How are people using AI? Take a peek into the work of an award-winning writer, researcher and storyteller…
It’s been an odd couple of weeks in the Sensible Woman’s life.
I had a minor knee op on August 6, which meant there were several days where I was focused on mundane things: how do these damn crutches work, how many cups of tea can I persuade people in my house to make for me?
All that was happening right around the time I would usually be researching and writing my Sensible Woman’s AI blog post and newsletter.
So I asked Anne Taylor for help. Anne is a former colleague and long-time friend – we’re planning an AI course for writers and editors. And I knew she was busy starting to think about her own newsletter, focused on how real people are actually using AI in their work and lives.
Here is the first of those interviews. There’ll be more to come.
Let’s get to it!
Renee Moodie
AI&Me with Tanya Farber, award-winning writer, researcher and storyteller
Tell us about your work. What kinds of writing do you do – and who do you do it for?
I do three types of writing. The first is my day job where I work on strategic communications and publications for an environmental non-government organisation. The second is true crime writing – I write narrative non-fiction novels with my husband for a British publisher. The third is fiction writing.
When did you first start using AI tools? What prompted you to try them out?
When AI first became a thing, I had an intense aversion to it. I felt like it would sully the very craft I was born to do and was worried it would make all writing homogenous. Then, a work colleague organised a series of workshops, with the theme, ‘How to use AI in your work’. This exposure opened my eyes to its potential as a useful tool (but only if used wisely).
How do you use AI in your work?
For my NGO work, I use it exactly as I was trained: to assist me but never replace me or the cognitive function I use to make my work meaningful. I use it for research, to distill information, to simplify something scientific I am trying to understand, or to break down something I have already written into digestible pieces of content for a lay audience.
For my true crime writing, I use it to help me with timelines or lists. For example, I may prompt the app with something like, ‘Tell me how many times so-and-so committed acts of petty crime before he went on to commit murder. Tell me how many times he was convicted and in what years.’
For my fiction writing, it is absolutely out of bounds. My life and calling would have little meaning if a robot was doing my creative writing for me.
What has been the biggest surprise about using AI? Any examples of tasks where it is most useful?
The biggest surprise is how it acts as a ladder out of the rabbit holes of information. I am prone to going down rabbit holes that turn into labyrinthine warrens. I love information and find myself reading up about things that stray further and further from the original topic. AI can pull me back and help me with the ‘bigger picture’ information, or even the minutiae without the distractions.
What is one AI task you tried that completely flopped? What do you never use AI for? Why not?
This only happened once, but it was very strange. I was researching the victims of a serial killer (grim, I know) and it suddenly got all confused and started mentioning the names of the victims of a previous killer I had written a book about. That made me realise that AI can get things horribly wrong. It also messed up dates in that same sitting. Perhaps it was having a bad night. It can be human like that.
Your favourite AI tool – and why.
I really love Perplexity because it searches excellent sources, names them, and shows its ‘thinking’. That said, I only really use Perplexity and ChatGPT so the competition isn’t very stiff.
Any tips that others may find helpful?
What I love is that AI provides a starting point. One can use it not only for research or content, but ideas. For example, you could write a prompt saying, ‘Suggest five ways in which I could get a broad range of audience to understand the dangers of microplastics – from policy makers to the general population.’ It may provide some excellent ideas and some poor ones, but it gives me a starting point from which to work. I can then revise, brainstorm, refine, and discuss with colleagues…
What advice would you give to a fellow creative who is unsure about trying AI?
See AI as your helper, not your substitute. My advice for writing is different from editing and research. If you prompt it to edit or shorten content in the right context, when it is not unethical, check what it has done. See it as your intern or assistant, not your master.
For research, it’s great. But for writing, it’s a hard no from me. I recently edited a batch of interviews with a group of people who had been placed in different organisations. It was depressing. The previous people all gave such textured answers that gave me a sense of them as individuals. Now that AI has hit the scene, one interview was hardly distinguishable from the next. The dead giveaways? The em dashes, the lists of three, the excessive use of abstract nouns, the cheesiness…
How do you see AI changing the role of editors and writers over the next few years?
It is so difficult to say. This particular tech revolution is exponentially faster than any one before it. But this is my take: when electric lighting first became a possibility, people did not realise that just because you could be awake with the lights on all night didn’t mean you should. It took time to realise that one still needed darkness and sleep.
We’re in that phase: we’re going crazy with it because we can, but we need to refine how we use it. As AI homogenises writing (in the same way that if you overwork your oil paints, you just get one shade of brown) it becomes less useful. Perhaps we’ll eventually get to a point where a premium is placed once more on originality. Again, how I see it for editing and research is very different from how I see it for writing. For the former two, it has its place. For the latter, please just give it a wide berth.
Tanya Farber worked as a journalist for two decades, during which she won four international journalism awards and several local awards for human rights reporting. She now works in strategic communications in the non-profit sector with a focus on making complex ideas accessible. She is the author of five non-fiction books, with two more in progress. She has a masters degree in journalism, two honours degrees (gender studies and applied linguistics), and is a qualified counsellor. She is passionate about narrative non-fiction, human and animal rights, science and the environment. Tanya is currently working on her first fiction novel. Contact her on tanya.farber@gmail.com
Main picture: Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash
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