The first era of humankind was the land era. We fought over it, we travelled it, and we secured it as our own. Then came the time war, where television, theatres, and gyms competed for our attention.
This was followed by the attention era, with the rise of social media and applications that take us away from our families to stare at a little light box. Thankfully, we are now entering the perspective era, where we will carefully refine and curate what we consume and use.
This is precisely why, with the rise of AI, it is important to use it but not lose ourselves to it.
Think of the skills we have lost due to technological advancements. Our grandmothers could wash clothes by hand; few of us could now. If we allow AI to write every email for us, every sentence, we will lose those essential skills.
That is not to say AI is inherently bad. There are practical ways to use it that progress your writing without losing your spark.
How I Use AI
Unlike many people, I do not use ChatGPT; for me, Google Gemini is the better platform.
The majority of my AI use is in my teaching career rather than my writing. Now, I can bullet-point everything I want to teach in an hour and have it produce a brilliantly formatted lesson plan.
In addition, it can produce the diagrams, worksheets, and everything else I need for the lesson in a couple of minutes, something that would typically take me an hour or more. I can now concentrate on my teaching and let AI take care of the paperwork.
Within my writing life, there are fewer uses for it. I spoke last week about the concerns I have over it being my research partner, although I still ask it to compile a list of websites I can research from.
Once the article is written, AI becomes my editor. As with any of these platforms, I take everything with a pinch of salt and make my own decision. It is, however, brilliant at picking up typos, spelling, and grammar issues.
I then ask it to produce an image, giving it clear instructions as to what I would like included. This is a key benefit of Gemini: the image quality is so much higher. In my experience, ChatGPT does not seem to be able to follow basic instructions such as ‘do not include writing in the image.’
Finally, an area I believe Gemini excels in, I ask it to produce an SEO-optimised title and description to put into the metadata on Substack. Since I have used it for this, I have noticed that my read links include Google, whereas they never did before.
AI is meant to be a tool; it must not take over our writing and thinking processes. Saving time should be the primary goal of your AI use.
When writing my last book, Deadly and Feminine, I had many article links scattered throughout many pages. I put all of this into AI and asked it to remove the links from the whole book and create a bibliography. It took one minute. That is how AI should work for us, as that task would have taken me hours.
If you would like to read Deadly and Feminine, looking at the wonderful bibliography, you can download it as a paid subscriber to Murder Mayhem UK. This month, in celebration of Halloween, you can get a whole year’s subscription for only £1.50.
So, if you want to read a vast catalogue of crime articles, support my writing, and download five true crime books to read at your leisure, then click the link below.
Until next Saturday: Find the time, find the words, find the way.
The future of AI is not about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting human capabilities. — Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
