Legit ways to still incorporate AI in your work
The bad news: Sorry people, ChatGPT is banned! This is the title many news stories carry this month as the world reacts to news about artificial intelligence progress. Many people in schools and tech companies are worried about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday tasks like writing essays by students or coding by engineers, and they have ordered that AI not be used. Some, like New York public schools, have gone ahead to block it on their servers.
Their arguments range from fears about the truthfulness of the results AI gives, to ethical issues like cheating in academic and work environments, yet again to fears that humans will develop a learning problem if we outsource creative and text generation to AI. In fact, as the AI industry is growing, so is the industry to check for AI generated content, with many organizations wielding this as a stick against students, staff and freelancers.
The good news: In this newsletter, we will take a look at some of the legit ways you can still incorporate AI into your work without repercussion.
1. Come up with content ideas
“Give me five ways ML is impacting healthcare.” Typing this prompt on ChatGPT will generate a list of different ways ML is being incorporated into healthcare and you can then develop each idea into long form content yourself. This can speed up the job for creatives who just need an idea spark to start creating.
2. Produce an initial draft
When you have the idea but are still stumped on how to begin, you can always ask AI to come up with a first draft of your intended work. This can be studied enough to give you the confidence (and backup knowledge) to produce your own drafts.
3. Generate titles and headings
While your content might be the best, not having a catchy title can be a drag as less people will click on your work and if you’ve ever experienced the pain of thinking about possible titles and headings for your article, you’ll immediately see the possibilities AI brings. Prompts like “Generate 10 headings and sub-headings for a newsletter about machine learning” will give you a list to use directly or to modify to suit your work.
4. Use as a research tool
“Just Google it” was the most popular phrase in research over the past decade, but now with conversational AI bots on the battlefield, “Just ask ChatGPT” is becoming mainstream. You can leverage AI to do research on specific topics gothat Google might not give direct answers to. Be careful and confirm your answers from other sources though, because even the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has said that because of its limited training data, and other limitations, GPT-3 might give false answers in a confident manner.
5. Use as an editing tool
For a long time, creatives have used AI to edit their work, like Grammarly to check for writing errors, Quillbot to paraphrase texts, and a variety of other AI tools to improve the structure of their work. But with the advent of AI models like GPT-3, you can have your work edited following specific guidelines like checking for grammatical errors, tone, length of work, location-specific language, e.g., American or British English, etc., without having to implement most of these changes yourself.
6. Have a conversation with it
You might get generic wisdom, but having a conversation with AI might be one of its best use cases. Humans thrive on communication; sadly, the pandemic and lockdowns showed us the heights of loneliness. With text or visual based AI, this could be reduced by having full blown conversations with it. These can range from discussions about life, art, entertainment, your work, and much more. But like they say, “don't Google your symptoms," we say, “don’t ask AI to treat you.” It just isn’t competent enough. | 
