Writing with AI

I wrote my previous blog - parenting post with AI assistance. I’ve been using AI for coding, preparing bids and presentations for a while which is what led me down the chain of logic in the post. This is first time since University (where I studied Mathematics & Philosophy) I’ve tried to write an argued philosophical argument, so I tried using AI to help.

My observations

• It was very helpful refining the argument and being a sounding board
  • I wrote the article originally as bullets
  • Using the AI we jointly refined the logical flow
  • It provided critique and help me hone the flow and focus on the key points
• It was less helpful writing the text, I tried
  • Having it create a style guide from my other blog posts - so it uses my style (a trick that works for presentations)
  • Allowing it to write the longer article from the bullets
  • However it wrote a very verbose, academic article - that really was a long way from something I’d write (or enjoy reading)
• I ended up having to repeatidly tell it to correct items, and improve the style guide. This did work - but it was a painful process.

Reflecting on this - the AI is training on philosophical arguments from books, and when it saw one it wrote in that style despite my instructions. It took a lot of prompting to guide it back to what I wanted. I think I got most value when working with the bullets, refining the argument, wheras writing the full prose was just too wordy.

This post is not AI assisted, for future ones I’ll likely still use a mixture - but maybe do the long-form myself.