How to Use AI as a Flint for Content Writing

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard were designed to improve the efficiency of research and content creation, a personal assistant to professionals. Now, professionals in many fields worry about AI taking over their jobs completely. In fact, 43% of United States workers say they expect their job to change significantly in the next five years because of AI’s disruption.

We don’t think AI can ever match the work of a human being, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use it to our advantage. As generative AI takes over, we need to find ways to adapt to technology, rather than deny its existence. So, here are some ways you can use generative AI without trusting it as an all-encompassing source of information.

Sometimes, on-demand creativity feels impossible. For example, you’re trying to brainstorm blog topics, but you’re getting stuck. Generative AI can take the place of a collaborator, giving you ideas for you to expand on to intrigue your audience. 

To make idea generation more specific, provide the AI with context about your organization and your audience. Provide a summary of the buyer persona you want to target, and ask the AI to come up with ideas that would directly target that audience. When the AI provides a list of topics, develop them to be specific, targeted content. 

This isn’t where the collaboration ends. When you’re working on a portion of your copy, like the call-to-action, but the words you’re using aren’t quite landing right. Copy and paste the section you wrote and feed it into the generative AI platform. Ask the AI to provide examples of ways to improve the section. Copying and pasting exactly what the AI says will make your copy robotic, whereas you want your writing to stand out. Instead, see how you can combine the two versions to create the best possible adaptation of the section while matching your organization’s voice and tone.

Here are some prompts to guide your brainstorm process with AI. Be sure to make it specific to your industry and organization.

1. Act as a seasoned professional in [industry]. Generate blog ideas that would interest audience members described by this buyer persona: [paste persona].
2. Use creative language to edit this call-to-action to stand out and encourage [audience description] to [perform a specific action].
3. Create a social media caption for Instagram, Facebook, and X, that summarizes and pushes to this blog post.

Once your brainstorm is complete, start researching with a generative AI platform to simplify the process.

When you type a question into a search engine, you will have to do some digging to get the answer you want. It can also take time to figure out the right keyword or question to get the answer you’re looking for. When you use generative AI, you can communicate with it to get more specific answers for your questions. 

The AI remembers the questions you asked it previously in the conversation. So, it combines your previous questions with new questions to determine what exactly you’re looking for.

Remember to always ask for sources and verify them! AI can misunderstand the legitimacy of some sources. When you’re performing research online, use your critical reasoning to determine whether a source is reliable or not. For example, generative AI could mistake a college newspaper as having the same amount of credibility as The New York Times. Confirming sources as you go will save you issues in the long run. Find multiple sources to verify information. (We all know it’s best practice to check your sources; it should be the same when you use generative AI).

Once you use your research to write, use generative AI to gather feedback. 

So you’re a talented writer, but you struggle with the editing process. If you find it difficult to edit your own work with an editor’s eye, leverage generative AI to help you improve your writing and get closer to the finished product. 

To get the best feedback, give your AI descriptive prompts for the type of editing you need. Here are a few examples to get you started:

1. Act as an expert editor with several years of experience. Please provide a bullet point list of errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Provide some general thoughts on style and structure. Then, ask for any elaborations or ask me to get you to suggest further useful prompts.
2. Are there any parts of this work that need to be fleshed out or loose threads that should be resolved?
3. Please analyze this document and tell me the most important things I can change to make it more readable.

Play around with these prompts until you get the answers you need. Remember that you know your content best, so if the AI gives suggestions you don’t agree with, you don’t need to apply its feedback, or better yet, push back. Use your judgment to determine which edits make the most sense for your piece of writing and your organization overall. 

It’s important to acknowledge that, in their current state, generative AI platforms are far from perfect. One of the most common flaws are hallucinations, when the information the AI provides is inaccurate or incorrect. If the AI you’re using gets information wrong, it’s important to correct it so it can further develop its algorithm. 

For example, we used a generative AI platform to provide suggestions on one of our internal documents. The AI recommended that we change the spelling of a word, even though that word was spelled correctly. In turn, we communicated to the platform that this information was incorrect, helping it become more accurate for the future. 

Generative AI can also have difficulty understanding content. We asked generative AI to come up with a title for our blog about buyer personas, providing the text so it could pull information from it. The platform misinterpreted what the term “buyer personas” means, giving us titles that weren’t relevant to the content we provided. Again, we communicated the inaccuracy to the platform, so it can improve.

With generative AI comes potential for bias, toxicity, and harmful outputs. If you aren’t diligent,  you could be a messenger of harmful misinformation, identity theft, plagiarism, fraud, and propaganda.

To learn more about responsible AI use, read and analyze guidelines for evaluating their risk and making ethical decisions.

In a world with constantly changing technology, it’s important as an individual and professional to adapt to it. Incorporate generative AI into your work while recognizing the issues that can come along with it. Generative AI can make your job more efficient if you use it correctly, saving time on brainstorming, researching, and editing your content.