Of all the ways I use generative AI, this is my favorite: plagiarizing from myself.
You take one piece of content, split it into 20 different things, share it on social, and reuse it.
I’ve been doing that for 20 years. I would have maimed (maybe lightly wounded) someone for the ability to rip apart/pull together different pieces of content in minutes rather than the hours I would spend back then.
If you’ve got a body of work, put it in there. Interrogate it. Ask it questions. What are your common themes? What do you talk about often that you could expand on? What are you missing? What could you write about next?
You’ve already done the thinking and the writing. AI can help you find more uses for that work.
Rip yourself off.
I’ve loaded years of my own writing as background. I have a project for each client, too, with the work I’ve done for that client. That gives the tool material to draw from when I ask it to make something sound like me.
I also use AI as a research assistant. It’s like a magical way to wander down the Dewey Decimal System. You can follow something down a rabbit hole, head off in another direction, and explore. It pulls things together with some context, and I decide which parts I want to use.
I’m working on a research assistant prompt that will let me say, essentially, “Hey, go find some shit.”
Then I can figure out what’s useful.
As an editor, it helps me ask questions beyond whether I’ve put a comma in the right place. Where are people going to get bored? Where am I most likely to lose the audience? Where does my logic break down? What haven’t I talked about that I could have?
Those questions help make what I produce stronger. I still have to decide what to do with the answers.
This posts extends a few thoughts I had in our most recent podcast. Steve Weissman and I get into this in Nattering Nabobs of Information: using AI for research, editing, and ripping yourself off while keeping your own judgment in charge.
Watch our conversation below.
There’s something else to watch for. These tools aren’t perfect (Not. Even. Close.). They WILL make up material and insert it into your work. ALWAYS edit and double-check genAI drafts for accuracy and the right voice. Pay attention or you can end up sounding like everyone else instead of yourself.
You have to be the boss of AI. It can’t be the boss of you.
During our latest Nattering Nabobs of Information conversation, my pod-partner Steve Weissman described catching himself doing exactly that. He was working on a Web page and found himself trying to stay true to the essence of the AI’s draft more than the essence of what he wanted to communicate.
Steve knows information governance backwards and forwards. He talks about it. Writes about it. Does it for clients. He still felt himself getting pulled along.
It’s dangerous.
I keep it in the back of my mind that I’m talking to a server in a rack somewhere. It can give me something confidently wrong. It can give me something that sounds good and still doesn’t say what I mean.
Which brings me to this:
If you can’t write without AI, you can’t write with it either.
You need to understand what you’re trying to say. You need to recognize when something feels wrong and keep working until it feels right. Taste, discernment, whatever word you want to use — you have to know what you want out of it to get good work out of it.
Steve gave me a phrase I like: “Me-generated.”
Writing with GenAI can still feel a little ooky to me, even when it’s working with my words. “Me-generated” helps describe what I’m trying to do. My thinking. My work. My judgment about the final result.
AI is another tool that exists to serve the business. Start with the business outcome you want, then decide whether it can help.
Research. Editing. Finding more uses for work you’ve already done.
There’s plenty of useful work for it.
Just don’t hand over the thinking.
If you’ve got a body of work (or are ready to start creating one) that helps and supports your customers and need help turning it into a useful newsletter, let’s talk about Newsletter in a Box, Bryant@SimplyUsefulMarketing.co.
Plagiarizing yourself is my favourite use of it too. I keep a running journal of what happens at work, and the useful question is which stories I keep coming back to without noticing.