# How to Approach Content Generation

As I mention in my blog intro, I am a PhD student, and the end goal of this road that I’m on for the next few years is to write a lot of words and, if I’m lucky, even publish some of them in a space outside of this one! Oh, and science of course, let’s not forget about that. But, as the current world of research and progress stands, you need to be able to share the science you find out with others and make sure that they can understand your own brilliance (and especially point out any lack thereof). This magnificent process is encapsulated in the glorious field of writing.

Now, in the last year or so we have seen an explosion in non-human writing, particularly from AI models that can generate content that reads as if a human had written it. These models have been used to generate all kinds of literature, from song lyrics to explanations of complex mathematical concepts. One of the first concerns to catch the public’s attention, however, was that people could use AI to write up something like an essay for class, or any response to a writing need they have (often to really sad effect…).

But why do we feel this concern about a robot writing what a human should? Why not let AI handle our writing assignments? My own writing can be hot garbage at times, and I don’t know that I could trust myself to a lot of different writing environments. A large language model like ChatGPT, on the other hand, can so masterfully keep an eye on things like coherence, clarity, paragraph length, and so much more. Why not let it do my homework so I can spend more time on YouTube or whatever my distraction-of-choice might be?

Well, plain and simple, because we can’t. We need to keep the skill of writing alive as a society. It’s one of the greatest milestones of an ancient civilization’s development, the fact that they could write a message that someone could later come along and read. The ability to think is an extraordinary thing, a gift, even, depending on how you might interpret it. The ability to write? To communicate? What more could these be than a chance for us to return that gift of thought back to this crazy world? Oh, sure, you can argue that our writing hath gone down the hill since the great dayes or yore, in a manner of speaking. Slang and abbreviations echo throughout modern discourse, especially in cyberspace. Nevertheless, the opportunity to write and add to this world is one that can’t be taken for granted.

As for me, I want to be a better writer. I want to be able to get excited about something, yell it out into the internet, and hopefully get someone else excited about it, too. I want to add to the great literary works that people use to shape their hobbies, their interests, even their very lives. So, when you stop and think about it, it makes sense to learn to be better at writing. It makes sense to master this for myself, rather than leave it for an AI to do all the world’s writing from now on.

# Practice Makes Permanent

If I might brag for a moment on a somewhat unrelated topic, I have successfully maintained a language learning habit on Duolingo for over a year now, and I’m still going strong. That is something that takes dedication, willingness, and keeping your eyes on the prize.

It can also only take five minutes a day.

Now, I won’t pretend to be fluent in Czech (I’m just barely getting to the infinitives), but I can say that I speak it better than I did a year ago. And I can say that I feel more confident about it, and especially my ability to learn it.

Why is this learning model effective? Oh, I don’t mean that someone could reach linguistic perfection by using Duolingo, but it is pretty dang good at finding ways to keep people involved. Daily reminders, not to mention streak freezes to allow forgiveness on the days that you “just can’t,” serve to make streaks attainable. As a result, I get to look back now on over three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of willingness to keep up with something.

Why can’t writing be like that? Think about it, it doesn’t take a lot to practice your writing each day. If you are in between major publications, just write out a paragraph of something you work on, whether you would publish it or not. Start and keep a streak with this. See how long you can go, maybe even a year of continuous writing practice.

Of course, it doesn’t help to just write a paragraph and leave it out there. Duolingo coaches you, giving you new tasks to work out and error correction along the way. It tests you using different mediums, settings, and message lengths. It tries to give you a dynamic, holistic approach to learning a language. Writing in general can be just as nuanced and tricky to master as any language. So, however you intend to practice your writing, you may want someone to read through what you write and help you overcome your mistakes and refine your skills.

Now, there could be a lot of people that you might turn to for this, be they coworkers, family members, partners, etc. And indeed, please keep other humans in the loop as you are trying to refine projects and practice explaining to someone who reads like a human does - slightly inefficiently, potentially too-critical, and with limited memory of what you explained five paragraphs ago. Anything you publish will have that exact type of audience, and getting human feedback can be essential.

But when it comes to a five-minute writing goal that you are trying to sustain daily, does your also-human editor have the time and focus to make sure to edit your writing practice every day?

If only there was someone—or something—who had the patience and capacity to edit your work regularly, who could so masterfully keep an eye on things like coherence, clarity, paragraph length, and so much more…

# Enter the Bot

Well, in case you were wondering, I eventually managed to connect the dots for myself and start using ChatGPT as my personal writing coach.

When I started working with ChatGPT in this way, it was a bit bumpy. I spent the first few back-and-forth message prompts trying to help it understand my needs and my situation as a writer. I explained that I was a graduate student and that my goal was to practice writing and get feedback on a regular basis, Duolingo-style. Where I immediately ran into issues was that ChatGPT doesn’t keep streaks; it actually doesn’t record any information about the time or date you are interacting with it, opting instead to keep conversations stateless. Well, this is great for privacy, but it made this process a step trickier. Thankfully, I was able to track down Habits (also its Android app, Loop Habit Tracker), and every time I perform my writing practice, I can record it on the app. This lets me still get that streak function I really appreciate from Duolingo with ChatGPT’s limited state functionality.

After building my setup, there was still some fine-tuning to do. I suppose ChatGPT must like talking about itself, because the first few prompts I got all focused on how AI was changing technology and such. After a few days, when prompted to write a paragraph about “the role of artificial intelligence in modern engineering,” I had to firmly sit the bot down and explain that my expertise as a computer engineer lies more with hardware, networking, and systems design. Dutifully, the AI adjusted, and it cheerfully revised the question, asking me to write about “the role of advanced technologies, including but not limited to artificial intelligence, in modern computer engineering.”

Baby steps, right?

Narcissistic tendencies aside, I’m rather impressed with how ChatGPT has handled the exercises. If I tell it that it has gotten stuck in a pattern of asking me for 3-5 sentence paragraphs, it will happily suggest I practice longer pieces, emails, and bug reports. If I don’t like a prompt on a given day, it will happily change either the format or the topic of the conversation.

The feedback I get is also clear and concise. ChatGPT will grade me on clarity and conciseness (which I requested early on) and give me actionable feedback on where I could be improving. Typically I may just get the former, so I guess I ought to sit it down again and have a conversation about people pleasing, but overall I have been happy with corrections it offers and the associated adjustments I can make in my writing.

# A Helpful Step Up

When I started using ChatGPT as an editor, I was genuinely struggling to make writing an important part of my regular workflow. Over the next fwe months, though, I found myself having a lot more ease thinking about writing and seriously considering some deadlines that I had coming up. Just this month, I submitted a paper on my work in vehicular networking to an IEEE conference, and I have been able to sit down and focus on other writing projects, such as blog articles (et voila, I have finally published this one!).

I’m still a ways off from completing a year-long streak (tbh I think I reset it to 0 this last week 🙃), but even in the last few months I have grown as a writer, and ChatGPT was able to give me a helpful step up.