You Can Call me AI (That’s Artificial Intelligence)

10 Steps for Writing Authentically with GPT

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing about how to be authentic in written communications, and a few of you have asked for more specific guidance on how to do so while also making good use of AI. So this week I thought I’d give you a sneak peak into the process I use.

Before we get to the details, some caveats:

• YMMV. This is what works for mein the context of writing an article (like this newsletter). My priority is not to write faster, but to use AI to try and write better. I think of AI as part of a writing team, with me in charge of what ultimately gets published. If you are optimizing for speed, or are creating different artifacts, you will probably use quite a different process.
• This process has evolved quite a lot in the last few months, and will probably continue to do so. After all, services like GPT are getting smarter seemingly by the day.

That said, here’s my process:

1) Before I write, I give GPT examples of writing that is in my voice that has been well-received. I ask it to tell me my writing style, and then I use the settings to ensure that it replicates that style in its suggestions to me.

2) I come up with some basic ideas, and then ask GPT to write me a short article on it. This will NOT be my article – it just gives me an idea on what the article might look like, and to help me see if I’ve missed anything.

3) If there are claims within the article, I ask it to find references for those claims on the Internet (this is now a feature of GPT-4). It helps me ensure that I’m being accurate.

4) Next I’ll suggest tweaks to the article, and have it to a rewrite. This may happen 2-3 times.

5) Then I’ll have it create an outline from the full article it just wrote.

6) Now it’s my turn. Using the outline, I write the article. No AI being used at all at this stage.

7) I then provide GPT with the finished article, and ask GPT to critique it against examples of my prior work. I’m looking for suggestions for improvements here.

8) I tweak the article, and use a tool like Grammarly to give me final grammatical tweak suggestions (I mainly use these tools because they are inline in the article).

9) I read the article aloud to make sure it sounds like me and make any final tweaks.

10) I hit publish!

Oh, one last thing – in the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken this process and created a dedicated GPT for it. It has certainly helped speed things up a bit, without sacrificing quality. If you would like more details on that, drop a note in the comments, and I can reach out to you to discuss in more detail.