How to Use AI to Enhance Your Writing

Buy the rumor, sell the news

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I’m a pretty good writer, but I don’t have much of a knack for writing catchy, SEO-friendly headlines. See, for example, the headline of this post: How to Use AI to Enhance Your Writing. Its clear and concise, but it’s also anodyne and boring. Which is to say it’s likely not amenable to SEO bots trawling the web for good content.

In other words, it’s not good copywriting, where “good” means “conforms to the expectations of web crawlers and other automated tools.” This is, after all, an algorithm-mediated world in which we live. Just ask the GameStop shorts.

Well, it turns out that there is a tool that can help with this: Copy.ai. A bit of a technology digression: Copy.ai is, as its name would suggest, an AI-powered tool for writing copy. More specifically, it generates suggestions of copy for you to adapt for your own use. It uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 tool. If you’re interested, you can read a thread on YCombinator’s Hacker News about Copy.ai. You can also read about how OpenAI provided Microsoft access to its GPT-3 tool. And, of course there’s a wiki entry.

That digression out of the way, let’s take a look at how Copy.ai can help you write better headlines for your newsletter editions or blog posts. Copy.ai assumes that companies will use their tool for brand-related copywriting. A company has a new product, let’s call it Dave’s Widget, and the user will use “Dave’s Widget” and some kind of blurb as a prompt for Copy.ai to generate copy.

We can adapt this to the use case of a newsletter unaffiliated with any particular brand by entering a subject prompt in the “brand” field and a blurb in the blurb field. And then we can refine it.

To make this a bit more concrete, let’s take the subject of the previous edition of my newsletter, the GameStop short squeeze and the algorithms which created it. The headline I came up with is serviceable but dull: Algorithms, not People, Caused the GameStop Squeeze. So, in the product/brand name field, enter: stock market gamestop. In the “describe your product” field enter short squeeze caused by algorithms.

This is the first iteration of suggestions:

I don’t think any of these are very good. But we can select the best and click the “make more” button to iterate on it. Of the choices above, I think The Problem With Stock Markets Now: How Algorithms are Screwing Things Up…” is the best. So, when I select it, and now we have this:

I still don’t like any of these suggestions, however, I like where the second one is going: Can Algorithms Hurt Investors?… I’m going to edit it a bit and then click Make more. I edited it to Can Algorithms Hurt Investors? How Feedback Loops Create Disaster.

The point I was trying to make in the last edition of this newsletter is that algorithms created feedback loops, which generated the extreme volatility we saw in GameStop trading. With this iteration I get:

Finally, we’re getting some interesting headlines, which get at the crux of the message I want to convey! I’m going to take the first as my prompt, but I’m going to edit it a bit: How the GameStop Short Squeeze was Caused by Algorithms, not Humans. That strikes me as a much better, more SEO-friendly, headline that what I had previously used. To refresh your memory, the headline I used was Algorithms, not People, Caused the GameStop Squeeze.

Hopefully you can see why Copy.ai’s tool, in combination with some human editing, is more powerful than just my brain. And, as you repeat this exercise you will become quicker and more efficient with your writing. Given a good headline as a prompt, you can then dump the headline directly into Substack’s editing tool (as I did here), or paste it into Roam Research or Notion and start building out an outline of what you’re trying to write.