Category: Writing
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AI and judgement: Cultivating taste in an age of capability
Content creation is trivially easy now. Curation—selecting what to make—is also becoming easier as AI learns your patterns. What remains is taste: evaluative judgement about what should exist in the first place. AI can be descriptive but not evaluative. It can learn your preferences but cannot judge whether they’re worth amplifying. That’s your responsibility.
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[Link] Reflections on the proliferation, use and misuse of (generative) AI
Cheating is a social problem. We should not be trying to use technology to solve a social problem.
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Revising AI-generated text leads to better outputs
The real advantage for knowledge workers using AI comes from using it as a writing partner – or more accurately – a thinking partner. And this is the value of working with AI; it can help get us out of our own heads.
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Writing with AI isn’t a binary proposition
We need to start developing a sense of taste for when to lean heavily on AI for content generation, and when we want to engage with it on a spectrum with either more, or less, AI-generated input.
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The buttonification of writing
When you introduce a feature that makes it simple to use AI to generate writing, everyone is going to use the feature.
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AI-supported writing is a validity issue, not a morality issue
Moving beyond debates about ethics and style, this post reframes AI writing in academia as a validity issue. When students use AI for writing, the key question becomes whether we can still make valid assessments of their skills and understanding. This practical framework helps educators determine where AI support helps or hinders educational goals.
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AI-supported writing and confusing style with purpose
Moving beyond debates about AI writing’s “human element,” this post explores how writing purpose should guide AI usage. From technical documentation to personal reflections, understanding the intended purpose of writing helps determine when AI support is appropriate. The post introduces a practical suggestion for evaluating AI writing through purpose rather than style.
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AI-supported writing can be whatever you want it to be
I wanted to challenge the idea that AI-generated writing is inherently sterile, so argued that the quality of AI writing largely depends on how we interact with it. Through better prompts, iterative feedback, and personal editing, writers can create AI-supported content that maintains human qualities while leveraging generative AI’s capabilities.
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Writing with AI isn’t about eliminating the tedious and mundane
Engaging in the cognitively difficult, time-consuming, critical thinking parts of writing, supported by genAI as a thinking partner, may help to produce higher quality pieces, as opposed to seeing it simply as a way to produce more content.
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Zettlr is an open-source writing platform for academics
I’ve always been fascinated with the tools people use to write (I should write a follow-up to that post), and over the last couple of years that interest has been focused on what I think of as . Your one-stop publication workbench. From idea to publication in one app: Zettlr accompanies you while writing your…
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Building custom GPTs to provide feedback on samples of writing
Introduction “Our results show that i) ChatGPT is capable of generating more detailed feedback that fluently and coherently summarizes students’ performance than human instructors; ii) ChatGPT achieved high agreement with the instructor when assessing the topic of students’ assignments; and iii) ChatGPT could provide feedback on the process of students completing the task, which benefits…
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Lex: An AI-supported writing app
I’ve used the Lex writing app a few times for putting together a draft of longer pieces, when I would previously have gone to Google Docs. I like the experience and the interface, and have always enjoyed the experience. They’ve just put out an update to the product, called Checks. Checks will basically review your…
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Claude, help me convert a process into a narrative
Recently I needed to provide a description of a process that we’re going to implement for an upcoming conference, but the process we’d developed in our meetings was written as a list i.e. short, incomplete sentences in bullet point format. We wanted to submit a narrative description so I took that outline and gave it…
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Scaling output with no additional input
One of the ideas that makes generative AI so powerful is that it takes me exactly the same amount of time to create a 250-word summary, or a 1000-word summary of a document. For example, if I want to share an overview of a report I’ve written, or a lecture or presentation I’ve given, the…
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Claude, help me to write
Yesterday I published a post describing my concerns with how universities are responding to the new paradigm of expertise-on-demand that’s facilitated by generative AI. At the end of that post I noted that I wrote it collaboratively with Claude, and this post describes what that process (kind-of) looked like. I also want to be clear…
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A trilogy of posts on using AI for academic articles
Earlier today I published a short series of posts on some ideas I had for using language models (e.g. ChatGPT and Claude) to help support academic writing. I didn’t plan to write a series of posts. I initially had the idea to test Claude’s capability as a peer reviewer, and as I was finishing up…
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Claude, help me draft the outline of my academic paper
My last 2 posts have dealt with 1) the use of Claude to complete a peer review, and 2) how journals could include this process in their workflow. It follows that authors should be using LLMs as well. There are the obvious use cases; rephrasing passages, summarising, expanding, correcting, and so on. However, I think…
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Journals should be experimenting with LLMs in their editorial workflow
I recently wrote a post about using Claude to peer review an academic paper, and the decent job it did. Based on that experience, I started thinking about the probable impact on journal editorial workflows, a significant part of which is the peer review process. If I was still on an editorial board of a…
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Prompts you can use to train ChatGPT to write in your style
This article describes 5 steps you can take to train ChatGPT to write in your style. Full disclosure; I haven’t tried it but given my previous experiences with ChatGPT, it seems plausible. As I said, I haven’t tried this but it seems like the kind of thing that’s possible. Having said that, I don’t see…