3 Ways AI Can Transform Your Writing
And how to start using it today
AI has been making waves in the writing world lately, with many people turning to AI-powered tools to help them write more effectively and efficiently.
In this post, we'll take a look at 3 ways you can leverage this technology today.
Grammar and Simple Mistakes
Unfortunately, grammatical errors cost the writer some creditability. But lucky for us, tools like Grammarly can catch most of these errors.
Leveraging software like Grammarly will help you write higher-quality content in a shorter amount of time. And it will help you feel more confident when publishing as you’ll know there aren’t (too many) simple mistakes.
The Sandwich Workflow
Noah Smith and Roon explain the sandwich workflow in their essay, “Generative AI: autocomplete for everything”:
This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like.
The sandwich workflow is a new approach to using AI during the writing process. The recent progress in Large Language Models (LLM) unlocks this new technique.
Noah Smith and Roon give an illustrative example of how the sandwich workflow can be used:
In fact, Noah imagines that at some point, his workflow will look like this: First, he’ll think about what he wants to say, and type out a list of bullet points. His AI word processor will then turn each of these bullet points into a sentence or paragraph, written in a facsimile of Noah’s traditional writing style. Noah will then go back and edit what the AI wrote – altering phrasing, adding sentences or phrases or links where appropriate, and so on. An iterative, collaborative writing loop where an AI coauthor masters different parts of the cognitive stack than Noah himself, not dissimilar to the co-writing of this article.
A critical part of the sandwich workflow is to think of those first bullet points in step 1. AI writing tools will make this step increasingly important.
I write in “The First Step of the Writing Process” that the best way to come up with unique, authentic writing is to take action in the real world. Once you take action in the real world, you can share your findings with others through (AI-assisted) writing.
General Feedback
A third way to use AI when writing is to generate feedback on your drafts. While not as personalized and targeted as human feedback, AI can provide some useful insights.
For example, I copied my post, “How free-to-own NFTs can be used to incentivize learning” into ChatGPT’s text box:
And here’s the feedback it gave me:
There will likely be additional use cases for using AI to help us write. And as I write in “Did GPT-3 Write This?,” we should embrace these tools.
For now, Grammar and Simple Mistakes, The Sandwich Method, and General Feedback are some great places to start.
For those of us who write a lot in our jobs,AI could be a big time saver.