Don’t be fooled into thinking Artificial Intelligence is simply a good vs bad battle between synthetic content created by machines and work you do yourself. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude AI and Gemini have a lot to offer when they’re used to provide feedback on your work, analysis and additional perspectives.
I recently wrote a blog criticising organisations that preach till the cows come home about their corporate ‘values’ but don’t always live them. I uploaded the blog to Google’s new Notebook LM tool which summarised it and cited Gandhi as an example of a leader who actually lived their values rather than simply talked about them.
That gave me a useful perspective to add to my blog post and it became less of an opinionated rant and more nuanced, with examples to help back up what I was saying. Although I know who Gandhi is I hadn’t thought to include him in my original piece. Like most humans, I’m not able to immediately access all my knowledge all the time and I don’t always spot every opportunity to apply it. In this case, the AI gave me a nudge and threw up an idea that I wished I’d thought of in the first place and on another day, I probably would have.
Another tool worth a look, and it’s also from Google, is Text FX. Still officially an experiment, it won’t churn out articles for you like ChatGPT but it’s an extremely quick and simple system designed to stimulate your writing and provide new ideas and inspiration. Use it to find similes, alliteration and explore how words and ideas could relate to each other. There’s no complex prompting and no concerns about what might be happening with your data. Give it words like ‘media’ or ‘safety’ and it’ll generate acronyms. Or enter a concept such as ‘bus travel’ and have the ‘Unexpect’ feature provide creative ideas to bring the concept to life. Much of it will be dismissed as rubbish but there will be one or two that spark something within you and lead to something useful. You might then use these ideas (your own ideas but with a bit of help) in a creative campaign, to, in this case, encourage people to take the bus.
I’m not a particularly visual thinker and I find it useful for waking up those parts of my brain which seem to lie dormant some of the time. This provides new angles and an edge that breathes new life into my writing and makes my training more interesting and memorable.
For me, AI is not about ‘getting AI to do the work’. It’s always my work, with me taking full responsibility and credit for it. And I like to make sure that I learn and develop through my use of AI rather than diminishing myself because I’m making less use of particular faculties. So taking something I’ve created and asking ‘how could I improve this?’, and learning from the feedback can be helpful. This is particularly useful if you’re in an environment where you’re working from home and don’t have immediate access to colleagues.
I’ve a friend who runs a social media account for an organisation. She’s great at coming up with 5 different ways to promote an event but the ideas don’t form in her head ready-made with the correct word counts. So she’ll take her idea and use it as a ChatGPT prompt but ask for it it be repurposed with the word count she requires for the graphic she’s creating. She takes note of the writing techniques the AI uses to summarise what she’s trying to say. This way, she’s also developing her own skills and improving her writing and editing abilities and saving time.
Some of the discussion around AI can be very polarising. There are lots of different tools and lots of different ways to use them. At Comsteria, we can help you get up to speed with what’s going on and figure out how to apply what’s available to your situation. Get in touch today if you’d like to find out more or arrange some training for your team.
