Oliver Reichenstein shares strategies for using AI to elevate your own writing instead of handing the job entirely to the robots. (This rhymes nicely with the core principle of Sentient Design: amplify judgment and agency instead of replacing it.)
Let’s turn the tables and have ChatGPT prompt us. Tell AI to ask you questions about what you’re writing. Push yourself to express in clear terms what you really want to say. Like this, for example:
I want to write [format] about [topic]. Ask me questions one at a time that force me to explain my idea.
Keep asking until your idea is clear to you.
Reichenstein is CEO and founder of iA, the maker of iA Writer. One of its features helps writers track facts and quotes from external sources. Reichenstein suggests using it to track AI-generated contributions:
What if the ChatGPT generated something useful that I want to keep? Paste it as a note Marked as AI. Use quotes, use markup, and note its origin. … iA Writer greys out text that you marked as AI so you can always discern what is yours and what isn’t.
It’s a good reminder that you can design personal workflows to use technology in ways that serve you best. What do you want AI to do for you? And as a product designer, how might you build this philosophy into your AI-mediated features?
