There is no doubt that AI is taking the world by storm and changing the world in too many sectors to count. The advantages are often to save time with no sacrifice to the quality of the work produced.
As discussed in many articles I’ve published recently, AI has the potential to benefit our productivity systems heavily. At the same time, there are some things that you should never use AI for in workflows like these. This is what this article is for — to make sure that you are using AI in your work as efficiently and intelligently as possible because using AI in the wrong way will make your content uninteresting for readers.
My of AI use in knowledge work — you must moderate the input of ideas and thoughts into the system, but you can use AI between these points for some things. I’m going to focus on the start and finish points of the system in this article, as these are the points which need manual contribution. I’ll explain what happens when you try and use AI for these stages and I’ll outline what you should be doing instead to make the most of the technology without reducing the quality of your work.
1. Input and finding ideas
This is a controversial one. Many people claim that you could use AI to generate ideas and suggestions to inform the writing that you are doing. I don’t believe that this is a suitable use of AI and its capability.
You should continue to consume the content you find valuable, manually capturing ideas that stand out to you. AI doesn’t know who your favourite writers are, it doesn’t know where to find the most stimulating ideas. It’s only recently learned how to browse the internet for content.
Trust yourself over the computer — it’s likely what you come up with yourself will be more original. You can make this capture process easier for yourself by having a system in place. Ideas come to you at any time of the day, they aren’t necessarily things that come to you when you sit down with the intention of brainstorming. Carry a notebook or have an app on your phone to capture ideas as and when they strike you.
You could use AI to some effect in this idea generation system, so long as you are specific enough. It wouldn’t be enough to use a prompt such as ‘give me some productivity article ideas’, but something like ‘I want to write an article about some pitfalls of AI when in knowledge work — suggest some contrasting opinions on this topic’ might expose you to something relevant you haven’t considered before.
Recently I’ve come across a novel use of AI in an idea generator software called Napkin. It allows you to write short ideas on cards, and then links the cards together using AI. Although I see a lot of potential here with the progress of technology, your thinking is still a lot more powerful than this. The AI might be able to find basic links, but it’s only as powerful as the content you’ve placed into it.
There is no link to the deep context that your life experience can provide, so reduced chance for your insight to weigh in on generated ideas. It doesn’t provide function beyond exploring related thoughts that you’ve captured.
2. Ouput and delivering content
This isn’t ‘management’ per se, but is why we manage our knowledge in the first place, so I figured it important enough. And before I delve deeper I have one overarching piece of advice for you all to take note of.
Please don’t generate your written content with AI. Period.
Now that I’ve said this I can move on to some more nuanced insight. Why do I say the above? Because anyone can do it. There is no value for your readers to gain by consuming your articles that they couldn’t gain from a ChatGPT prompt. The reason anyone writes is to captivate the world with their organic and unique perspectives. Perspectives that you can’t find within work generated by a large language model.
Sure, use AI to rephrase a story of yours that you can’t put into words well. Use it to suggest synonyms to make your writing more impactful. Don’t rely on it to create an engaging and well-performing article for you to deliver.
I type the entirety of my content by hand because I want control over every sentence. In your head, you should have an idea of the voice in which you want to write your content. AI is not powerful enough to capture what you desire in a query and execute it in a response. You can add bold, italics, line breaks and other formatting as you like.
It’s also easier when you want to include personal experiences or anecdotes in your writing. You might not be able to find a suitable point to do so in a piece that you haven’t written yourself.
Where you can use AI from within PKM and content writing
Outlining is a big one here. Once you’ve collected all your ideas for a piece that you want to write, you can ask AI to turn it into a cohesive outline for you. This saves you time and won’t convolute the ideas, structure and format that you end up with in the final piece.
I take my ideas from brainstorming and feed them into a script for AI that turns the ideas into a well-structured outline. By doing this, I can ensure that my writing is engaging and ordered in a way that will deliver the advice it contains well.
Because you’ll use your second brain to link ideas when writing content, it’s a good idea to separate your AI-generated notes and personal notes in your vault. I use a PARA system of organisation in my vault, where the areas folder contains personal atomic notes that I’ve made an effort to write and link between. I contain this folder from the rest of the vault so that I can keep my ideas and AI-generated content separate.
Conclusion
To conclude this article, I’d link back to the input and output points in a creative workflow. You can create original content so long as you manually control these steps. Choose what interests you, learn about what you think is important and synthesise it into a piece of content that will inform others. You can keep your notes separate from AI-generated content in your vault so they don’t mix with each other.
Beyond this, feel free to use AI to alter and improve your writing. You can also use it as an outliner to create a well-structured piece of work. Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed this article please consider following — I write about productivity and Obsidian amongst other things. I hope you gained value from this piece!