Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Why Writer.com Approaches Generative AI Writing Differently Than I Do

About two weeks ago, I asked myself the question “How Soon Will I Have to Change My Temperamental Writer Generative AI Suggestions/Rule?“

Perhaps that time has come.

Perhaps not.

What are my temperamental writer generative AI suggestions and rule?

If you haven’t seen my June 5 blog post or my June 13 LinkedIn article on this topic, here is a brief recap of how I use generative AI in my writing:

Designed by Freepik.
  • Suggestion 1: A human should always write the first draft.
  • Suggestion 2: Only feed bits to the generative AI tool.
  • An ironclad rule: Don’t share confidential information with the tool.

This post will focus on the first suggestion, although the ironclad rule will come up in the discussion also.

There are several reasons why I believe that a human should write the first draft, and the generative AI tool should only be used to improve the draft. Two of these reasons (I won’t get into the ego part) are as follows:

  • Iterate on my work to make it better. For me, the process of writing itself lets me tweak the text throughout the written content. In my view this makes the first draft much better, which makes the final version even better still.
  • Control the tone of my writing. One current drawback of generative AI is that, unless properly prompted, it often delivers bland, boring text. Creating and iterating the text myself lets me dictate the tone of voice and eliminates the need to rewrite the whole thing later to change the tone.

However, there is one drawback to my method. It takes a lot longer.

  • If you submit a prompt to a generative AI tool and receive results in a minute, and if you tweak the prompt four times to make it better, you’ll have a complete first draft in five minutes.
  • Using my method, I don’t create a first draft in five minutes. It usually takes me between 60 and 120 minutes (not counting “sleep on it” time) to crank out a first draft the old fashioned way.

Let’s look at a different way to use generative AI in writing.

What is writer.com?

The Content Marketing Institute recently hosted a three-day series of webinars on content marketing called ContentTECH 2023.

From ContentTECH 2023.

One of the sessions, “Generative AI FTW: Must-Have Use Cases and Requirements for Success,” was presented by Alex Wettreich (LinkedIn, Twitter) of Writer, which promotes itself as providing the “AI platform built for the enterprise.”

This isn’t your general-purpose generative AI tool that throws everyone’s prompts into the same data warehouse. This is truly a tool for your enterprise:

Unlike other large language models, Palmyra, our family of LLMs, is built for business….

Ability to self-host: Offered as self-hosted option. Own, host, and customize your own version of our LLM.

From https://writer.com/platform/

Guess what this means? All of my personal concerns about sharing confidential data with a generative AI tool are eliminated. Read Writer’s Terms of Service:

7.1. Ownership.  All data, information, files, or other materials and content that Customer makes available to Company for the purpose of utilizing the Service (including, without limitation, training data, prompt inputs, and drafts) (“Customer Content”) shall remain the sole property of Customer. Customer shall retain all intellectual property rights in the Customer Content. Company does not screen Customer Content, is not responsible for storing or maintaining backups of any Customer Content, and is not responsible for the content of or any use by Customer of the Customer Content.

From https://writer.com/terms/

Now that we’ve talked about the basics of Writer, let’s see how it creates content.

What is writer.com’s generative AI writing process?

With Writer, the generative AI tool writes the first draft.

[W]hat we did at Writer was simple: customers already had their style guides built into Writer — their writing style, terminology, and must-have language. We used that plus samples of customers’ best blog posts, help articles, headlines, email subject lines, ads, and more. Writer can create first drafts that are significantly better than other tools because the content is modeled off your best content and trained on your voice.

From https://writer.com/blog/generative-ai-capabilities/

The training data is important. A marketer who uses Writer is guided along the way.

“Create a unique, consistent, and relatable voice that shines through every communication touch point — at scale. Your marketing team doesn’t have time for the copyediting (or scolding).”

“Keep your editorial guidelines up-to-date and easy to access. From punctuation to capitalization rules to grade level and specific terminology, put all your guidance in one place.”

“Make your core messaging easy to repeat. Keep company voice, terms, and boilerplate consistent, no matter who’s writing.”

From https://writer.com/use-cases/marketing/

But is Writer’s output as bland as the reputed “style” from other generative AI tools? If it is, then you won’t save any time by using Writer, since you’ll have to rewrite everything to fit your tone of voice anyway.

Now I haven’t tested Writer, but Trello has. And it sounds like Trello’s tone of voice has been preserved even when the bots write the content.

From trello.com.

Trello avoids the “professional voice” trap traditional software companies fall into (aka stodgy, robotic tone) by treating the person who reads their content like a coworker….With phrases like “go from Trello zero to Trello hero,” you can see that the writers at Trello had permission and encouragement to have fun while writing help content, and that fun translates to a delightful experience for users….

Leah Ryder told us, “With the 10-year anniversary of Trello around the corner, combined with major developments in-product with the new Views feature, it seemed like the right time to update and align our brand and product towards our shared goal of empowering productivity for teams everywhere.”…

Trello’s brand refresh was 1.5 years in the making, and it took a tremendous amount of strategic leadership, partnered with cross-team collaboration to make it happen. It couldn’t have happened without ten years of defining and committing to rule-breaking brand principles. Over the next decade, there’s no doubt the product will change as it adapts to user needs, but with strong brand principles in place, Trellists can always expect a sense of joy built into everything Trello creates.

From https://writer.com/blog/trello-brand-refresh/

The guidance provided by Writer ensures that Trello continues to sound…Trello-y, even after Trello became a small part of Atlassian.

What does this mean?

So if Writer and Trello are correct in their assertions, it IS possible for a well-designed generative AI tool to create a first draft that does NOT require extensive rewrites. Or, if you control your data warehouse, fact-checking. This preserves the ability to save time, since you don’t have to rewrite bland text or correct inaccurate text.

Of course, you have to buy Writer. As of today, Writer’s price for a team of five or fewer people is $18/user/month. Talk to them if you want a larger offering for your entire enterprise.

The people who review for G2 have identified alternatives to Writer, including some well-known names such as Grammarly, Jasper, and Notion. As time goes on, the major players such as Microsoft will incorporate AI into existing and new products, but whether these tools will allow tone of voice specification and privacy preservation remains to be seen.

Let’s see how long my “human drafts first” suggestion lasts.

Why Your Business Needs an Obsessive Content Marketer

Compulsions and obsessions can be bad things, or they can be good things if channeled correctly.

What if Bredemarket provided me an outlet to chnnel my compulsions and obsessions to help your business grow?

Compulsions and obsessions

I recently wrote a three-post series (first post in the series here) that frequently used the word “compulsion.”

I almost used the word “obsession” in conjunction with the word compulsion, but decided not to make light of a medical condition that truly debilitates some people.

I used the word compulsion to refer to two things about me:

Writing compulsion, or writing obsession. Designed by Freepik.
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bredemarket-identity-firm-services_daon-is-a-frost-radar-leader-for-biometrics-activity-7077377129717379073-JDXW/

While compulsions and obsessions can certainly be bad things, when harnessed properly they can provide good for the world.

Like a butterfly.

Animotion on embracing an obsession

When people of a certain age hear the word “obsession,” they may think of the 1980s song by the band Animotion.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIs5StN8J-0

Unfortunately for us, 90% of the song deals with the negative aspects of a person obsessing over another person. If you pick through the lyrics of the Animotion song “Obsession” and forget about what (or who) the singer is obsessing about, you can find isolated phrases that describe how an obsession can motivate you.

  • “I cannot sleep”
  • “Be still”
  • “I will not accept defeat”

But thankfully, there are more positive ways to embrace an obsession.

Justin Welsh on embracing an obsession

While Justin Welsh’s July 2022 post “TSS #028: Don’t Pick a Niche. Embrace an Obsession” is targeted for solopreneurs, it could just as easily apply to those who work for others. Regardless of your compensation structure, why do you choose to work where you do?

For Welsh, the practice of picking a niche risks commoditization.

They end up looking like, sounding like, and acting like all of their competition. The internet is full of copycats and duplicates.

From https://www.justinwelsh.me/blog/dont-pick-a-niche-embrace-an-obsession

(For example, I’d bet that all of the people who are picking a niche know better than to cite the Animotion song “Obsession” in a blog post promoting their business.)

Perhaps it’s semantics, but in Welsh’s way of thinking, embracing an obsession differs from picking a niche. To describe the power of embracing an obsession, Welsh references a tweet from Daniel Vassalo:

Find something you want to do really badly, and you won’t need any goals, habits, systems, discipline, rewards, or any other mental hacks. When the motivation is intrinsic, those things happen on their own.

From https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1547230105805754369

I trust you can see the difference between picking something you HAVE to do, versus obsessing over something you WANT to do.

What’s in it for you?

Welsh was addressing this post to me and people like me, and his message resonates with me.

But frankly, YOU don’t care about me and about whether I’m motivated. All that you care about is that YOU get YOUR content that you need from me.

So why should you care what Justin Welsh and Daniel Vassllo told me?

The obvious answer is that if you contract with Bredemarket for your marketing and writing services, you’ll get a “pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” person who WANTS to write your stuff, and doesn’t want to turn the writing process over to some two-year-old bot (except for very small little bits).

Regarding the use of two-year-old bots:

“Pry my keyboard,” indeed.

Do you need someone to obsess over YOUR content?

Of course, if you need someone to write YOUR stuff, then I won’t have time to work on a TikTok dance. This is a good thing for me, you, and the world.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, before I write a thing for a Bredemarket client, I make sure that I understand WHY you do what you do, and understand everything else that is relevant to the content that we create.

As I work on the content, you have opportunities to review it and provide your feedback. This ensures that both of us are happy with the final copy.

And that your end users become obsessed with YOU.

So if you need me to create content for you, please contact me.

Feel free to share YOUR favorite 1980s song if you like.

Even if it’s THIS song that your favorite temperamental writer detests.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDgHXiWgKlE

Pilots, Co-Pilots, and Marketing and Writing Services

I’ve always been amused by this bumper sticker saying.

"God is my co-pilot" license plate.
Flickr, david__jones, “God is my co-pilot.” Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

The phrase “God is my co-pilot,” taken from pilot Robert L. Scott Jr.’s World War II autobiography of the same name, superficially appears to depict a fervent religious devotion.

By United States Air Force – https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/105661/brigadier-general-robert-l-scott-jr/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92651184

But look at it again.

Military pilots have a huge reputation for supersized egos. Not that I necessarily have a problem with egos, but this must be recognized. And the phrase above bears it out.

  • Scott is the pilot, in charge of things.
  • God is the co-pilot, subservient to Scott’s every command. Heck, since Scott runs the show, God might as well be a mere passenger.

But this is not only a religious issue.

Who controls artificial intelligence?

If you’re going to employ generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) to create your written work, you need to decide who will be the pilot, and who will be the co-pilot.

  • You could send the prompt off to your favorite generative AI tool and let it shape the words you will communicate to your customers. In this case, the tool is the pilot, and you’re just the co-pilot.
Designed by Freepik.

(The perceptive ones among you have already noted that I treat text and images differently. In the image above, I clearly took the co-pilot’s seat and let Freepik pilot the process. My raving egotism does not extend to my graphic capabilities.)

This concept of AI as a co-pilot rather than a pilot is not just my egotistical opinion.

GitHub Copilot. From https://github.com/features/copilot

When GitHub implemented its generative AI coding solution, it named the solution “GitHub Copilot.” The clear implication is that the human coder is still running the show, while GitHub Copilot is helping out its boss.

But enough about generative AI. Heaven knows I’ve been spouting off about that a lot lately. Let’s turn to another topic I spout off about a lot—how you should work with your content creator to generate your content marketing text.

Who should pilot a content marketing project?

Assume for the moment that your company has decided NOT to entrust its content marketing text to a generative AI tool, and instead has contracted with a human content marketing expert to create the text.

Again, there are two ways to approach the task.

  • The first approach is to yield all control to the expert. You sit back, relax, and tell your content marketing consultant to do whatever they want. They provide the text, and you pay the consultant with no questions asked. The content marketing consultant is the pilot here.
  • The second approach is to retain all control yourself. You tell the content marketing consultant exactly what you want, and exactly what words to say to describe your best-of-breed, game-changing, paradigm-shifting, outcome-optimizing solution. (That last sentence was painful to write, but I did it for you.) The content marketing consultant follows your exact commands and produces the copy with the exact words you want. You are the pilot here.

So which of these two methods is the best way to create content?

As far as I’m concerned, neither of them.

Which is why Bredemarket doesn’t work that way.

Can two people pilot a content marketing project?

By Alex Pereslavtsev – http://www.airliners.net/photo/Transaero-Airlines/Boeing-777-212-ER/1984464/L/, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16594678

Bredemarket’s preferred content creation process is a collaborative one, in which you and I both control the process. While in the end you are the de facto pilot since you control the purse-strings, Bredemarket emphasizes and follows this collaborative approach.

Throughout this collaborative and iterative package we both pilot the process, and we both contribute our unique strengths to produce the final written product.

Are you ready to collaborate?

If you have content marketing needs that Bredemarket can help you achieve, let me know and we’ll talk about how to pilot a content marketing project together.

Repurposing My Generative AI Suggestions/Rules as a LinkedIn Article

I have published a number of articles (as opposed to posts) on LinkedIn.

Until today, I had never published an article under the name of the Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page. (That’s the green one, if you pay attention to the color coding.)

Since I’m re-establishing Bredemarket’s identity/biometrics credentials, I decided to repurpose my previous Bredemarket blog post “The Temperamental Writer’s Two Suggestions and One Rule for Using Generative AI” as a new LinkedIn article.

From https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-ways-i-use-generative-ai-create/

Repurposing is fun, not only because I get to customize the message to a new audience (in this case, specifically to the identity/biometrics crowd rather than the general AI/writing crowd), but also because it gives me a chance to revisit and modify some of the arguments I used or didn’t use in the original post. (For example, I dove into the Samsung AI issue a little more deeply this time around.)

If you want to see my latest take on using generative AI in writing, see the Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn article “Three Ways I Use Generative AI to Create Written Content for Identity/Biometrics (and other) Companies.”

And bear in mind that as AI and customer expectations change, I may have to revise it sooner rather than later.

P.S. If you want Bredemarket to create a LinkedIn article for your profile or company page…

How Soon Will I Have to Change My Temperamental Writer Generative AI Suggestions/Rule?

From https://twitter.com/jebredcal/status/1667597611619192833?s=46&t=ye3fFEJBNKSiV7FWcogPmg

Repurposing from Instagram for wider reach…

I recently published “The Temperamental Writer’s Two Suggestions and One Rule for Using Generative AI.” If you didn’t read it, the three ways I use generative AI are as follows:

  1. (Suggestion) A human should always write the first draft.
  2. (Suggestion) Only feed bits to the generative AI tool.
  3. (Rule) Don’t share confidential information with the tool.

If content consumers expect created content within 5 minutes, will i have to change my suggestions/rule a year from now?

A month from now?

The Temperamental Writer’s Two Suggestions and One Rule for Using Generative AI
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/06/05/the-temperamental-writers-two-suggestions-and-one-rule-for-using-generative-ai/
From https://twitter.com/jebredcal/status/1667597611619192833?s=46&t=ye3fFEJBNKSiV7FWcogPmg

The Non-Temperemental Publisher WIRED’s Rules for Using Generative AI

I recently published “The Temperamental Writer’s Two Suggestions and One Rule for Using Generative AI.” If you didn’t read it, the three ways I use generative AI are as follows:

  1. (Suggestion) A human should always write the first draft.
  2. (Suggestion) Only feed bits to the generative AI tool.
  3. (Rule) Don’t share confidential information with the tool.
Here is how I used generative AI to improve a short passage, or a bit within a blog post. I wrote the text manually, then ran it through a tool, then tweaked the results.

However, I noted in passing that these suggestions and rules may not always apply to my writing. Specifically:

…unless someone such as an employer or a consulting client requires that I do things differently, here are three ways that I use generative AI tools to assist me in my writing.

From https://bredemarket.com/2023/06/05/the-temperamental-writers-two-suggestions-and-one-rule-for-using-generative-ai/

Now that I’ve said my piece on how to use generative AI in writing, I’m researching how others approach the issue. Here is how WIRED approaches generative AI writing, and differences between WIRED’s approach and Bredemarket’s approach.

Why does WIRED need these generative AI rules?

Before looking at what WIRED does and doesn’t do with generative AI, it’s important to understand WHY it approaches generative AI in this fashion.

By Scan of magazine cover., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60369304

As of May 22, 2023, WIRED’s article “How WIRED Will Use Generative AI Tools” opens with the following:

This is WIRED, so we want to be on the front lines of new technology, but also to be ethical and appropriately circumspect.

From https://www.wired.com/about/generative-ai-policy/, as of the May 22, 2023 update.

Note the balance between

  • using cool stuff, and
  • using cool stuff correctly.

This is an issue that WIRED faces when evaluating all technology, and has plauged humankind for centuries before WIRED launched as a publication. Sure, we can perform some amazing technolocial task, but what are the ethical implications? What are the pros and cons of nuclear science, facial recognition…and generative artificial intelligence?

WIRED and text generators

WIRED’s rules regarding use of AI text generators are (as of May 22, 2023) five in number. As you will see, they are stricter than my own.

  1. “We do not publish stories with text generated by AI, except when the fact that it’s AI-generated is the whole point of the story.”
  2. “We do not publish text edited by AI either.” 
  3. “We may try using AI to suggest headlines or text for short social media posts.“
  4. “We may try using AI to generate story ideas.“
  5. “We may experiment with using AI as a research or analytical tool.“

I don’t want to copy and paste all of WIRED’s rationale for these five rules into this post. Go to WIRED’s article to see this rationale.

But I want to highlight one thing that WIRED said about its first rule, which not only applies to entire articles, but also to “snippets” (or “bits”) and editorial text.

[A]n AI tool may inadvertently plagiarize someone else’s words. If a writer uses it to create text for publication without a disclosure, we’ll treat that as tantamount to plagiarism.

From https://www.wired.com/about/generative-ai-policy/

The plagiarism issue is one we need to treat seriously. “I’ll polish them until they shine” is probably not enough to land me in court, but it provides yet another reason to follow my second suggestion to only feed little bits (snippets) of text to the tool. (WIRED won’t even do that.)

WIRED and image generators

WIRED also discusses how it uses and does not use image generators. I’m not going to delve into that topic in this post, but I encourage you to read WIRED’s article if you’re interested. I need to think through the ethics of this myself.

So who’s right?

Now that you’re familiar with my policy and WIRED’s policy, you’ll probably want to keep an eye on other policies. (Sadly, most entities don’t have a policy on generative AI use.)

And when you compare all the different policies…which one is the correct one?

I’ll leave that question for you.

The Temperamental Writer’s Two Suggestions and One Rule for Using Generative AI

Don’t let that smiling face fool you.

Behind that smiling face beats the heart of an opinionated, crotchety, temperamental writer.

With an overinflated ego and pride in my own writing.

So you can imagine…

  • how this temperamental writer would feel if someone came up and said, “Hey, I wrote this for you.”
  • how this temperamental writer would feel if someone came up and said, “Hey, I had ChatGPT write this for you.”
By Mindaugas Danys from Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania – scream and shout, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44907034

Yeah, I’m an opinionated, crotchety, and temperamental writer.

So how do you think that I feel about ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI text writing tools?

Actually, I love them. (Even when they generate “code snippets” instead of text.)

But the secret is in knowing how to use these tools.

Bredemarket’s 2 suggestions and one rule for using generative AI

So unless someone such as an employer or a consulting client requires that I do things differently, here are three ways that I use generative AI tools to assist me in my writing. You may want to consider these yourself.

Bredemarket Suggestion 1: A human should always write the first draft

Yes, it’s quicker to feed a prompt to a bot and get a draft. And maybe with a few iterative prompts you can get a draft in five minutes.

And people will soon expect five-minute responses. I predicted it:

Now I consider myself capable of cranking out a draft relatively quickly, but even my fastest work takes a lot longer than five minutes to write.

“Who cares, John? No one is demanding a five minute turnaround.”

Not yet.

Because it was never possible before (unless you had proposal automation software, but even that couldn’t create NEW text).

What happens to us writers when a five-minute turnaround becomes the norm?

From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbredehoft_generativeai-activity-7065836499702861824-X8PO/

If I create the first draft the old-fashioned way, it obviously takes a lot longer than five minutes…even if I don’t “sleep on it.”

But the entire draft-writing process is also a lot more iterative. As I wrote this post I went back and forth throughout the text, tweaking things. For example, in the first draft alone the the three rules became three suggestions, then two suggestions and one rule. And there were many other tweaks along the way, including the insertion of part of my two-week old LinkedIn post.

It took a lot longer, but I ended up with a much better first draft. And a much better final product.

Bredemarket Suggestion 2: Only feed bits to the generative AI tool

The second rule that I follow is that after I write the first draft, I don’t dump the whole thing into a generative AI tool and request a rewrite of the entire block of text.

Instead I dump little bits and pieces into the tool, perhaps something as short as a sentence or two. I want my key sentences to pop. I’ll use generative AI to polish them until they shine.

The “code snippet” (?) rewrite that created the sentence above, after I made a manual edit to the result.

But always check the results. HubSpot flagged one AI-generated email title as “spammy.”

Bredemarket Rule: Don’t share confidential information with the tool

This one isn’t a suggestion. It’s a rule.

Remember the “Hey, I had ChatGPT write this for you” example that I cited above? That actually happened to me. And I don’t know what the person fed as a prompt to ChatGPT, since I only saw the end result, a block of text that included information that was, at the time, confidential.

OK, not THAT confidential. By July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike_unedited_part1.ogv: US Apache helicopterderivative work: Wnt (talk) – July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike_unedited_part1.ogv, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9970435

Feeding confidential information to a generative AI tool can get you into real trouble.

  • Let’s say that Bredemarket is developing a new writing service, the “Bredemarket 288 Tweet Writing Service.” (I’m not. It’s not economically feasible. But bear with me.)
  • Now this is obviously an extremely valuable trade secret.
  • If someone scouring generative AI data found out about this offering and beat me to the punch, I would lose $45 billion. Or maybe less.

So how should I have a generative AI tool edit text about my new service?

  1. First, don’t use a Bredemarket account to submit the prompt. Even if I follow all the obfuscation steps that I am about to list below, the mere fact that the prompt was associated with a Bredemarket account links Bredemarket to the data.
  2. Second, if the word “Bredemarket” appears in the prompt, change it to something else. Like my standby WidgetCo, or maybe Wildebeest Inc.
  3. Third, obfuscate other parts of the prompt. Perhaps change 288 (a number closely associated with modern-day Twitter) to something else, and maybe change other things also.

To show how this is done, here’s something I just submitted to a well-known generative AI tool.

Convert the following to eye-catching text with 250 or fewer characters: “Wildebeest Inc. is pleased to announce that we are providing a brand new service for you, the Wildebeest 176 YouTube Video Creation Service. This service, priced at $50, allows me to collaborate with you in creating a YouTube video. Before I start work, I ask you a number of questions about your desired video, including where the video will be shown, the features you want to highlight, and the target audience. I prepare seventeen drafts during the process, and you can review each of them. The result is a YouTube video that meets your needs and brings your company a lack of profits.”

So my collaborative service provided…a code snippet!

Code snippet

**Wildebeest 176 YouTube Video Creation Service**

**Get a custom YouTube video for $50**

* Collaborate with a video creator
* 17 drafts for review
* Meet your needs and bring profits

**Sign up today!**

Use code with caution.

Now I can edit the text and insert the real words, adjusting them as needed, without revealing my super-secret project.

Would a temperamental writer really do all of this?

Yes, a temperamental writer would really do all of this.

Despite my (overly?) high opinion of my own written work vs. something a bot would write, in certain circumstances the bot can improve my writing.

And as long as I disclose to a potential Bredemarket client (or an employer) my three suggestions (whoops, two suggestions and one rule) for using generative AI, there should be no ethical or legal problem in using a tool. In a sense it’s like using online grammar correction tools, or a book like a dictionary or thesaurus.

So embrace our bot overlords, but keep your eyes wide open.

By Stanley Kubrick – A Clockwork Orange trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61914139

(If you want to see the earlier draft of this post, click here.)

(Old Draft) The Temperamental Writer’s Three Suggestions for Using Generative AI

(This is the early version of a post. Here’s the final version.)

Don’t let that smiling face fool you.

Behind that smiling face beats the heart of an opinionated, crotchety, temperamental writer.

When you’ve been writing, writing, and writing for…um…many years, you tend to like to write things yourself, especially when you’re being paid to write.

So you can imagine…

  • how this temperamental writer would feel if someone came up and said, “Hey, I wrote this for you.”
  • how this temperamental writer would feel if someone came up and said, “Hey, I had ChatGPT write this for you.”
By Mindaugas Danys from Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania – scream and shout, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44907034

Yeah, I’m temperamental.

So how do you think that I feel about ChatGPT, Bard, and other generative AI text writing tools?

Actually, I love them.

But the secret is in knowing how to use these tools.

Bredemarket’s 3 suggestions for using generative AI

So unless someone such as an employer or a consulting client requires that I do things differently, here are three ways that I use generative AI tools to assist me in my writing. You may want to consider these yourself.

Bredemarket Suggestion 1: A human should always write the first draft

The first rule that I follow is that I always write the first draft. I don’t send a prompt off and let a bot write the first draft for me.

Obviously pride of authorship comes into play. But there’s something else at work also.

When the bot writes draft 1

If I send a prompt to a generative AI application and instruct the application to write something, I can usually write the prompt and get a response back in less than a minute. Even with additional iterations, I can compose the final prompt in five minutes…and the draft is done!

And people will expect five-minute responses. I predicted it:

Now I consider myself capable of cranking out a draft relatively quickly, but even my fastest work takes a lot longer than five minutes to write.

“Who cares, John? No one is demanding a five minute turnaround.”

Not yet.

Because it was never possible before (unless you had proposal automation software, but even that couldn’t create NEW text).

What happens to us writers when a five-minute turnaround becomes the norm?

From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbredehoft_generativeai-activity-7065836499702861824-X8PO/

When I write draft 1

Now what happens when, instead of sending a few iterative prompts to a tool, I create the first draft the old-fashioned way? Well obviously it takes a lot longer than five minutes…even if I don’t “sleep on it.”

But the entire draft-writing process is also a lot more iterative and (sort of) collaborative. For example, take the “Bredemarket Suggestion 1” portion of the post that you’re reading right now.

  • It originally wasn’t “Bredemarket Suggestion 1.” It was “Bredemarket Rule 1,” but then I decided not to be so dictatorial with you, the reader. “Here’s what I do, and you MAY want to do it also.”
  • And I haven’t written this section, or the rest of the post, in a linear fashion. I started writing Suggestion 3 before I started the other 2 suggestions.
  • I’ve been jumping back and forth throughout the entire post, tweaking things here and there.
  • Just a few minutes ago (as I type this) I remember that I had never fully addressed my two-week old LinkedIn post regarding future expectations of five-minute turnarounds. I still haven’t fully addressed it, but I was able to repurpose the content here.

Now imagine that, instead of my doing all of that manually, I tried to feed all of these instructions into a prompt:

Write a blog post about 3 rules for using generative AI, in which the first rule is for a human to write the first draft, the second rule is to only feed small clumps of text to the tool for improvement, and the third rule is to preserve confidentiality. Except don’t call them rules, but instead use a nicer term. And don’t forget to work in the story about the person who wrote something in ChatGPT for me. Oh, and mention how ornery I am, but use three negative adjectives in place of ornery. Oh, and link to the Writing, Writing, Writing subsection of the Who I Am page on the Bredemarket website. And also cite the LinkedIn post I wrote about five minute responses; not sure when I wrote it, but find it!

What would happen if I fed that prompt to a generative AI tool?

You’ll find out at the end of this post.

Bredemarket Suggestion 2: Only feed little bits and pieces to the generative AI tool

The second rule that I follow is that after I write the first draft, I don’t dump the whole thing into a generative AI tool and request a rewrite of the entire block of text.

Instead I dump little bits and pieces into the tool.

  • Such as a paragraph. There are times when I may feed an entire paragraph to a tool, just to look at some alternative ways to say what I want to say.
  • Or a sentence. I want my key sentences to pop. I’ll use generative AI to polish them until they shine.
The “code snippet” (?) rewrite that created the sentence above, after I made a manual edit to the result.
  • Or the title. You can send blog post titles or email titles to generative AI for polishing. (Not my word.) But check them; HubSpot flagged one generated email title as “spammy.”
  • Or a single word. Yes, I know that there are online thesauruses that can take care of this. But you can ask the tool to come up with 10 or 100 suggestions.

Bredemarket Rule 3: Don’t share confidential information with the tool

Actually, this one isn’t a suggestion. It’s a rule.

Remember the “Hey, I had ChatGPT write this for you” example that I cited above? That actually happened to me. And I don’t know what the person fed as a prompt to ChatGPT, since I only saw the end result, a block of text that included information that was, at the time, confidential.

OK, not THAT confidential. By July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike_unedited_part1.ogv: US Apache helicopterderivative work: Wnt (talk) – July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike_unedited_part1.ogv, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9970435

Did my “helper” feed that confidential information to ChatGPT, allowing it to capture that information and store it in its systems?

If someone at Samsung did that, they’d get into real trouble.

Let me share an example.

  • Let’s say that Bredemarket is developing a new writing service, the “Bredemarket 288 Tweet Writing Service.” (I’m not. It’s not economically feasible. But bear with me.)
  • Now this is obviously an extremely valuable trade secret.
  • If someone scouring generative AI data found out about this offering and beat me to the punch, I would lose $45 billion. Or maybe less.

So how should I have a generative AI tool edit text about my new service?

  1. First, don’t use a Bredemarket account to submit the prompt. Even if I follow all the obfuscation steps that I am about to list below, the mere fact that the prompt was associated with a Bredemarket account links Bredemarket to the data.
  2. Second, if the word “Bredemarket” appears in the prompt, change it to something else. Like my standby WidgetCo, or maybe Wildebeest Inc.
  3. Third, obfuscate other parts of the prompt. Perhaps change 288 (a number closely associated with modern-day Twitter) to something else, and maybe change other things also.

To show how this is done, here’s something I just submitted to a well-known generative AI tool.

Convert the following to eye-catching text with 250 or fewer characters: “Wildebeest Inc. is pleased to announce that we are providing a brand new service for you, the Wildebeest 176 YouTube Video Creation Service. This service, priced at $50, allows me to collaborate with you in creating a YouTube video. Before I start work, I ask you a number of questions about your desired video, including where the video will be shown, the features you want to highlight, and the target audience. I prepare seventeen drafts during the process, and you can review each of them. The result is a YouTube video that meets your needs and brings your company a lack of profits.”

So my collaborative service provided…a code snippet!

Code snippet

**Wildebeest 176 YouTube Video Creation Service**

**Get a custom YouTube video for $50**

* Collaborate with a video creator
* 17 drafts for review
* Meet your needs and bring profits

**Sign up today!**

Use code with caution.

Now I can edit the text and insert the real words, adjusting them as needed, without revealing my super-secret project.

Would a temperamental writer really do all of this?

Yes, a temperamental writer would really do all of this.

Despite my (overly?) high opinion of my own written work vs. something a bot would write, in certain circumstances the bot can improve my writing.

And as long as I disclose to a potential Bredemarket client (or an employer) my three suggestions (whoops, two suggestions and one rule) for using generative AI, there should be no ethical or legal problem in using a tool. In a sense it’s like using online grammar correction tools, or a book like a dictionary or thesaurus.

By Elliott & Fry – https://creacionempresamadrid.com/asesoria-gratuita-para-emprendedores-gestoria-para-crear-una-empresa/, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82393914

Just fact-check everything. It’s important.

Roberto Mata sued Avianca airlines for injuries he says he sustained from a serving cart while on the airline in 2019, claiming negligence by an employee. Steven Schwartz, an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman and licensed in New York for over three decades, handled Mata’s representation.

But at least six of the submitted cases by Schwartz as research for a brief “appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” said Judge Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York in an order….

In late April, Avianca’s lawyers from Condon & Forsyth penned a letter to Castel questioning the authenticity of the cases….

Among the purported cases: Varghese v. China South Airlines, Martinez v. Delta Airlines, Shaboon v. EgyptAir, Petersen v. Iran Air, Miller v. United Airlines, and Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, all of which did not appear to exist to either the judge or defense, the filing said.

Schwartz, in an affidavit, said that he had never used ChatGPT as a legal research source prior to this case and, therefore, “was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.” He accepted responsibility for not confirming the chatbot’s sources.

Schwartz is now facing a sanctions hearing on June 8.

From https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/27/business/chat-gpt-avianca-mata-lawyers/index.html

Oops…

Postscript: what if I didn’t follow suggestion 1?

Earlier in this post, I imagined the prompt that I would have to deliver to a generative AI tool to create the first draft that I created manually.

Write a blog post about 3 rules for using generative AI, in which the first rule is for a human to write the first draft, the second rule is to only feed small clumps of text to the tool for improvement, and the third rule is to preserve confidentiality. Except don’t call them rules, but instead use a nicer term. And don’t forget to work in the story about the person who wrote something in ChatGPT for me. Oh, and mention how ornery I am, but use three negative adjectives in place of ornery. Oh, and link to the Writing, Writing, Writing subsection of the Who I Am page on the Bredemarket website. And also cite the LinkedIn post I wrote about five minute responses; not sure when I wrote it, but find it!

Are you wondering what I’m wondering?

So I fed the prompt above into Google Bard. The result begins with the next paragraph. I think my version is more entertaining, but the bot version is admittedly more succinct, if less accurate (especially the “ornery” paragraph). And after a lot of thought, I canned this version of the post entirely and came up with a more succinct, mostly manually-created version instead. You can read it here.

3 Guidelines for Using Generative AI

Generative AI is a powerful tool that can help you write better content, faster. However, it’s important to use it responsibly. Here are 3 guidelines to follow when using generative AI:

  1. Start with a human-written draft. Generative AI is best used to improve existing content, not to create it from scratch. Start by writing a draft of your content, then use generative AI to polish it.
  2. Feed small clumps of text to the tool. Generative AI can be inaccurate if you feed it too much text at once. Instead, feed it small clumps of text, and then review and edit the results.
  3. Prioritize confidentiality. Generative AI can be used to create confidential content. If you are using generative AI to create confidential content, be sure to take steps to protect it.

A Story About ChatGPT

I once had a client who asked me to write a blog post about a new product they were launching. I was really busy at the time, so I decided to use ChatGPT to help me write the post. I gave ChatGPT a brief overview of the product, and it generated a draft of the post in about 10 minutes. The post was well-written and informative, and it saved me a lot of time.

Ornery

I’m not sure if you would call me ornery, but I can be a bit of a perfectionist. I like to make sure that my work is the best it can be, and I’m not afraid to ask for help when I need it.

Writing, Writing, Writing

If you want to learn more about how I use generative AI to write content, check out the Writing, Writing, Writing subsection of my website. I also wrote a LinkedIn post about five minute responses. You can find it here: [link to LinkedIn post]

I hope these guidelines help you use generative AI responsibly.

(Part Three of Three) Why is There So Much STUFF on the Bredemarket Identity LinkedIn Page These Days?

I’ve spent the first two entries in this post series (Part One, Part Two) talking about my compulsion to share identity information to Slack or LinkedIn or other places.

And you’re probably asking a very important question.

So what?

Talking about my compulsion isn’t really a good customer-focused thing to do.

Unless my compulsion benefits you in some say.

And for some of you, it does.

If you are a professional in the identity industry, you want to remain up-to-date on all the goings-on. And there are a number of sources that provide that information. But in many cases, you have to read the entire article.

That’s where my long-established practice of quoting excerpts can help.

Through force of habit, most of my shares to the Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page begin with a relevant excerpt, and sometimes I include an editorial comment based on my 25-plus years in the identity industry. If the excerpt (and/or editorial) interests you, you can click on the link and read the article. If the excerpt/editorial doesn’t interest you, you can skip the article entirely.

From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bredemarket-identity-firm-services_socure-updates-kyc-solution-improves-onboarding-activity-7070061579781734400-oBZd/

This saves you time that you can devote to other tasks.

And now for the CTA

CTA stands for call to action, and my call to action is this.

Would you like to read the identity-related content that I’m starting to post again to the Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page?

It’s really easy to do so.

  1. Log into your LinkedIn account.
  2. Go to the page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/bredemarket-identity-firm-services/.
  3. Click the “Follow” button.
To see my new content, click the “Follow” button at https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/bredemarket-identity-firm-services/

It’s so easy even a wildebeest can do it.

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744

(Well, if they have a wildebeest keyboard.)

(Part Two of Three) Why is There So Much STUFF on the Bredemarket Identity LinkedIn Page These Days?

Part One of this post series talked about my compulsion to write stuff.

Designed by Freepik.

And it also touched upon my compulsion to share stuff. Specifically, articles about identity.

I’ve already told how I’ve created or managed five services over the years to share identity industry information, but I’ve never told any of the behind the scenes story regaridng the creation of the fifth identity information service. This one was created for Incode Technologies, which was (and is) very different from Bredemarket, and very different from IDEMIA, Safran, and Motorola.

Behind the scenes on the fifth identity information service

By the time I joined Incode, I had spent much of my life as an employee working for large bureaucratic multinational companies.

  • I worked for Motorola when there was only one Motorola.
  • MorphoTrak was part of the huge Safran Group (until it wasn’t).
  • IDEMIA was, and is, a combination of dozens of previously independent companies that eventually merged into one big firm.

I was used to process. Motorola WAS process, and Safran and IDEMIA weren’t slouches at process either. You can’t build aircraft parts just by, um, winging it.

But now I found myself at Incode, a rapidly growing startup. It used (and uses) newer tools that didn’t even exist when I worked for Motorola. For example, it used Slack as one of its primary methods to communicate with employees.

As I perused the Slack channels offered at my new employer, a new idea popped into my mind. OK, it was actually a pretty old idea from my perspective, but it would be new to my coworkers.

“Why don’t I create a Slack channel devoted to identity industry information?”

But of course one does not simply create a corporate Slack channel.

Before establishing a Slack channel on a corporate platform, I knew (with the same certainty professed by certain generative AI services) that you obviously need to go through a lengthy approval process. You probably have to get signatures from the corporate headquarters, IT, and probably a few other organizations besides. I mean, I knew this, based upon extensive data that I had acquired up to 2021. (Actually mid-2022, but some of you get the reference.)

So I went to my boss Kevin, told him I wanted to create a Slack channel for identity industry information, and asked him what the official Incode approval process was to create the channel.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMin0i_h8PI

(And you wonder why my younger marketing coworkers said “OK Boomer” to me at times.)

Kevin was a patient boss. I don’t know what was going through his mind when I asked the question, but he simply smiled and said, “Just create it. And if no one uses it in a couple of weeks, just delete it.”

(They didn’t do that in La Défense or Issy-les-Moulineaux or Schaumburg, or even in Reston or Billerica or Alexandria or Tacoma or Anaheim or Irvine.)

So I did simply create the new corporate Slack channel, posting articles of interest to it, and letting my coworkers know about the channel’s existence.

And soon other people started posting to the channel.

And soon people other than myself were inviting other people to the channel.

I didn’t delete it.

So the fifth identity information service took off, and I settled into a routine. On many mornings, I did the one thing that experts say you shouldn’t do. I started my morning by reading my corporate email.

(Despite being a Sage, I’m still a Revolutionary/Rebel/Maverick.)

And as I read my various alerts and emails I’d find articles of interest, identify a brief excerpt that encapsulated the main point of the article, and share the excerpt (occasionally with an editorial comment) and article to the Slack channel.

Compulsively.

Of course, because I was devoting time to the company-only fifth identity information service, the Bredemarket LinkedIn showcase page (the fourth identity information service) wasn’t receiving that much attention. Bredemarket wasn’t doing any identity consulting anyway, so I was spending my limited Bredemarket time pursuing other markets. And pouring my identity compulsion into Incode’s Slack channel.

‘Til Tuesday

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uejh-bHa4To

(Couldn’t resist.)

Then on Tuesday my routine was shattered. For purposes of this post, I’ll simply say that I no longer had access to that fifth identity information service, or to any of Incode’s Slack channels.

But I still had my identity information sharing compulsion.

I was still reading articles (albeit from other sources), and I still had the urge to share them on the Slack channel, but then I remembered that I couldn’t.

That’s when I started hearing the plaintive call of the wildebeest.

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744

My old forgotten friend the wildebeest was soothingly telling me that I could go back to the fourth identity information service and share identity stuff there again.

I hadn’t shared anything to that Bredemarket LinkedIn showcase page in over two weeks. But starting that Tuesday, I started sharing several items a day, successfully redirecting my compulsion and sharing to a new target.

So what? I’ll explain why this whole story is important to YOU in Part Three.