Better writing with AI - not by AI

Author

Calvin Brown
February 15, 2024

Welcome to the first issue of AI Communicator

What’s in store: deep dives, practical takeaways, AI news. One issue weekly. 5-minute read.

In today's issue:

  • Better writing with AI - not by AI

  • Gemini Advanced first impressions 

  • ChatGPT gets memory

Better writing with AI - not by AI

The cursor is blinking at you.

Maybe it's an email, social media post, media release, article, slide deck, report or newsletter.

Blank page syndrome has hit.

You could just fire up ChatGPT and get it to write it for you. No one would know.

Would they?

Many people would tell you they certainly would know. That AI writing is easy to spot. Glaring in its lack of human touch.

More likely, they can spot bad AI writing. Good AI writing is a trickier prospect. And AI detection software is fraught with issues.

I’ve seen enough examples to be of the view that, when properly prompted, AI can produce writing of a good enough standard to be indistinguishable from human writing.

If that was all that mattered, things would be easy.

But as any communications and PR practitioner knows, perceptions often outweigh facts.

MIT researchers found that people initially preferred text they believed was written by a human, until they found out it was generated by AI. 

Questions of transparency, ethics, and authenticity present further challenges. 

My recommendation is that it generally makes sense to side-step these potential pitfalls of AI authorship.

Treat AI as your writing assistant and muse - rather than straight up ghostwriter.

So what about that blank page? 

Like the one I was facing with this newsletter. 

Blank mind actually as I was making my lunch when mild panic set in. I had subscribers and would actually have to write the newsletter I’d been considering for months.

You might guess what happened next. 

I opened up ChatGPT.

I switched to Voice and started by asking who the greatest thinkers in communication and PR history were. 

Why? I wanted it to adopt the perspective of an expert in the field. 

Asking AI to role play in this way can give better results by making it more selective about the areas of its knowledge it accesses. 

I told ChatGPT about my newsletter. Its purpose. Its audience. And that I needed a topic for the first issue. 

I gave it the background information it needed so it could give more tailored advice. 

I asked if this made sense. This let me check it understood what I needed as well as giving it time to “think”.

Chunking up complex requests in this way has been found to produce higher quality responses.

We had a back and forth. It made suggestions. I clarified and refined what I needed. It gave me ideas.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT are very good at coming up with ideas. Better than MBA students according to research by Wharton.

I honed in on content creation with generative AI. 

We considered structure. I wanted one based on hook, problem, solution. It fleshed it out.

We talked about challenges and problems that communicators experience in producing content and where AI could make a contribution. 

Collaborative storytelling came up.

And then I realised. That’s exactly what we had been engaging in.

AI as co-writer. Not as a replacement for human writing and creativity, but as a tool to enhance it.

I asked it to apply this to our structure and requested the key actionable outputs of our chat in a bullet point summary.

I didn’t follow it to the letter, but that’s not the point. I had my inspiration. 

I no longer had a blank page.

Takeaways for better writing with AI:

  1. Use one of the leading models - ChatGPT-4, Gemini Advanced, Copilot (GPT4 on the mobile app or Creative on the browser version) for best results. 

  2. Give the AI a role relevant to the topic you are writing about.

  3. Explain the context and background to what you are writing, the format (social media post, article, presentation, letter),  its objective, and other relevant details such as the intended audience.

  4. Ask if it understands the brief.

  5. Ask it for ideas, or different approaches to the topic if you already know what it is.

  6. Clarify what you are looking for depending on its output - adding further background where necessary.

  7. When you get something that resonates, ask it to expand on the point.

  8. Don’t like a specific answer? You can ask it to regenerate. ChatGPT has a button for this at the bottom of each response.

  9. Ask it to suggest different structures that might fit the topic.

  10. Choose one and ask it to fit the topic to the structure.

  11. If required, ask it to amend or refine further.

  12. You should now have a solid outline that you can use as the jumping off point for your own writing. 

Gemini Advanced first impressions

Google finally released its ChatGPT-4 competitor Gemini Advanced last week. And it’s pretty impressive. 

There’s a fair bit of buzz that it is superior to ChatGPT for copywriting - if you choose to go down this road.

I have found its answers to be very well structured and its critiques of my own writing insightful and helpful.

It can also search your Gmail and Google Docs.

Gemini has some more very useful features:

  1. Pin chats in the sidebar 

  2. Three drafts for every answer

  3. Fine tune responses (shorter, longer, simpler, etc)

  4. Edit and rerun prompts

  5. Button to double-check responses.

Gemini comes in a free version using Gemini Pro and the paid-for Advanced using Gemini Ultra, which is comparable to GPT-4. You can try Advanced for free for two months. 

ChatGPT gets memory

OpenAI has begun rolling out its new memory feature to a small number of ChatGPT  Plus and free users. This allows it to learn from your chats and build up a personal profile that can help give you better and more tailored answers.

It remains to be seen how much of a difference this will make in practice. But many believe it will provide a significant leap forward in utility. I will report back when I have it.

ChatGPT’s free version is powered by GPT-3.5. You need to pay for a Plus subscription to get ChatGPT-4 along with features including vision, image generation and data analysis. 

I hope you found this first issue helpful. I’d love to hear what you think. Reply to this email with feedback or questions.

Thanks for reading. 

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