How I managed to fit A.I. into my blogging habits

Consider me very suspicious of AI, or should I say very cautious. After all, the latest or next generation of A.I. may eventually render my job useless; why should I embrace this new technology?

My job involves organising the production of content for a brand, writing a few things here and there, proofreading a lot of emails and webpages, ensuring the right tone of voice, defining topics and creating outlines for the brand’s presence through blog posts, webinars, videos, white papers, etc. It’s easy to see where A.I. could either replace me for 90% of these tasks or render them completely useless: who would read or even download a white paper if an A.I. could summarise it as a 2-minute audio clip?

All the things I do professionally are already being impacted, accelerated, improved, and transformed by AI. I could either resist A.I. or learn to harness it and use it to my advantage.

In fact, it was completely impossible — and unprofessional even — for me to turn my back on this new technological revolution. Considering what I do for a living, I simply couldn’t ignore what all this new A.I. can do. While an analog photographer could somehow continue to work and succeed without ever knowing the first thing about digital photography, a “content manager” like myself better embrace the change and learn how to use this tech quickly.

Long story short, I started looking into how my work could benefit from some of the tools built on this new generation of AI. Reading this post by Om Malik also reassured me.

I’m now becoming more and more confident in how some of them will fit into my daily tasks, without starting the day with the anxiety of seeing my position slowly disappear. The potential is incredible, and in many ways I’m now glad to be able to embrace A.I. at work after I managed to dissolve my initial instinct of hating it.

We’ve seen this perspective everywhere, and I largely agree with it: A.I. can be a valuable tool for professionals, rather than a direct competitor for the same jobs. Everything about including A.I. into our work won’t be great, and there will be difficult moments. But in the grand scheme of things, it should end up being a good thing. I think. At least, I’m now pretty relaxed and optimistic about it. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll start a pizza place.

One thing I didn’t anticipate, though, is how A.I. would sneakily find its way into my blogging habits too.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a few tools.

1. Editing and proofreading drafts with the help of AI

I love writing. I hate editing.

Editing and proofreading takes a lot of time, and I’m not great at it. When I finish writing a blog post, I’m eager to publish it as fast as possible. Editing feels like a chore to me. I already do a lot of editing during a significant portion of my workdays, and I don’t want to do it in my spare time. I also don’t enjoy editing my own words, especially in a language that is not my first language.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing different web services for editing, and right now, the one I prefer using is called EditGPT. The UI is really well done, and using it feels very natural to me.¹ I simply use the option to “proofread” my draft, which helps me catch all the typos, mistakes, and grammatical errors I make, without touching the structure of the text. It’s quick and effective, and it doesn’t get too fixated on Markdown link syntax, unlike some other tools. It’s so good in fact that I’m almost tempted to go back to my older posts and fix them one by one.

I rarely use the options that involve more “rewriting.” I’m not very comfortable with letting a bunch of computers take over completely, and I feel like it wouldn’t be my blog if there wasn’t any of my poorly written nonsense it in. I want to preserve my writing “style”, so I only use these options when I’m really unsatisfied with a sentence or a paragraph, or when my English level prevents me from fully expressing what I want to say. The results of these “streamline” or “strong proofread” commands are often good, but when I use one of these options, I usually only keep bits of a paragraph, never the whole thing.

For those of you who are regular readers and native English speakers, you may have noticed an improvement in the writing of recent posts. Well, now you know that these improvements mostly come from one of these new and pretty great A.I. tools. It’s just so quick. When it used to take me more than half an hour to read and reread a draft to try to find errors and reword awkward sentences, now it takes me less than 5 minutes for a 1000-word post. And the end result is even better I think.

When I see that a paragraph I wrote doesn’t raise any warnings from the tool, I’m very proud. I think that these tools are even helping me understand some of the mistakes I make, so I guess I’m getting better in the process.

2. Creating the first draft

You see, when I work from home, alone, I like to think out loud in order to think clearly. It helps me understand my ideas and sort of listen to myself. This is usually how I start a draft. I think out loud, expressing my thoughts, ideas, rants, or anything that comes to mind. When I feel I have something interesting in mind, I “interrupt” myself and start writing a note, that may or may not become a blog post.

Last week, I thought that maybe A.I. could help me convert these spoken-out-loud ideas into first drafts more efficiently.

The idea is this:

• Record a voice note in English via Just Press Record on my phone instead of just rambling out loud alone in my living room.²
• Give the transcript of this note to ChatGPT and ask it to transform the dictated free-of-punctuation nonsense into proper sentences.
• Send this new text to EditGPT and make the sentences simpler and more casual so that they are an easier material to work with.

I’ve tried this a couple of times — I currently have two half-finished drafts created like this — and the results are fine. Not great, but fine. I think what I end up with is a great starting point, but I’m not sure I like it.

The thing is, I love writing too much to enjoy this.

Writing is what helps me understand my own thoughts. Without the writing step, my thoughts are all over the place, and this A.I. process just puts them into text, but it doesn’t do my job, which is to make sense of them.

This alone is why I don’t think this will work for me. I still want and need the writing part to develop my own thoughts.

If a future post originated as a voice note fed to a bunch of A.I. tools, I’ll make sure to let readers know.