Generative AI and Writing
Gen AI writing tools, while promising efficiency, can have significant costs. In addition to well-documented environmental and ethical issues, Gen AI can also have costs for your learning and your career. Consider the following issues before you develop a dependence on it.
Drafting with AI Can Create More Work for You
To use AI effectively, you have to frame and reframe your prompts, evaluate multiple drafts, and then fact-check, rewrite, revise, and edit. In addition, to get usable text, it takes several prompt iterations that require in-depth subject matter and writing knowledge. In many cases, it is less work to create your own first draft.
Drafting with AI Can Create More Work for Your Colleagues
Deciphering workslop takes time and energy. Sending workslop to a coworker tells them that you cared more about your time than theirs.
Developing Your Own Voice Helps You Build Relationships
Professionals use writing to connect to others, build their brand, and network. You need to develop your own voice and create an authentic connection to others.
Drafting and Revising Deepen Your Thinking and Develop Your Ideas
Writing isn’t a static recording of your developed thoughts; writing is part of the process of thinking deeply about a problem, concept, or work of art. This type of deep thinking trains your brain to perform even deeper thinking.
In competitive fields where most people have the same degree, creative thinking and problem solving is how you’ll stand out. If you have Gen AI do your writing for you, you may be losing years of cognitive development that you’ll need later.
Using Accurate Information and Credible Sources Matters
AI tools sound confident even when wrong. Always remember that they aren’t thinking through your question and considering how to answer it. They are offering the most likely answer, which sometimes means the answer that appears most often on Reddit. They are also trained to please their users, which means they avoid telling you they don’t have an answer.
Using AI Can Reinforce Biases
Gen AI tools offer, sometimes subtly and sometimes obviously, all the biases of their training data. To make them better consumer products, AI companies have tried to refine their chatbots’ training, but that also means that their output mirrors their parent company’s agenda and perspective.
Practicing Improves Your Writing
Drafting is a key part of writing and a skill that requires practice. As John Warner noted in The Writer’s Practice, “we get better at writing the same way we get better at anything else: by doing it.” Widespread use of calculators didn’t mean that no one had to learn how multiplication and division work. Being a skilled writer yourself is going to make it easier to use AI assistance effectively in the future.
Writing with Open-source AI Assistance May be Banned or Limited in Your Future Workplaces
Copying and pasting client or proprietary data into a third-party AI tool raises serious security risks. The experience of using an AI tool trained on limited internal data is different from using a tool trained on centuries of text vacuumed from the internet. Becoming too dependent on open-source AI tools for your writing could cause you problems in the future if your workplace restricts or limits their use.
Companies are also reconsidering the value of having employees use chatbots for tasks, once they are paying to real cost of those tools.
Writing in the Workplace Often Serves as Preparation for Further Discussion
If you outsourced a report to AI and your boss has questions about it, it will be awkward if you can’t answer them because you didn’t write something you presented as your own work. Drafting and revising help you develop a deep understanding of a problem or issue, which will be necessary if you’re asked for additional explanation.
Using genAI Ethically & Responsibly
Generative AI is a tool similar to a calculator, where writing tasks are complex word problems. In the same way that you need to think to figure out what operations to input into the calculator, you have to think and draft before developing a prompt for an AI tool. You also need to think carefully before choosing language offered by an AI tool; even with basic grammar suggestions the AI is not always correct.
Check the rules. Never use AI when you’ve been asked not to. Ask instructors, supervisors, and cybersecurity experts.
Be transparent. Acknowledge when and how you used AI; it is unethical to present work you did not create as your own.
Review all AI output. Use AI tools to supplement your writing process, not to do the work for you. Be a critical reader of their output and fact check any claims they make with reliable sources.
Understand the tools you’re using. Research the limitations of these tools; their abilities are changing rapidly, so you’ll have to read up on how they work on an ongoing basis. Strategies for prompt writing, for example, continue to evolve. Our prompt suggestions include designated roles and attitudes for the AI because that seems to give better results; that will likely change.
Using genAI Strategically
The following prompts are designed to get you started; they would need to be tailored to your situation and expanded and refined to give you good results.
If you are researching a new topic, generative AI can help you develop more detailed questions and multiple related search terms, to take your research in directions that you may not have the background to think of yourself. However, an AI tool is NOT the place to find sources or answers to research questions; AI tools hallucinate sources and produce incorrect and/or biased information.
Prompt Suggestions
- You are a helpful research librarian. I want to write about “AI and labor exploitation;” can you, as a research librarian, give me five search terms that would help me find information in popular magazines, newspapers, and trade publications?
- You are a caring instructor of writing and research at a public university. My research question is “what knowledge worker jobs will AI replace?” Can you, as an instructor of writing and research, give me five related research questions?
Copy and paste your draft into an AI tool and ask it to analyze how well you’ve met the needs of different types of audiences.
Prompt Suggestions
- You are an accounting professional with five years of experience. This draft is written for you–am I meeting your needs as an audience? Why or why not?
- This draft is designed to inform an audience with no background in finance about no-load mutual funds. What additional questions might they have and why?
Confused about passive voice or information flow? Ask an AI tool to explain it to you.
Prompt Suggestions
- You are a caring instructor of writing and research at a public university: What is passive voice and can you provide an example and explain why it should be avoided.
- What is information flow and why is it important?
- Where in my draft am I using jargon that might be confusing to a reader outside of my field of accounting? Please explain why.
- Does this sentence have sufficient “you” view? Why or why not? How could this sentence be revised for “you” view?
Ask an AI tool to play the role of an instructor and provide an evaluation of what you’ve written so far. You can ask for general feedback or think about specific areas you’ve received feedback on before.
Prompt Suggestions
- You are a business communication instructor; can you give me five pieces of advice that would improve my writing and explain why they would improve my writing?
- You are a business professional who cares about basing decisions on data and evidence; can you identify claims in this document that need additional support and explain why they need to be backed up with evidence?
- You are a busy professional looking for actionable information on improving your listening skills. Where is the draft too vague to be useful and why?
- You are a caring instructor of writing and research at a public university. What suggestions can you provide to decrease wordiness?
- You’re a busy reader who doesn’t want to waste time trying to figure out what I mean. What suggestions can you give me for making my main ideas easier to understand?
- You are a business professional with 10 years of experience who cares about making a good impression on readers. How would you describe the tone of this writing? Why?
Documenting Your Use of genAI Tools
If you are researching a new topic, generative AI can help you develop more detailed questions and multiple related search terms, to take your research in directions that you may not have the background to think of yourself. However, an AI tool is NOT the place to find sources or answers to research questions; AI tools hallucinate sources and produce incorrect and/or biased information.
Protect yourself from accusations of cheating or using AI in a way that is not allowed by using the following strategies:
- Check with your instructor or supervisor to determine documentation and citation rules.
- Save all versions of your drafts:
- Word: click “save as” and add the current date to the name of your document to keep a record of every change you’ve made. You’ll end up with multiple documents for your project.
- Google Docs: Name and save different versions by clicking “file” and “version history” to keep a record of every change you’ve made.
- Save your entire AI chat record–copy and paste into a Word or Google doc and name it so you can find it later.
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This guide details strategies for effective workplace communication and approaches for research in professional settings.