I’ve been using AI for what feels like a long time now, in Obsidian and beyond. I grew on Medium when writing about AI, putting out articles about tips and tricks that I used to make my work more efficient.
But do I still use these tools now?
From my perspective, the ‘shiny object’ quality that AI has had since its widespread appearance is somewhat wearing off, and I find myself using its capabilities less and less frequently.
However, there are still some things that I use it for. I’m taking the time in this article to show you where AI is still applied effectively in my life. I’m also going to go over where I used to use it and stopped doing so, mainly in my creative workflows, justifying myself by explaining what I now do instead.
Let’s get started…
What do I still use AI for?
It’s still a great informational tool that I use regularly when I don’t understand a certain term or concept.
An example is when I was recently revising for my university exams — whenever I came across a term or a theory that I didn’t understand, I prompted AI to give me a brief explanation, which it did brilliantly.
I could also ask AI to explain to me how the information fitted into my current knowledge by including some terms that I already understood in the prompt. That way, the AI’s answer was building upon my current knowledge sustainably.
I’ve always claimed that AI can be used to save time when working on repetitive tasks, and I want to share another use that I still have for AI. At university, I didn’t have to get 100% to pass the first year, merely 40%. This allowed me to make use of AI to generate flashcards that I could revise leading up to the exam.
I simply used the content from the lecture slides and directed reading in order to inform the contents of the flashcards, and I let AI do the rest in terms of summarising and producing formatted flashcards for export.
This way, I was able to cut many hours of work creating flashcards manually, leading to being able to spend more time writing. Which, it turns out, is what I’m using AI for less and less…
What I no longer use AI for, and what I do instead
It’s easy to say ‘don’t use AI to write your work’, and I think that the majority of serious creators on the internet follow this advice. However, until quite recently, I’ve advocated the use of AI in other parts of creative work, such as generating ideas, writing outlines and transforming text.
But no longer. You should learn to use your own skills to create as much as possible, from the outline of your writing to the vocabulary you use to the way you format your writing.
You have experiences and personality, so you should never outsource the means of displaying this to a machine that has neither. It will never be as interesting to listen to as you are.
Using AI to outline my creative work was very attractive to me, and for a while I did this, allowing AI to provide me with very well structured outlines for my articles. However, these outlines were bland, just like AI-generated content is.
The order in which you present the sections in an article is important to consider for things such as audience retention and emphasis on certain points. Again, AI doesn’t understand this as well as you do.
Trust yourself to be able to write a structured and engaging outline. This comes from practice — you should be writing regularly to sharpen your abilities and keep your readers interested in what you have to say.
I’d thought for a long time that using AI to generate ideas is one of most effective ways to use the technology. I’d even written a piece about how to do this in Obsidian, but recently I’ve felt myself turning away from this as well.
Using AI to make generic suggestions for content to write is not an acceptable substitution to having a good idea capturing system in place. After writing for a while, you should find that ideas for content to create come to you relatively regularly and so long as you have a system in place to capture these ideas, they’ll cover the content suggestions every time that you want to write.
I no longer have to spend time sitting down specifically to generate ideas, because I capture them when they arise, meaning that I have a bank of suggestions for content that is growing faster than I can turn them into output.
For this I suggest putting in place means to capture ideas at every point they seem to come up. I have an app on my phone and laptop (Todoist) which is really effective for quick capture digitally. I also have a notebook by my bed, which I use when I’m trying to sleep and don’t want to get distracted by screens.
I have a newsletter issue that you can read here, which goes into detail about the capture systems that I use and reasons behind them.
Within the old article that I published and mentioned here earlier, I suggested using AI to give feedback on your work. This could be one useful use of AI if you don’t know how to proceed with your piece of writing. Use AI to make a suggestion based on what you’ve already written, and you can dig yourself out of the block in your mind.
Having said this, you shouldn’t face this problem often at all, because of the outlines that you’ve been building yourself will contain the structure and main points in the piece to prompt you to keep writing.
Never use AI to rewrite your work — develop your own style and voice that’s going to make you unique and engaging to your readers.
The most that I use when I’m writing is a grammar checker that’s configured to check for spelling and basic grammar errors. I don’t want suggestions as to how I should sound or what words I should use. You should discover this yourself through trial and error.
Think of this — if AI disappeared would you be able to produce the same level of work that you do when using the tools?
If the answers no, you’re too reliant and should look to take responsibility for your writing much more.
I know I’m not perfect, but I’d rather learn how to get better than use artificial intelligence to negate the fact that I’m not as accurate as the work portrays.
This article turned into a bit more of a rant than what I normally create, but it’s not to say you should completely reject AI technology. There are things it’s useful for, but when you’re writing, make sure you include what make you human and different to everyone else. Otherwise your uniqueness will fade and make your writing less interesting.
Thanks for reading!