How much AI should you use (if any) in your content?

This is Scrolltown

First off, I’m not going to make a judgement either way about whether you should or should not use AI… it’s completely up to you. There’s the meme that saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI “tens of millions of dollars”, which of course equates to untold amounts of carbon.

“But generative AI sucks!”

Let’s take a look at some of the most common objections.

• If you object to generative AI on environmental grounds, you’re right to.
• If you object on the basis that all our work was “stolen”, there’s a bit of nuance there but basically you’re right, and the nuance isn’t important.
• If AI feels inhuman or makes us more beholden to machines and less communicative interpersonally, broadly speaking I don’t disagree.
• If you object to generative AI because it produces slop, that’s actually the one area I’ll push back on. We don’t have to go into it now but it can do incredible things with the right guidance. But without that guidance, you’ll end up sounding like an overly keen American salesperson.

But with all of these objections, AI isn’t going anywhere. Denying it or assuming it’ll be a fad is the wrong call, and refusing to use it is between you and your own moral compass and I’m not about to inject myself there.

I’m not writing this because I think “everyone else is using it so you should too”, but rather a quick set of questions to help you evaluate if you can and should use AI, where and when to use it, in what media, and how much you should rely on it.

Oh, and just a quick point before we go on. I have no dog in this fight. I’ve lost business due to the commoditisation of my art form. I know this isn’t everyone’s stance, but when I see that something like podcast editing can be done competently by someone without an audio engineering degree, I go “OK great, now it’s time to level up my skills so I can do something most people can’t”.

The work I do now isn’t made any easier or harder by AI, which might be why I’m getting splinters from sitting on the fence. I see its enormous potential, but I also see how it can be ruinous if unchecked.

We’ll talk more about the “should” stuff later, but for now let’s answer a more fun question:

Can you use AI to make your work easier?

In almost all circumstances, you can use tools like ChatGPT (which now generates pretty decent images as well as text, once you give it the right parameters) to help you in your work.

I use ChatGPT as a thought partner but I never let it write any of my words. That’s because I enjoy the process of writing and it’s a muscle I want to keep exercising. Reports are beginning to suggest that if we don’t keep exercising our critical thinking muscles, we lose them.

My brain is basically the only thing I have that works reasonably well, so I want to keep it working.

That said, if ChatGPT or Perplexity (a phenomenal AI-based search engine) can get me an answer faster than Google, I’m going to use it… after fact-checking it first.

And that’s an important point. Relying on ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to do the critical thinking for you is probably a dangerous road.

But if you need someone to help you brainstorm ideas, validate something, or – one of my favourites – give you counterpoints to an argument, you might find it pretty addictive in a short space of time.

Just watch out for platitudes. OpenAI is already tweaking ChatGPT because its latest model (think “version of the operating system”) is too sycophantic.

Given that, should we be using generative AI?

I’ll cover that, and more questions in the next few issues of this newsletter. If you want to get them in your inbox, you’ll find the newsletter signup box at the bottom of my website.

Have an amazing weekend, and do something for yourself over the bank holiday. You’ve earned it.

T’ra a bit!
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