How You Can Use AI to Improve Your Writing

Generative AI is the boogeyman for anybody that does anything with text, with writers of all stripes up nights worrying what this new technology means for them. Thankfully it’s not all doom and gloom: there are many ways in which AI can be used to improve writing and make it better than ever before — especially for those just starting out as writers.

In this article we’ll go over some of the ways in which generative AI can make life easier for anybody that writes. Whether you’re a professional journalist, somebody who writes in their off hours, or even a student looking to improve their grades, AI can help you get a little more oomph out of your written word.

Get Feedback

Probably the most useful thing about generative AI is that it can give you one of the most valuable resources for a writer: feedback. While you could ask family, friends, coworkers or even the internet for their opinion on something you’ve written, a program like ChatGPT has the benefit of being available to you whenever you need it.

The way it works is that you ask ChatGPT “give me feedback on this” and then below paste the text (you can add a “please” to make a good impression if you’re worried about the robot uprising). The upside is that you get your feedback whenever you want it, you’re not dependent on others. ChatGPT focuses very strongly on how content comes across, which is good if you’re writing for an audience.

Writing little prompts like this are a great way to get better at writing. Not only can you write around yourself and figure out what you like best, you can feed your creations back into ChatGPT to get its opinion.

While our example is very basic, ChatGPT also picks up on more obscure grammatical errors and will help you correct them. If you’re looking to improve that aspect of your writing, it’s a solid tool, and we like it more than Grammarly, say, and it’s occasionally odd stylistic choices.

Expand Vocabulary

Writers’ tools are words, and it’s always good to have more, and better, tools. ChatGPT is pretty good, here, too, acting like an interactive dictionary that can help you grow your vocabulary. In fact, in some ways it’s better, as it can help you figure out alternative words and phrasing on the fly.

For one, you could use it as a dictionary, simply asking it what a word means. For more complicated subjects you may want to add that you want the explanation in simple terms or get hit with a wall of text. However, for simple things, you get a dictionary-style answer.

However, where ChatGPT has most old-school tools like these beat is that it can also help you in the context of a sentence, or even reword entire sentences.

The nice thing about doing your research this way is that you can isolate things you’d like to know more about in ChatGPT’s explanations and thus keep learning. You can also use ChatGPT to create examples for you, like if you need some sample code to illustrate a point or are looking for an anecdote to lend legitimacy to a point you’re making.

, or to look up a detail you don’t know, there’s no way in its current incarnation it can stand up to real, skilled research — or, let’s be honest, a thorough reading of Wikipedia.

For a quick fact check, ChatGPT is adequate, but for anything more than that, it becomes shaky. Ask it for the causes of the First World War it comes out with cookie cutter stuff that gives many historians pause, and its explanation of theological concepts would give a cleric conniptions. It’s not too great on hard sciences, either, so tread with care in this regard, and double check when in doubt.

Writing Prompts

The trick to becoming a better writer is actually quite simple once you boil it all down: write. The more you write, the better you get at it. ChatGPT is a great help here, as it can set up prompts for you that will help you build your skills. For example, say you want to write more about how accountants could use AI.

We’re pretty sure we’ve seen this prompt before: ChatGPT likes people finding keys in forests, it seems. As you can see, though, if you’re stuck or just want to practice a bit, it does come in handy, just don’t expect to win any prizes.

However, you will see that our prompts are quite specific in this case; that’s because otherwise you get weird, nonsensical prompts. When asking AI for anything remotely abstract, you need to appeared first on AddictiveTips.