A Beginner’s Guide to Writing with Generative AI: Your AI Valentine
Are you ready to Augment your Writing Skills with AI Tools?
Here are some Valentine’s Day tips on how to use generative AI, focusing on how to sharpen your writing. If you’ve been hesitating about the technology, you shouldn’t. Get yourself a free license on one of the major platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, or the newcomer DeepSeek), whip up a few prompts, reflect on what you get. For best results, embrace AI to improve your writing process, rather than your writing product.How do generative AI writing tools work?
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a set of technologies that help you generate, organize, and analyze text, images, sounds, video, and more. AI that generates text is really popular because of its broad applications in business and education. I wonder if the popularity also has to do with just how hard it is to become a proficient writer. Having a generative AI tool at your fingertips can make you feel like you have writing superpowers, but you have to learn to use these tools responsibly. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie these tools have been trained on vast datasets, and can generate infinite arrays of texts for you, in a variety of styles and even languages, in response to your random prompts. “Write me a four-line Valentine poem, to a person who wants to become a better writer by using AI”, I ask of Claude, and without hesitation, it replies:In all my drafts, I see your trace, Suggesting words with AI grace. Together we'll craft tales divine— Be my writing Valentine!Not bad!
Best uses of generative AI for writing
I love using ChatGPT or Claude (or sometimes Gemini, conveniently accessible directly within my Google Docs) to get advice on words or phrases. It’s like having a writing buddy available at all times, for any writing task, to check your writing, provide alternative phrasings, and even cheer you on. “What’s a more elegant way to say predictions are all over the place?” I recently asked Claude. Its response:Forecasts vary widely Projections diverge significantly Estimates span a broad spectrum Predictions show considerable varianceFor those of us who live in two languages, Claude is especially good at translation, and in seconds can produce pretty good versions of the previous phrases in Spanish:
Los pronósticos varían ampliamente Las proyecciones divergen significativamente Las estimaciones abarcan un amplio espectro Las predicciones muestran una varianza considerableIt also easily fine-tuned those translations based on my instructions about audience (for scientists, “Los patrones predictivos exhiben una notable heterogeneidad”; for children, “Las ideas sobre qué va a pasar son como un arcoíris – ¡hay de todo!”). You’ll have to read the Spanish version of this post to get at the phrases in English, or, better yet, you can copy and paste those sentences into Google Translate, which uses generative AI to effortlessly take you back and forth between a couple hundred languages. A strength of these tools is their ability to summarize text (Google’s NotebookLM is exceedingly good at providing summaries of your very own collections of sources). I like to ask Claude to summarize a text I’ve written, to see if it captures my intended main message, so I can use its summary to inform my revisions. These tools are great for helping you write executive summaries or draft conclusions for reports. They can also help you come up with titles or section headers for documents (yes, the title and headers in this post were all suggestions by Gemini).
Potential pitfalls of writing with AI
I have had less success using AI to do detailed proofreading of my writing. When I’ve asked an AI tool to find typos or help identify ungrammatical sentences in a text, it sometimes fails to find the typos and often wants me to correct sentences that are just fine. It frequently hallucinates, for instance, finding words to correct that aren’t even in the text. I have also learned never to ask AI to count anything in a text. Here is Claude’s disappointing output when I asked it to rewrite the poem above embedding the letters of the word LOVE as the third letter at the beginning of each line:Written LOVE flows from both mind and screen, The LOVE of words enhanced by machine, My LOVE grows stronger as we combine To LOVE create stories, yours and mineAI can be good at identifying hard-to-read passages and recasting them in simpler language. But AI tools will go too far if you let them, stripping all unique language out of a text, so all that’s left is void of your unique voice. That’s fine for some writing tasks, but not okay for others. AI can help you brainstorm content, but be very careful, especially with topics you don’t know well: all of these tools are prone to fabrications. Tools I’ve used have variously invented people, scholarly sources, literary quotes, historical events, and more.
