“Should I get AI to write for me?”

In today's video, I want to talk to you about AI. More specifically, I want to talk to you about AI writers, like Chad GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepMind, I think is the other one, Grok. There are all kinds of different tools to help you with your writing. Now, before we do anything, before I get into anything, I want to make sure you understand, I by no means think that you should not use AI writers. It's a great tool, absolutely use it, but I'm going to show you four reasons why you still need to know how to read and write in order to properly use this tool. Okay, so we're going to start with, actually before I get into the first point, let me get into something more very important to understand. I want to make sure you know the difference between create and curate. AI does not create anything, it curates, it collects all kinds of data and information, all kinds of writing styles and words and structures. It gathers them from all over the internet, brings them together to suit your specific need based on your prompt, on what you asked it to do. So, it's very important to remember that it curates and you'll understand why in a moment. So, let's start with the first thing you need to be careful about, accuracy and quality. AI still makes mistakes. Now, it's okay for you to write an essay, to write an email, to write whatever you need to write using the AI tool, but then you must read through what it produces, right, the result that you you get from the chat GPT or whatever, and you're gonna have to look for factual errors. And in case if you're writing something like academic, you need to check that all citations, all sources of information, because there may be mistakes in it. It happens, right. It's not a perfect tool. So, that's one thing. AI tools can make very weak arguments. They may sound or they may appear very strong, very well delivered. It doesn't mean that they can't be attacked easily or counter-argued easily, right. It's going to take information from all over the place and put it into what it thinks is a good presentation of an argument. But a critical reader will be able to find the chinks in the armor, as we say. The little areas where you can easily insert a counter-argument and break apart the whole thing. So, you need to be a good reader in order to be able to find those weak arguments or those weak points in whatever the AI tool produces for you. Vagueness. Like, AI tools use a lot of vague words and sometimes they use some vague structures because it sounds good, because that's what they've collected by scouring through the internet, right. As a reader, you have to find that vagueness and tighten it up. You need to make that something vague into something very concrete and specific in order to make your argument stand up or make your message stand up. It doesn't always have to be an argument. You're not always writing essays, right. But even if you're writing something like an email, you could have mistakes in it or you could have something that's vague so that the person receiving it is not entirely sure what you're trying to say. So, specifics are up to you more than the AI tool, right. But you have to notice that. Repetition. AI will repeat a lot, right. If you give it a particular word count, if you give it a particular length, it may think that it's answered the prompt instruction clearly, but it hasn't reached that word length. It'll just start repeating things, right. And a lot of the times when it curates, when it collects information from other places, it's taking that style or that information, which may already be repetitive, and then it's just doing the same thing. Again, because it's not creating something unique. It's creating something to suit your prompt, which I'm going to talk about next, which is a very key issue here. So, you need to recognize repetitions and remove them, right. And that's a part of the reading process for you. And then, as you remove information or as you remove unnecessary words or unnecessary sentences, you need to make sure that the part where you ended and then removed and then the next part still has to match somehow. So, you're doing surgery on your text. You need to make sure that there are no, like, you know, big stitches or scars left over. Tone. What a lot of the times the AI tool doesn't understand the tone that you want to convey. Maybe it's a misleading tone. Maybe you're sure, like, the AI will present the information in a little bit angry way. It seems like you're a reader. Maybe it's too light. Maybe it's too serious. Maybe it's not. It's not the tone that you think is suitable for the context. Again, AI doesn't know who you're writing to. You can put that in the prompt, but the person you're writing to, you need to know who that person is and how to approach that person. AI can't do that for you. So, you need to make sure that the tone is right. And if it's not, you need to make adjustments. And I'll talk about that in a second as well, okay? So, accuracy and the quality of the writing is up to you to check after the AI tool does its job, okay? Let's get to the next point. Okay, so now we come to, obviously, a very important part of using an AI tool, and that is the prompt. That is the instruction or the request that you give the AI tool of what you want it to produce for you, right? Now, if you give it very simple instructions, you'll get a very simple text that probably doesn't match what you actually wanted and probably doesn't serve the purpose of what you're trying to aim with this text, right? So now, a few things to keep in mind. When you're writing the prompt, you need to explain the context clearly. But remember, you're doing this explanation in writing. I mean, yeah, you can speak, you can do a voice command, but you still have to be very clear about what you want done in the text. So, you have to have very clear ideas in your head to begin with. An unclear prompt is an unclear product at the end, right? So, you have to be able to, you know, put all these ideas together in your mind before you even approach the AI tool. So, you have to logically structure what it is you want the final outcome to be, what you want the final text to be. And this is why I always come back to this idea. Writing is thinking. The better you are as a writer, the better you are as a thinker, because you have no choice but to organize ideas clearly, use the right words, use the right tone. And all of this is before the AI can put it all together for you. So, you still need to know how to write in order to use an AI tool. And I keep saying AI tool. Remember that word. It's a tool. It's not a replacement, okay? When you're writing your prompt, you need to specify the tone you want the final text to be. You have to specify the audience. For example, if you're writing to a business partner, it's going to have a bit of a business tone. If you're writing to kids, it should be a bit lighter. To adults, a bit heavier or more serious. And you have to specify the aim. If you don't do any of these things, the AI tool will just write whatever comes out from, it'll take some of the key words from your prompt, put them in there, put a few more sentences around it, and give it to you, right? It won't be what you need. So, you need to be very clear about what you want it to do, which means you need to write the instructions very clearly. And then, as I mentioned before, you have to go read the final product to make sure that all of that is in there. And you have to fill in the blanks. Now, sometimes you will have an idea of what you want to accomplish with your AI tool, with your writer, but there's always going to be a little bit of information that it won't do for you. The AI tool won't fill in the blanks of whatever information is missing. You have to think about what information needs to be in the prompt and put it in there yourself, right? So, again, that takes critical thinking. Critical thinking is developed through critical reading and critical writing. So, you still need to practice these skills. Your brain is basically a muscle. You still need to train it to use an AI tool. Now, one thing I will also say about the prompt. The prompt is going to be full of key words. You need to be careful because most of the AI tools are still going to take a lot of the words from your prompt and push them into the final text. You need to be very clear if you want those words in the final text because the AI may build your text around those very specific words. So, that means you need to read and make sure there's no repetition, there's no unnecessary wording, there's no hints that you used an AI tool to write whatever it is you wrote. Okay, so that's a very key component and all of this leads to the next point. Let's look at that. Okay, so now we get to a key component of using an AI tool and that is editing. Because again, like I said, you're not getting a perfect draft even after you give it a great prompt. Very detailed, lots of information, lots of specifics about audience and tone and everything. You're still not getting a perfect draft. You're still going to have to read through it, find the flaws and fix them. In order to find the flaws, you need to be a good reader. In order to fix the flaws, you need to be a good writer. Okay, so let's see some of the things you're going to have to work on. You're going to have to look out for awkward phrasing. Sometimes the AI tool will give you certain sentences or certain structures of sentences that are just a little bit strange. They might be too long, too short. They're not going to be grammatically incorrect. That's a little bit more and more, that's becoming more and more rare. Let's put it this way. But it does still make little mistakes, but more specifically, it gives you sentences that are just, you know, cluttered. Cluttered means messy. All these extra words that don't need to be there. It uses the passive when there's absolutely no reason to use the passive. It uses this structure or that structure for no apparent reason, but it might still look good. So even if it looks good, it doesn't mean that it is good. Sometimes you're going to have to tighten it, which means you need to know how to write well. Punctuation. Punctuation is very, very commonly misused or incorrectly used in AI writing. I think by now everybody has heard about the em dash, the em dash. So you have the very short one, that's a hyphen. A little bit longer, that's the em dash. And then the long one, the em dash. Like, AI tools love the em dash. Nobody knows why, but we rarely, when we write, we rarely use the em dash. And when we do, there's a very specific reason to do it. AI writers use them a lot. You have to go through your reading and just take them all out, or at least the large majority of them out. And there are other indications of punctuation, like semicolons. Also, not commonly used. Minimize the use of those. Things like that, look out for. Style and voice. There are certain giveaways, right? Certain ways of writing things that make it very clear that what was written was written by an AI tool. You have to look for that style, like for the word choices or the expression choices. I remember reading through an essay, actually this was a dissertation, this was a PhD dissertation, that the person, he put a lot of effort into it, but he used the AI tool to, you know, structure it all nicely because he wasn't a native speaker. I don't know how many of the paragraphs started with in addition and then went on to the thing. Absolutely unnecessary to begin that way. I had to remove so many of them to make the, you know, the final paper look like it was written by a human being. So you have to look for style and you have to look for voice. Voice means that it's somebody real. It's a personal one person, a unique person, and that goes with personalization, actually. It is up to you to find the voice that doesn't match and the style that doesn't match and then you have to personalize it to suit your voice and your style. And another thing you need to be careful about here is consistency. Sometimes the AI writing is not consistent. You'll have a certain style of writing or a certain selection of vocabulary in the first part and it'll be very different in the second part. A little bit high-end, a little bit low-end, a little bit fancy, a little bit antiquated, a little bit this, a little bit that. But it's not going to be very, very obvious. There will be little hints here, little hints there, right? It's up to you as the reader to find them and fix them and be able to, you know, make the necessary changes as you go along, which means you need to be a good writer anyway. Generic and robotic. This also goes with style and voice. It could be very, very similar to what you will see everywhere else. And again, we go back to the idea that AI curates. It goes all over the internet. It finds expressions and information and puts it together. The more people upload AI writing to the internet, the more that AI is just copying itself and the more generic the writing becomes. Everything will soon start looking exactly the same and it'll be very, very obvious it was AI written and not human written. Now there are tools that claim to use AI to humanize AI, but that too will start like, you know, feeding on itself and producing the exact same results and being very generic, very robotic. No life to the writing. So it's up to you to go in there and personalize it and fix that and make it sound like it was written by you, right? Which all of this brings me to the most important aspect, the most important thing you need to keep in mind about why you need to be a good writer to use an AI tool. Let's look at that. Okay, so now we come to the last point and it may look the simplest, but this is actually the most important aspect of why you need to be a good writer to use AI. Uniqueness. Now imagine you're applying to a university. You have to write an admissions essay or a personal statement, a statement of purpose. Say you are applying to Harvard and you say, write me a personal statement for Harvard Business School, right? And you give that to your Chad GPT or whatever and you tell it, here's my age, here's where I'm from, here's my grades and that's all you do. The next person who's applying to the same program does the same thing and the next person and the next person. 10 people will give the same prompt to the AI tool. They will get a very, very similar essay, right? As soon as the admissions officers receive these and if you're unlucky enough that one officer receives applications from two people who did the same thing, you're both getting rejected. Why? Because there is no you there. There is a Chad GPT. There's an AI writer who wrote this thing for you. There's nothing unique. There's no possible way that an AI tool can make you a unique, real person without you getting involved in the writing, okay? Same thing if you're applying for a job. You have to write a cover letter or if you're trying to make a sales pitch, you have to present something in a certain way that makes the reader want to engage with you. It's very, very easy to just rely on the AI tool to write something for you without putting your own touch on it. But if everybody's doing that, there is no uniqueness to the writing and uniqueness is what people will read. Generic writing or similar writing, people will just ignore. Because they've already read it somewhere, right? So this is the most important part of using an AI tool. Now, I have never said and will never say don't use it. I am terrible at math. I use a calculator but I still need to know the basic rules of math in order to be able to use the calculator well. Same thing with writing. Use the AI tool. Let it fix your grammar. Let it fix your structure. Let it organize your thoughts a little bit to help you get an idea of where you want to go. But that's your first draft. It is not your final draft, right? Make the writing unique to you in order to make it good writing and that means you have to know how to write well. You still need to know vocabulary. You need to know grammar. You need to know structures. You need to know organizational, you know, structures. You need to know how to go from an introduction to build up a background, present an argument, reach a conclusion. Again, AI will set it up for you but you have to finish the job at the end of the day. So I hope you're able to do that and I hope you continue to work on your writing skills and your reading skills. Exercise that brain once in a while and remember it's curating. It's not creating. You have to do the creating for the final result of the text, okay? If you have any questions, if you have any comments, please put them in the description box, in the comments below. I'll come back next time. I'll give you some more tips to help you improve your writing skills and your reading skills, okay? Till then, bye-bye.