expressed opinion entrepreneur Contributors are themselves.
I am so excited! Last week, I spoke with a potential author who told me his manuscript should be ready in a few days. kicker? He hasn’t started yet.
I imagined him sequestering himself in a hotel room, pulling Hemingway in a cabin off the beaten track. “I wrote it with AI, have you heard of the chat AI lately?” I have, and my 50 years make me wonder (that’s a side effect of getting old and awesome lol).
But I’m curious because the AI wave in my entrepreneurial network seems to be accelerating. AI-speak is everywhere. As a publisher, editor and writer, do I have anything to worry about? How will this change the face of publishing? Will it be like the recent change: everyone becomes a publisher and an author – which is great for the market and people, but with that comes the downside: everyone becomes a publisher and an author.
You might be mad at me, and that’s okay, but there are some areas we just can’t balance, even with the best tools. So this post was written after I played around with AI in my own manuscript and wrote ideas late one night. Here are my findings while using AI – its pros and cons:
Related: Why an AI Writing Assistant Is a Good Thing for Content Creation
Pros and Cons of Writing with AI
1. It’s pretty good at making headlines. In fact, I used it to cobble together the title of this post. My author told me he loves the titles it spits out for him.
2. It is very efficient at taking out existing copies and editing out all redundant words (i.e. “word economy”). The finished product reads a bit like a stereo manual: flat, impersonal, like everyone else’s. But if, for example, you’re dealing with transcripts, it’s a good place to start. Just load it up and send it through the AI so it comes out cleanly on the other side.
3. When I asked it to include storytelling elements like “use body language” and “include dialogue”, I didn’t like the result. It will give you very basic suggestions like “I wrote”, “I listened” and so on.
4. All elements contained in your manuscript are inconsistent or inaccurate unless requested by you. I think it’s actually designed for short documents, because I crashed it a few times. For example, I included a story about how my college professor took us on a field trip to choose the protagonist of our story, and boom! That doesn’t include it — until I tell it to “include stories from my professor’s class on a field trip.”
5. It saves some of the work of writing an outline (please tell me you always start the book writing process with an outline). But remember, the syllabus needs to read like your old-school English teacher used to yell at you. You need to set a goal for each chapter—easy to achieve with AI—but you also need support points. So, if you’re writing about how to implement effective marketing in your business, your bullet points could list what marketing is, why you need it, what some of these marketing options are, and more. You need to tell your AI bot to provide supporting statements. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with the table of contents — there won’t be enough information for your future books.
Related: AI and GPT-3 in Content Creation: How Will This Affect Your Work as a Writer?
Now, good news! If you’re a content creator, this can be a complete game changer for you. My author told me he ordered his AI to come up with a 52-week content creation calendar of posts. So you can work on it, and you can put in what you have. Repurposing the content you write and share is one of the smartest ways to increase awareness, increase brand awareness, make content creation more efficient, write and implement faster, and the benefits keep coming.
And don’t worry that you’ll turn people off with brand wear. It takes a long time for people to remember your name and face (not that you’re not totally lovable and memorable – that’s just human nature). Did you know that if you have at least ten podcast episodes, you have a book? Feed your transcript to the AI monster, get the results, and plug in your humanity, stories, and case studies. Then you have a book.
In my opinion, AI is like Grammarly. It will improve where you are. It will teach you too, if you will. You cannot blindly accept any one suggestion. You need to use your own judgment in deciding what to include and what not to include in your writing. Know the basic writing rules. Keep your style. Then take advantage of the tools at your disposal to enhance your talents.
