I was an early adopter of GenAI and have been experimenting with its various tools since they first became available for consumer use. And I’ve found them to be very helpful for a number of things. In fact, I usually have at least two or three tools open on my desktop that I refer to throughout the day.
GenAI Tools Are Useful, Sometimes…
While I haven’t found them to be useful for actually writing content, I have found them to be very useful for other things, like reviewing and summarizing long documents or reports, answering various questions throughout the day and saving me time I might otherwise have spent in Google searches, generating ideas and outlines, and creating SEO-appropriate content (e.g., email subject lines, SEO titles, page titles, meta descriptions, etc.).
The results aren’t consistent, though, and not always accurate. For example, the SEO content generated by the AI tools I’ve used don’t always adhere to the required word or character limit requirements. Sometimes I’ve sent copy back through over and over again with dismal results. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve not found the tools very useful for actually writing content.
There are a few new uses I’m experimenting with, though, that I think will be very helpful for me.
Experimenting With New GenAI Content Generation Applications
Most of the editors and clients I work with have very little feedback or edits to the content I submit. That’s not always the case, though, and the pendulum swings from the easy-to-work-with editors to the very demanding ones. There are lessons to be learned, though, from the more demanding editors and I’m experimenting with how GenAI can help me synthesize their input in useful ways.
One client I work with has contract editors whose feedback generally comes in the form of stream-of-consciousness rambling that can be tough to plow through to get at the details of what exactly they’d like me to address. So, I give their feedback, and my original draft, to my GenAI tool and ask it to make a list of specific things I need to add/change/respond to. Very helpful!
Using GenAI as a Teaching Tool
Sometimes an editor will send me final copy indicating that they’ve made “several changes.” Trying to go back to my initial draft and compare it to theirs can be time-consuming (even when using the “compare” feature in Word. So, I’ll give my GenAI tool a PDF of my original content and a PDF of the edited content and ask it to make me a list of style/tone and other preferences the editor seems to have that I can use when generating content for future requests.
Then, when writing new drafts, I can give them to the GenAI tool along with the list of preferences and ask it to make a list of areas I should edit before I submit the piece. I haven’t done enough with this yet to know how well it will work, but I’m hopeful!
Using GenAI for Research
I’ve also found GenAI tools to be helpful when looking for case studies, research, examples, etc., on various topics. For a recent blog post, for instance, I asked it to give me a list of successful AI-driven marketing campaigns. Within seconds I had a list I could go through and pick the examples I thought were most relevant for my needs. It would have taken me a lot of time to find those examples on my own.
I’ll continue to experiment with ways I can incorporate GenAI into my workflows. So far, I’m finding that it saves me a lot of time with certain tasks. How about you? Have you found ways to use these tools to make your work processes more efficient or effective?
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Tags: content marketing, GenAI, generative AI, using AI for writing, writing with AI