Most people I know aren’t bad thinkers, they’re bad writers.
What I mean is they don’t have the time or confidence to write. They might be better at thinking out loud than writing the idea down or run away scared when they see a blank page. You might have the best read on your market but you don’t know how to word it. Right now you either don’t write it at all, or you hand the whole thing to AI and get back something bland but ok with your good idea buried inside it. I don’t think that makes AI the enemy, though.
There’s a witch hunt going on around catching AI writing but it’s missing the point. Not all AI-assisted writing is bad. If AI helps people get their ideas onto paper, this is a good thing. It’s when AI transforms their ideas into something that is so far away from the original idea and writes them in a way that is so forgettable. This is the issue. I’m okay with people using AI to help them write, but I have some caveats. They need to make sure that the writing reflects of their style, their voice, and it’s authentic to them, plus it needs to be interesting.
For me, the problem is when the thinking gets destroyed along with the writing, when a genuinely good idea gets sanded and polished down so much that it sounds the same as everyone else’s.
The issue is AI by default creates bland professional-grade output. Someone using AI for the first time can produce something that reads like a marketing team wrote it, in the time it takes to make a coffee. This moment feels like magic. Their next thought is why do we even need a marketing team any longer? So let’s get rid of the marketing team and I can now do this in two minutes myself with AI. The issue is you’re not alone. Everybody else is having the same experience and moment.
I’m not a huge punk rock fan, I connected with the grunge era of music with bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden. These bands and these movements were a counter movement to the overproduced boy band girl band music of the time. People who connected with punk or grunge were looking for something that felt authentic, not something that was produced by five people in a suit after doing market research and deciding that this is how every band needs to sound.
I find the best way to use AI is to use it more as a thinking partner. What I mean by this is to get AI to interview you about whatever topic you want to write about. Make it dig for the specific answers instead of letting you generalise. You can even create different interviewer personas depending on the style of article you want to write. But it’s also important that you build your own writing style guide with your words, your phrases, the way you actually talk when nobody’s editing you, so the AI tool has something of yours to draft from instead of defaulting to the mean. Do the thinking out loud into it, let it draft from your own words after, don’t let it tidy the edges off on the way out. Then spend some time editing it.
Be yourself. Be more punk.