How ChatGPT and other AI tools are a boon to writers, designers and editors

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT and various other AI tools. Suddenly everyone is a thought leader in AI, and every company allocates the majority of its budget to develop its capabilities using AI. NVIDIA has suddenly grown by leaps and bounds due to the need for infrastructure to power AI.

ChatGPT relies on the content present throughout the internet until 2022. However, it can catch up with the latest changes, trends, and news by using a search engine. This helps us conclude that evergreen content (content that doesn’t keep constantly changing every year) is like gold for AI tools.

Before we start, let’s classify content and writing.

While content generally refers to text, it can also refer to multimedia — image, audio, or video. The output of any file is like a recipe made up of these ingredients, which is what our eyes and ears can process. The days of SMS were the era of text. Images/gifs, short videos, and podcasts have become popular. Because of its multimedia capabilities, WhatsApp has become a primary communication medium that has replaced SMS.

Content creators now refer to people who create content for their followers on social media. Videos have almost become synonymous with content creators, thanks to YouTube and Instagram. The average attention span of people has come down, which means every influencer, brand, or person is vying for attention on social media. Today’s world needs instant gratification, and the UX of social media apps is such that everyone will keep scrolling on and on!

Classifying writers

1. Content writers primarily write for social media, blogs, and graphic designs.
2. Copywriters write for marketing collateral, ads, and websites.
3. Technical writers write documentation and UI/UX copy for products.
4. UX writers primarily focus on UI/UX copy for products.
5. Scriptwriters create scripts for videos and movies.

An overview of different roles

• Content writers and Copywriters help market various products and services to obtain new customers and clients, maintain the buzz, and create awareness.
• Technical writers and UX writers aim to help retain existing customers and clients. They help improve adoption.
• Scriptwriters focus on storytelling to create scripts for marketing videos, explainer videos, short films or feature films.
• Content writers are a subset of Content marketers. Sometimes the functions of Content writers, Copywriters and Content marketers overlap.
• UX writers are a subset of Technical writers.
• Designers either do graphic design or product design.
• Editors create and edit images and videos.

Now let’s come to AI and understand what today’s AI can achieve.

Today’s AI can generate any form of content — text, image, audio and video! Open AI’s GPT-4o powers text generation in ChatGPT, whereas a modified version of GPT-3 powers its image generation tool DALL·E 3. DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from input text. This model is trained on a dataset of text-image pairs.

Generative AI usually uses the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) framework, which is based on deep learning and neural networks.

GAN models can help create deep fake videos that manipulate real people, which goes against AI's ethical and legal use. This generated content can get people into trouble if nobody checks it. For example, there was an instance of a lawyer getting dismissed for a cooked-up case being quoted in the AI text.

AI is a threat if misused, and AI can’t act as an unsupervised replacement. AI tools are meant to increase efficiency, cut down on mundane work, and improve productivity.

Let’s now take a look at how AI can help writers, designers and editors:

Content Writers and Copywriters

AI can be used to create outline, enhance content, suggest topics, research and create various forms of marketing content including content for websites, blogs, social media, ads, ebooks, posters, videos and podcasts.

You can make an AI tool follow brand guidelines, keyword density, and SEO as needed. It’s essential to edit all content and add the human touch and the writer’s perspectives.

Image generation tools help in including cover image, descriptive images etc.

Content writers can also aid in prompt engineering.

Technical writers & UX writers

AI tools can be fed with data about products(product specification doc, PRD, roadmap, features) using which different technical content can be created — documentation including knowledge base articles, how-to guides, FAQs, solutions and troubleshooting. UX content can be easily created or enhanced based on the description.

You can also create style guides or make content adhere to them.

One interesting use of AI is creating video scripts to guide users.

Existing content can also be refined. Complex content can be simplified.

Scriptwriters

Scriptwriters usually work on long videos, short films or movies. AI tools can help create or enhance script for short films, feature films or OTT series.

The creativity aspect lies on the scriptwriter across langauges — something which AI can’t be blindly dependent on.

Dialgoues and screenplay need human touch — a machine can’t visualise a director’s imagination.

Graphic designers and Editors

Adobe tools have implemented AI, so has Canva which democratized designing.

With plethora of AI tools, editing and optimising images and videos will be much easier.

One important aspect here is image generation — with the right prompt you can easily generate an image by describing the visuals.

Open AI Sora will open up the world such that anyone can easily generate videos.

Then there are also tools that can create videos from images by generating the movement of people or objects.

Product Designers

Creating mockups and wireframes is made much more easier with the help of AI assistance.

With Figma implementing AI features, translating a product vision to design will now consume lesser time, enabling more focus on core product aspects rather than design.

With that we can conclude that it’s certainly an exciting future ahead! As tools are becoming smarter we humans need to catch up and make the best use of them.