AI Content Challenge Reflections

I’m two weeks into my 30-day AI content challenge, and it’s harder than I thought. Most people have dropped out at this point.

My big takeaway so far is that while AI can produce content, the quality really depends on the inputs. If you rely on it for information then you’re going to produce garbage. When you give it claims, evidence, and research to work with then it can create some great content. It’s a reasoning engine, not a knowledge database.

The most effective method I’ve used so far is to get AI to create an outline and write a first draft. Then I review each section for its main point, the supporting evidence, and the takeaway. I’m usually unhappy with each of these; So I update with a better evidence, a more complelling main point and a clearer takeaway. Then I ask AI to rewrite the section with new information.

As a result, reading takes up most of my time when creating AI-generated content—about four or five hours per post. This has left me little time for promoting posts on social media and building backlinks, which was one main goals of this challenge.

One question I have is whether AI help me learn more efficiently? I knwo that I can use it to extract relevant information from articles but that’s doesn’t necessarily speed my synthesis of ideas. It’s like watching a movie on fast forward to understand the plot. I’d like to understand how AI can help me consume better information, as opposed to just creating it.

Now, with only half the challenge left, I think I should shift focus towards using AI to repurposing great content instead of creating it? Given that AI hasn’t been able to help me produce great content any faster than I would otherwise so far, I believe that a better use of time might be finding top ideas/posts/people in artificial creativity space and then using AI to summarizing their thoughts. If I can figure out how to do this well by teh end of this challenge then I believe this will have been time well spent.