How to Use AI to Support Your Writing
by Rochelle Melander
If you’ve been opening my emails, you know I’ve been promoting QuickWrite, an AI program I’ve found helpful.
I’ve struggled about promoting an AI program when I feel very mixed about using AI. In March, I learned that Meta had used three of my books to train its AI. The work was stolen: as far as I know, none of the writers were compensated for the use of their words.
But AI is here. Whether we like it or not, we use it every day. Google uses AI to support search engine results. If you use Siri or Alexa, you’ve already got an AI assistant. If you hang out on social media, AI is behind the scenes, curating your feed. If you play a video game, it’s likely that the program uses AI.
So how can a writer use AI responsibly? In this article, I’ll talk about the ways AI can supercharge your writing process. Then I’ll cover what you should not use AI for and why.
The Dos: How to use AI in an ethical way
Dislike writing emails? I’m not talking about query letters. Those you must write yourself. I’m talking about those long emails you’re required to write for work or your personal life. Like crafting a message to the school about why your kid needs accommodations. Or creating an instructional email to employees about how to use social media at work. Here’s where AI can help you check something off your to-do list and free up your brain to write your creative work.
Need help with a title? Writing titles can be challenging. But AI does a great job of coming up with lots of ideas. I’ve noticed that AI is good at generating topic-specific words. It also provides lots of titles in different sentence constructions. Once you have a few examples, you can play with them to come up with your own catchy title.
Got research to do? AI can gather research for you, saving you time. It can also provide you with summaries of scientific and academic articles. It’s also helpful to fact check citations. But double check everything. AI is often wrong. It does create studies or facts that it has hallucinated or absolutely made up.
Is your writing idea feeling slight? After you have generated ideas for your article or book, ask AI for more ideas. It might find areas or topics you have missed. You can also use AI to help you narrow your topic, so that it’s not as broad. Finally, use AI to find hidden patterns or make connections between unique ideas. Put in a list of topics that interest you and see what AI connects.
Need to get social? Every social media platform requires that you post super short content. When Write-A-Thon was published, I wrote dozens of tweets for my publishing house to use to promote my book. Imagine the time I could have saved by asking AI to help me! A caveat: Use AI as a starting point. Make sure you revise your social media posts so that they’re in YOUR voice.
Are you worried you’re repeating yourself? Use an AI Plagiarism tool to see where your manuscript repeats itself—in other words, where you plagiarize yourself.
AI can be a helpful tool to take the grunt out of the grunt work.
The Don’ts: Avoid using AI in these ways
Don’t use AI to write your books. Or articles, workbooks, or any other creative project. When you use AI to write your work, you are using information that it’s gleaned from scanning lots of online resources and books (like my books). You don’t know the source of what you’re getting. It may be the work of another author and thus be subject to copyright violation.
Don’t publish AI created projects. If you do use AI to write your book, know that you cannot copyright it. As of now, the US copyright office will allow only people not computers to receive a copyright. (And when you upload your book to Amazon, they will ask you if you used AI to create your book.)
You might be asking, why shouldn’t I use AI to write a book? Others are doing it. I have several reservations. AI doesn’t have a voice. Even if you take what AI has given you and adapt it, you will not get your unique ideas, creative thought pattern, or individual writing style. You will receive generic content with repetitive words like arguably, certainly, consequently.
Don’t overuse AI. Whenever you can, do your own work. AI is a resource hog. According to Jesse Dodge in an article on NPR: “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes,” he says. “So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity.”
Your turn: How are you using AI to supercharge your writing?
