richardgeorge.org

We can carry on worrying about AI coming for our jobs, or we can start learning how to use AI to be better at them. Here are 3 ways you can enhance your communications when it comes to the latest AI tools. These tips come with 2 golden rules: always verify the content AI produces, and never share confidential information (about you or your employer) with an AI tool.

1: Improve your writing

Most business writing is bad. That doesn’t mean the people responsible for it are bad, just human and fallible. Short for time and working to deadlines, it can be hard to carve out hours honing content to make it crisp and clear.

ChatGPT or any of the comparable tools out there can help save you hours of editing content by asking it to improve it. Here are a few sample prompts to try out next time you’re writing a byline, long email, blog post or report:

Prompt: Please make this content easier to read. Explain your thinking

Why it works: ChatGPT will identify complex sentences overly-long paragraphs, or duplication, and remove them automatically, often reducing word count significantly. By including the ‘explain your thinking‘ prompt, it’ll tell you how and why it made changes, so you can create an even better first draft next time.

2. Boost your creativity

I once listened a Buzzfeed editor explaining how they came up with such click-worthy headlines. They described the process of writing out 15-20 variations of a headline before finding one that leapt off the screen.

You can create a much faster version of that process by asking ChatGPT to give you variations on headlines that you feed it. You can even ask it to look for opportunities for puns or to include alliteration.

Prompt: Please give me 10 variations of this headline that include the themes of [enter your own themes here]

Why it works: This may not give you the winning headline, but it works like brainstorming with a writing partner and is to open up new ideas you hadn’t thought of before.

3. Video

If you wanted to create video content a year ago, you had to be pretty experienced in using any of the mainstream video editing tools. They often had a disorientating range of features which, for novices like me, made creating any length of video painfully slow and fiddly.

Today, AI is enabling new forms of video production and making it ridiculously easy. There are many out there, and I don’t pretend to know them all, but the best I’ve so far discovered is PlayPlay. There’s a free trial option if you want to try it out. It’s designed with corporate users in mind so the price point is high (around $23k for 3 users, last time I checked).

Check out this quick demo:

What I found really useful is the ability to use its AI features to automatically generate short videos by simply plugging in a URL for a blog post, for example. It then has easy tools for you to tweak the content, change the music, add your own visuals, call-to-action, and so on. It’s hard not to imagine the speed of innovation accelerating and the costs coming down just as fast.

For internal or external comms, the ability to easily add video assets to your product launches, pitch packages, or change communications should be a no-brainer.

What use cases am I missed? What’s worked for you? Please share in the comments.