How I use AI for my business without sacrificing my creative principles

No to AI-generated content, yes to using AI wisely

This image is 100% non-AI-generated. I made it the old-fashioned way — with clip art (and full copyright permission, thanks to my Canva Pro license).

I have a confession to make: I think AI is kind of cool.*

Wait! Hold your assumptions. I’m not about to advocate that you replace your carefully crafted words and images with AI-generated content. Ugh. No.

I also feel compelled to state that I am not cool with the mass proliferation of crappy AI-generated content by brands who want to save a buck, nor am I willing to blithely dismiss the very real risks and dangers of taking AI too far. We humans, on the whole, are way too good at asking, “Can we?” and really bad at asking, “Should we?” And in the hands of our famously unscrupulous techno-capitalist overlords, AI has the potential to wreak all kinds of havoc.

But in the hands of small, scrappy creatives who are doing their best to navigate a hypercapitalist system and hold onto their values while dealing with limited time, resources, and mental energy? There are times when AI can be pretty darn useful.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with ways that AI — ChatGPT, primarily — can save me time and make life a little easier without compromising my creative principles. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

1. Ask AI to write an article on a topic that’s relevant to your audience. Avoid or subvert the article’s main points.

I actually did this for my recent article about perfectionism. I told ChatGPT to write me an article about why it’s okay to put your work out there even if it isn’t perfect. Here’s the exact prompt I used:

Write me a blog article about how everything you publish online doesn't have to be perfect. Social media compels us to airbrush everything, but things like perfect margins and typos don't matter as much as your message.

How best to describe the result? Imagine that social media “live your best life” posts had a love child with those insufferable user-generated articles that are all over LinkedIn now, then that love child had another love child with every self-help book ever written, put it all in a blender with a dash of hustle culture, and run the ensuing slop through a filter of blandly punchy corporate speak… and that’s pretty much what I got back. It was basically a mishmash of stuff that’s already been written about ad infinitum — because that’s what AI does. It takes whatever content it’s been trained on (in this case, a whole bunch of the same generic advice regurgitated a million different ways) and spits it back out in a neat, five-paragraph article at a fifth-grade reading level.**

This is actually really useful information. AI gave me a specific list of tired tropes about perfectionism that have already been explored to death, so at the very least, I know to avoid those things in my actual article. I now also have the opportunity to subvert those tropes with some counterintuitive observations of my own — which is exactly what I did.

A couple of questions that helped me as I was writing:

• What are the prevailing societal assumptions on this topic (as demonstrated by the crappy AI-generated article)? Where do I disagree, and what do I have to say about that?

• What feels unhelpful about the generic AI-generated advice? What would actually be helpful to someone struggling with this topic?

Caveat: Using AI this way requires a baseline level of expertise with your subject matter. You have to be knowledgeable enough to spot AI’s errors and bullshit, and you need creativity and insight to turn AI’s generic claims into something that’s fresh, interesting, and unexpected.

2. Use AI to help you write alt text.

Alt text is super important for accessibility. Visually impaired people rely on alt text to help them understand the content of an image. Please use alt text!

Alt text is also hard to write (at least for me), and I can spend way too much time obsessing over how to get it just right.

It turns out that AI is really good at writing alt text. I just upload the image to ChatGPT, ask it to write me alt text, and it spits out an excellent draft. I usually tweak it a bit (AI alt text can get wordy and overly interpretive), but here’s a prompt that typically gets me a good result:

Write me short alt text for this image for someone who uses a screenreader and is visually impaired.

That’s what I used to create alt text for this post’s image.

Note: The free version of ChatGPT only lets you upload three images per day.

3. Treat AI as a brainstorming partner.

I love using AI for brainstorming. I think it’s genuinely fun to go back and forth with AI on creative ideas. Because AI can draw from a much larger knowledge base than the one in my brain, it helps me push my own thinking farther than I’d go on my own. If I have a specific idea but need help fleshing it out with different subpoints, AI can help me do that. If I’ve written a new article and want feedback on any gaps in my awareness, AI can offer a variety of critiques.

Fun fact: I used AI just now — literally just now! — to help me with that last sentence. I was going to say that AI can help me avoid “blind spots,” but I try not to use that phrase because it can be considered ableist. I asked AI for an inclusive alternative, and it gave me “gaps in awareness.” Thanks, robots!

Practical ways AI can help you brainstorm:

• Ask AI for a list of 50 article ideas on a single topic. You may not use any of them, but I bet they’ll spark something in your brain.

• Give AI the link to your website, or any marketing content you’ve created, and ask it for feedback from the perspective of your ideal client (if you don’t know who your ideal client is, don’t worry, we’ll cover that in a not-too-distant future post).

• Ask AI to help you workshop an initial idea by asking for variations, new insights, or alternative perspectives. For example, AI could weave in concepts from published research (you can even ask it to cite sources — just be sure to fact check!) or rephrase your idea for different audiences.

• Stuck on a specific word or sentence? Ask AI for 50 different ways to rephrase it.

• Want to really have some fun? Ask AI to adopt a specific persona or style when it gives you answers. You could get a design critique from AI Steve Jobs, have a philosophy dialogue with AI Socrates, or discuss the logic of starting a business with AI Spock.

4. AI can help you do boring stuff faster.

AI is great for boring, routine tasks that don’t require a ton of creativity to complete, and where you have sufficient expertise to double-check the work. For example, ChatGPT can help with all of the following:

• Writing summaries of longer content, surveys, meeting notes, or large data sets

• Auditing your website for broken links, typos, and other issues

• Creating templates to help with task and workflow management, e.g. editorial calendars and to-do lists

• Drafting boilerplate contracts and NDAs

• Summarizing new trends and tools in your industry

• Doing SEO keyword research to help your blog or website appear higher in online search rankings

• Turning meeting notes into a project brief and draft timeline

• Math

Caveat: as always, I recommend treating AI as a starting point for these items (or “vomit draft” as my friend Megan likes to say). You’ll almost certainly still need to revise, refine, and add to the AI version.

AI is not inherently evil, but we must use it wisely.

Ethan Mollick of One Useful Thing has one of the best articles I’ve seen on when to use AI and when not to. He concludes that using AI skillfully requires both technical knowledge and wisdom. He writes (bolds mine):

Knowing when to use AI turns out to be a form of wisdom, not just technical knowledge. Like most wisdom, it's somewhat paradoxical: AI is often most useful where we're already expert enough to spot its mistakes, yet least helpful in the deep work that made us experts in the first place. It works best for tasks we could do ourselves but shouldn't waste time on, yet can actively harm our learning when we use it to skip necessary struggles. And perhaps most importantly, wisdom means knowing that these patterns will keep shifting as AI capabilities evolve, and as more research comes in, requiring us to keep questioning our assumptions about where it helps and where it hinders.

Have I persuaded you to dabble with ChatGPT? You can create a free account and start asking questions right away, but if you want to go deeper, you can click “Explore GPTs” in the sidebar and really go down the rabbit hole:

And if you still cringe at the thought of using any AI, that’s okay, too. As always, feel free to take what works and leave the rest.

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*Here’s where I acknowledge that AI is an extremely broad category, and for the purposes of this article, I am mostly referring to ChatGPT and similar LLMs.

**AI can actually do way more than that if you want to get really sophisticated with it, but for your average user, it generally defaults to that sort of style.