Balancing authenticity and efficiency: my experience using AI in my writing routine

In my latest blog post, I explained my writing process and how I've been using a new approach to enhance my blogging experience. In today's post, I'd like to dive deeper into that process, share my thoughts, and discuss the pros and cons of using AI in blogging.

At the beginning of the year, I set a goal to publish a blog post every week to share my insights, experiences, and ideas. This ambitious target proved to be very challenging for me given my already tight schedule.

After three months, even if I enjoyed the experience, I found it difficult to keep up with this publication rhythm. Each blog post took me around 3-4 hours to write and publish, sometimes more. Over the past few weeks, I have felt like I am spending too much time polishing my English instead of focusing on developing my ideas. This almost made me give up my goal.

I realized that I needed to change something. So, for my previous post (and this one), I decided to experiment with a different approach.

I began the process as usual, jotting down my ideas in Notion. But when it came to writing the actual blog post, I made a significant change: I turned to ChatGPT, an AI language model, to help me with the writing and editing. I fed all my ideas into ChatGPT and asked it to compose a full blog post as if it were me.

After refining the prompt a few times, I received a satisfying result, which I used as the structure for my blog post. At this point, I had mixed feelings about the process. On one hand, I felt like I had discovered a time-saving hack. On the other hand, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was somehow cheating by letting an AI generate my blog post. Was it still personal? Was it still "writing" a blog post? However, neither of these initial impressions turned out to be entirely accurate.

What happened next was quite intriguing. ChatGPT provided an excellent summary of my ideas in 25 lines, but I wanted to dive deeper and elaborate on them further. When I asked the AI to produce a longer and more detailed blog post, it struggled, possibly due to certain limitations (which I was able to overcome for this current post).

So, I decided to expand on the ideas myself, section by section, using ChatGPT to write every part instead of asking it to write the whole blog post. Additionally, I used Notion AI's "Improve Writing" feature to enhance some paragraphs.

Surprisingly, this process led me to refine my blog post more meticulously than ever before, down to the smallest details. The downside? It consumed an entire afternoon!

However, as I spent time refining the post, my initial guilt over using AI to generate the content vanished. The ideas were still mine, and I was in control of the refining process.

So, what have I learned from this experience?

Firstly, I believe that my blog post was of higher quality with ChatGPT's assistance. Although I spent a considerable amount of time on the process, I think it's partly because I was just getting started with ChatGPT. I'm confident that as I become more familiar with the AI, I'll be able to save time in future posts.

Incorporating AI into my writing process has undoubtedly pushed me to refine my content more rigorously. The technology has been an invaluable tool in helping me clarify my ideas and structure my posts more effectively. In the end, it has made my blog posts more coherent and reader-friendly.

Of course, there are concerns about authenticity when using AI-generated content. However, I believe that as long I, as a the author, stay true to my ideas and maintain control over the editing and refining process, the essence of my work will remain genuine.

Going forward, I plan to continue experimenting with ChatGPT and other AI tools in my writing process. I'm excited to see how these technologies can further enhance my blogging journey and make my content even more engaging and valuable to my readers.

This first experience with AI in blogging has been eye-opening and transformative. While it's essential to approach this technology with a degree of caution and mindfulness, it can undoubtedly be a powerful asset in creating high-quality content that resonates with my audience.

Stay tuned for updates on my ongoing journey with AI-assisted blogging. I'll be sure to share my experiences, discoveries, and tips along the way. And as always, I invite you to join the conversation in the comments section below. Have you tried using AI in your writing process? What has your experience been like? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Side note: I wrote and published this post in under two hours. I spent one hour outlining my ideas, five minutes using ChatGPT to generate the post, and fifteen minutes editing the result. The rest of the time was spent creating the illustration, which features a cute little robot, with MidJourney!