My recent obsession, other than the delightful Fyna Superior Liquorice Co. Dark Chocolate Bullets only sold in Australia (sigh), is AI.
The outcry against the ChatGPT tool, particularly from artists and people interested in the true truth as opposed to common perceptions, makes sense. As a teacher, I especially hate it when my students use AI and present it as their own work—I'm not sure if using machine-generated language counts as plagiarism with a capital P, but I am darn sure it counts as cheating with a capital F.
Yet the technology presents incredible opportunities as well.
Take the recent set of AI-generated video captions I edited last week. As someone who remembers a not-that-long-ago time of hundreds of hours spent manually transcribing pages of text from recorded interviews, the ability to have a generated script to work with immensely simplified the project.
But as I corrected the AI script's "eighty-two" to the actual product name "AT2," I was reminded that such tools are often only as accurate as the living, breathing human working with them. We have to know a little bit about what we are doing, even if all we know is that we don't know something.
What is your writing/editing struggle? Wordiness? Time management? Comma placement? Excessive or barely existent detail? Motivation? Focus? The difference between except and accept? Finding a pen that works?
Whatever it is, don't just struggle with it—make a plan right now to take some actionable steps to improve your skills or knowledge. Then start that plan.
Today.
Even if you do just one small thing to overcome a hurdle or break through a block, do that one small thing.
If you take this seemingly minor challenge seriously, you are at least one millimeter closer to your goal.
That deserves a treat! Maybe a chocolate licorice bullet?
Image: Prompt Genius