I feel silly about how I used to use AI

The way I write has evolved, primarily due to a shift in my relationship with AI and the writing process itself:

• Before I used AI to generate content
• Now I use AI more as a refinement tool and writing companion

When referring to AI in this post, I specifically mean large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Before

How I worked with AI in the past is silly. Using AI to generate content makes the writing sound generic and peppered with buzzwords that people never use. I mean, check the title and content of my previous blog posts: ‘Unleashing the Writer Within: How ChatGPT Transformed My Writing’, and ‘Supercharge Your SSH with VS Code’ 🫣

AI generated content has telltale signs when you see words like: unleashed, supercharge, delve, crucial, more examples here. The silver lining is that AI taught me more words, the problem is these new words didn’t feel authentic to me.

Using AI to generate content was also a coping mechanism to my creative blocks. An unfortunate consequence was that it removed my “want to think”, I could feel myself leaning more and more on the information provided by AI. This felt similar to defaulting to a calculator instead of doing mental math. It’s been over a year since I published those blogs, and I’ve been using AI —perplexity— a lot differently since I started…

Now

Firstly, a bit of background, I work in tech for Xero and I’ve met so many awesome people there. Luckily for me, I’ve got a mentor who is a fantastic Engineer and an amazing Writer, seriously, it’s their superpower; and I’ve been heavily influenced by them. Their guidance has helped me to structure my thoughts more clearly and to approach writing with more confidence.

They shared an amazing blog that talks about the different roles in the writing process:

• Madman - full of ideas, jumbled thoughts and is where writing should start
• Architect - arranges the jumble into potential arguments, at the paragraph level
• Carpenter - sculpts the sentences into a logical structure to make better sense
• Judge - critical energy as the inspector and will check the facts of what is written

Applying these roles to my own writing revealed a crucial insight: that my writer’s paralysis was me prematurely judging the madman before he could cook. I’d critisise the words, sentences, paragraph, headings, scope, purpose, before my madman even had a chance to shine. No wonder I got scared of writing, and wrote at a snail pace.

The madman within needs some air time; sometimes you just need a good ol’ brain dump. Giving myself that permission totally freed me from the fear of writing. Nowadays, as soon as I feel myself being critical, I catch myself and think: “Is it time to judge yet?”

Final points

To wrap up, some final thoughts about using AI as a writing companion:

1. The point of writing is the act itself; letting AI take over robs you of expressing your own voice and innate creativity.
2. I think AI LLMs are great companions for writing, but remember:
   • Ideally, keep personal information out of it.
   • If you do put some personal information in, at least use temporary chats and disable model training
   • Also check with your company before putting sensitive information or private IP like code into it for work
3. On the flip side, I want to share Derek Sivers article here that talks about his commitment to not use AI to generate text. ‍

   I have never ever used AI to generate text in place of my “voice”. No emails. No sentences in my articles or books or even comments. Nothing pretending to be me.