AI and how I use it to help with my writing
Something about me that I don’t always share publicly is that I have Dyslexia. It specifically affects my ability to write long texts such as emails, documentation, feedback, blogs, cover letters, etc. Bizzarely writing code hasn’t never felt hard so perhaps there is something else. Basically when I have to write a lot I find it incredibly hard to get whats in my mind into the form of text. It’s either full of mistakes (spelling or grammar related) or so involved that I loose interest and procastinate.
Recently though I have discovered that I can leverage tools such as Notion’s AI or Chat GPT. What I end up doing is writting the outline of what I want to convey and then ask the AI to rewrite it. This has been amazing for helping me write large amounts of text. There is some downsides though and that is the output of these tools usually sounds grandiose or pompous so I spend quite a bit of time prompting the AI to either shorten or simplify the words used. I found that the more context you give it such for example “I am writing a email for x from myself a x …” helps it generate text that is more appropiate.
One more thing I’ve found is that the AI needs very little to generate the text to the point that a few bullet points is enough to generate a page of feedback for example. I wrote down all the points I wanted to mention in the feedback and the AI generated a nice feedback email with the correct tone and embellishments.
Now asking the AI to write cover letters has also been eye opening, the amount of information on a company that it is capable of picking up and introducing into the letter is crazy. To the point that even though I had done research on the company prior to writting the cover letter I was learning new things via the generated text.
To conclude, I was quite skeptical about Generative AI but I am now convinced that this is game changing. We just need slightly better tooling. Perhaps Microsoft should bring back Clippy with a GPT-4 backend.