t see in the prompts is all the writing work I’m doing in another application to drive the dialogue with the chat bot. I’m not just telling the AI what to write for me. I’m at the keyboard working alongside it. Copying pieces of what it has generated, pasting it into a word processor, and then writing and rewriting on top of that. This is how I view our workflow:
- Rapid Exploration: ChatGPT became the thought partner I could rely upon to explore and pressure test different ideas. By eliminating my 60 words per minute brainstorm at the keyboard cap, ChatGPT enabled me to rapidly sift through ideas without all the wasted keystrokes.
- Rapid Iteration: Once I (we!) found an idea, I started to work collaboratively with ChatGPT to help me see different ways I could integrate that content. Moving back and forth between Word and chat, hopefully you can begin to see how I twisted and shaped its raw material, going back to get additional ideas and even giving it my copy to improve upon what I’d done.
For those who shiver and think, “ooh, is that wrong?” let me reiterate, ChatGPT didn’t replace me or the work that I ultimately delivered. The end product was still my strategy told in the way I wanted to tell it, with probably less than 5% of the finished content actually being verbatim from the chat bot. (This is the good news part for all the freelance writers in my ecosystem – you all still have jobs, don’t worry.) What ChatGPT did for me, and what it can do for you, was massively improve my overall keystroke efficiency, improving the ratio of words drafted to words finaled, boosting overall productivity.
Look, I’m not naïve. Generative AI is real and we have no idea what the latest burst of development will wreak on our society – including its impact on people’s ability to make money. Further, just as there were no shortage of people willing to outsource their content creation to low-cost platforms (like Fivver, etc), there will be plenty of people who elect to give the work to ChatGPT, instead. But just as cheap content didn’t destroy the writing business, as so many feared, I currently believe ChatGPT won’t either. Instead, at least in the near-term, AI will become yet another voice in the vast ecosystem of creators competing for dollars. And for those out there hustling for a living, know that it’s a big marketplace. And maybe, just maybe, ChatGPT will be able to help you deliver to it faster, and better.