In-Depth
How AI Helps Me Write
The different day, I used to be speaking to a pal of mine about AI generally, and he or she appeared stunned once I informed her how a lot I take advantage of AI in my writing. I believe she assumed that I used ChatGPT or another generative AI program to magically create my articles, which could not be farther from the reality, however I do use AI every day to help with my writing.
Although AI is robust and getting stronger on a regular basis, I’m not significantly fearful about AI taking up writing. I figured this dialog can be an excellent segue into how I take advantage of varied instruments when writing an article and the way AI suits into this workflow.
When beginning a brand new article, if the topic is new to me, I take advantage of Google or Bing to ship me to websites the place I can examine the topic to grasp it higher. Both instruments are AI-enhanced.
I then use MS Word to start creating an overview of the article. MS Word is sweet at detecting misspelled phrases (I’m a horrible speller) and punctuation, and I discover its textual content completion operate helpful.
I’ve all the time struggled with the nuances of the English language. Don’t get me incorrect; I’ve an excellent vocabulary, however I nonetheless battle with a few of the mechanics of English. Don’t even get me began on hyphenated phrases and homophonic phrases. Due to this, I’ve nothing however respect for English majors and the editors I’ve labored with. How they’ll sustain with all of the conflicting guidelines of English is past me. To assist them out, I run Grammarly within the background.
Grammarly opinions spelling, grammar, punctuation, and different errors in your writing and makes strategies for it. For instance, it steered the next within the second paragraph of this text:
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Although I do not use all of Grammarly’s strategies, I evaluate them because it does an awesome job flagging problematic chunks of textual content. Grammarly will not be good, however it is rather good at detecting apparent errors in my writing. According to its site, it’s a generative AI writing assistant.
One of the final issues I do earlier than transport off my work an editor is to learn it aloud to me. This is a trick that my spouse taught me. I discover this invaluable as I usually learn what I believed I wrote relatively than what I really wrote. I take advantage of MS Word’s built-in text-to-speech operate. Not all variations of Word have it. To entry it, go to Review > Read Aloud.
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Although Microsoft would not specify that it makes use of AI when producing text-to-speech, I’m keen to guess that the backend does use it to grasp the nuances when talking appropriately.
As a aspect word, there are different text-to-speech engines, and I’m at the moment investigating Amazon Polly for text-to-speech conversion and the way it works.
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Let’s speak about ChatGPT, the 500-pound gorilla within the room (AI is not superb at catching combined metaphors). I’ll use ChatGPT for the remainder of this text, however it additionally refers to many different generative AI merchandise.
So, what’s ChatGPT? I figured it would not be proper to ask ChatGPT for a definition as it might be biased, so I requested one among its rivals, Google AI, and that is what it got here up with. “ChatGPT is a chatbot that makes use of synthetic intelligence (AI) to generate dialogue and reply questions.”
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So, on the floor, it might seem that utilizing ChatGPT would enable me to ask it a number of pointed questions, and my articles can be robotically created! The downside with that is that it’s a generative AI product. It can solely reformat and regurgitate current info and doesn’t generate new insights or type new opinions on a product or topic. This can result in a self-confirming bias the place a number of articles are generated utilizing the identical supply materials, with solely slight modifications. Then, these are utilized by generative AI to bolster the choices, proper or incorrect, within the authentic article and provides it extra credence.
I’ve additionally discovered that ChatGPT’s writing has a definite tone and tends to make use of way more flowery language than I desire in my articles.
I’m not saying that merchandise like ChatGPT will not be helpful. In reality, in lots of circumstances, they are often helpful when composing articles, however for the kind of work I do, they don’t seem to be that helpful.
I assume the gist of my dialogue with my pal, which is the topic of this text, is that, sure, I discover AI invaluable for helping within the writing of my articles, however not for writing them themselves.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT expertise gained over the previous 30 years in a wide range of applied sciences, with the previous 20 years specializing in virtualization and storage. He beforehand labored as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He additionally beforehand labored at VMware in Staff and Senior degree positions. He has additionally labored as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, the place he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in beginning up its vSphere Virtual Volumes observe. He’s on X @vDoppler.
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