Given the recent rise in text-based language models, sometimes called AI tools, I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences in using them, especially in the context of blogging.
My experience
Fully AI generated blog posts, especially in my tech niche, seems like a really bad idea at this point in time.
I tried it out a bit and besides obvious factual errors in the results there seems to be a bias towards new and shiny technologies, which isn’t bad in and of itself, but should be kept in mind when using those tools.
In addition the models seem to tend towards higher level abstractions and are therefore somewhat unusable for in-depth posts.
How I think it can be used
My normal process for writing posts includes and idea stage, in which I write down mostly unordered bullet points related to a topic. From there I usually introduce some kind of ordering, write an introduction, fill in the bullet points and finish up with some kind of conclusion or recap.
Kick-starting the actual writing
Going from bullet points to text is sometimes really hard for me, this is where i saw the biggest benefit of using AI tools to get some rough paragraphs on screen and then start iterating from there.
I did this with a couple of my early stage drafts and within a couple of iterations none to almost none of the AI generated text remained.
Building better bullet points
I also asked some of the AI tools, given my bullet points and intended audience, if they think something is missing.
In most cases this resulted in a rehashed version of my bullet points, but a couple of times the tools came up with something I was legitimately missing and could expand on myself later.
Rephrasing
Every writer knows the feeling when a paragraph just doesn’t feel right and I had some success with telling the tools to rephrase it while keeping my own style and editing it further from there.
Extracting new ideas from previous posts
The AI tools seem to be really good at extracting interesting follow up topics from my existing posts.
I’m not necessarily bad at that either, or lacking new ideas, but I still found it interesting how good the tools are at this.