Writing books to build your influence is time-consuming. AI can make it more efficient. If your time is money, you could save a lot of money this way. But it’s a foolish way to economize. What it really costs to write your book with AI Let’s game this out. For the purposes of this exercise,…
People: AI doesn’t. That’s why there will always be room for people, and why human writing, even when flawed, is often better.
Charlene Li and Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, just published this week, is a fascinating case study in how authors can use AI to create better books. While Charlene and Katia are more sophisticated with AI than the average author, they didn’t use AI to write prose. They used it…
I write. I edit. I ghostwrite. I also use AI — carefully — to help me with ideation and summarize research content. But I don’t substitute AI for own abilities. Unfortunately for the quality of the text I work on, my clients have made different choices. Here are two examples — an author that used…
AI tools like Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Perplexity generate text intended to mimic human writing. They’re pretty good writers. But they write with telltale signs that they’re not human; you might say they write with an “accent.” Any native speaker can tell when another speaker’s first language doesn’t match the one he’s speaking. If you’re speaking…
Newsletter 41: When you subtract AI from writing, what’s left is creativity; ending garbage books; remembering Daniel Dennett; surprising truths about book sales; plus three people to follow and three books to read. Soon, only creative writers will remain. Huzzah! There are things AI excels at. Summarizing long documents. Finding patterns. Turning formulaic content into…
As I’ve written, the advantage that human writers have over AI is wit. Ergo, if you want to continue to make a career of writing, you must develop your wit. Is that even possible? Yes. I’ll explain. What is wit? Wit is the ability, not just to inform, but to delight readers with your writing….
Gannett’s USA Today runs a product review site called Reviewed. It makes money when you click to buy things. And, at least according to the union talent that writes a lot of the reviews, it recently started filling up with some pretty crappy, possibly AI-generated reviews that they didn’t write. That’s the story from Washington…