AI won’t do your thinking for you…

I’ve resisted writing an article about AI for quite a long time.

Our feeds are already jam-packed with opinions about it, from predictions that AI will transform absolutely everything to warnings that it’s coming for all of our jobs. I’ve preferred to take a step back from the conversation and just get on with sussing out where it can help me and my clients.

But the fact is, whether you like it or not, AI is here to stay. And I think most of us need to keep up with it to a certain degree if we don’t want to get left behind.

I’m certainly not anti-AI. As a Virtual Assistant, I can’t really afford to be. If somebody else can use technology to complete the same piece of work more efficiently without compromising on quality, then I need to keep up!

What I am wary of is using AI to cut corners, churning out whatever it gives you without question, or assuming it can somehow fix everything for you.

AI is a tool, and I think it should be treated in much the same way as the technological advances that came before it. I’m sure plenty of people were wary of email and the internet when they first appeared. Now, most of us would struggle to run our businesses without them.

So this isn’t an article about moaning about AI or shaming people for using it. It’s about getting the best from it without giving up your brain in the process.

Why use AI in the first place?

For a small business owner who doesn’t have the budget for a team of copywriters, designers or marketers, AI can be incredibly useful.

Perhaps you’re busy, feeling overwhelmed or staring at a blank page wondering how on earth to turn everything in your head into something another person can understand.

This is exactly where an AI can help.

It can give you somewhere to start. It can help organise rough thoughts, suggest a structure, spot gaps or turn a rambling collection of notes into something much more manageable.

That can save a huge amount of time, and using technology to save time isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Business owners have always looked for better tools and more efficient ways of working because their time is precious.

That doesn’t mean copying and pasting everything an AI tool produces and considering the job done.

You still need to question it, edit it, and, most importantly, you still need to add the experience and personality that make the work yours.

How I use AI with my clients

One of the main ways I use AI is to help clients create social posts and longer-form content.

Usually, the client already has the interesting bit - the ideas, experiences and opinions.

What they often don’t have is the time or headspace to turn those thoughts into a content plan, sit down and write an article, and then work out how to get more mileage from it afterwards.

So it usually starts with a conversation. We’ll sit on a video call and talk about what they want to say, while an AI transcription tool captures the discussion in the background. For me, that conversation is the nucleus of the content because that’s where the actual expertise comes from.

I can then take the transcript and work with an LLM to start giving those ideas some shape.

And when I say work with, I really do mean it.

There’s a lot of back and forth. Some suggestions are useful. Others are generic, boring or completely miss the point. So I’ll challenge it, rewrite things, change the order and sometimes I even abandon a suggestion altogether.

Once the structure feels right, I can use prompts I’ve developed to create a first pass of the article, but there is still plenty of human work involved.

Eventually, I’ll get it to the point where I feel I’ve taken it as far as I can and send it back to the client.

That final bit of client input is incredibly important because AI still struggles to completely capture the quirks and nuances of an individual’s voice. It can get surprisingly close, particularly when you give it plenty of context, but there is usually something a human can spot that a machine can’t.

The client feeds back, I make the adjustments, and we end up with a finished article that can then be repurposed into smaller pieces of content.

The client hasn’t had to spend hours staring at a blank Word document. AI and I have done much of the heavy lifting, while the ideas and expertise remain firmly theirs.

Is AI a substitute for human talent?

Absolutely not.

I completely understand why copywriters, designers and other creative professionals are concerned about AI. I would never suggest that using AI is equivalent to the skill and experience of somebody who has spent years becoming very good at what they do.

At the same time, I don’t think a small business owner who just doesn’t have the budget to hire those specialists should be made to feel guilty for using AI to help them.

If you have the budget to employ a brilliant copywriter or designer, I think you absolutely should. The quality of their thinking and output will usually be far superior to what somebody without those skills can produce by prompting an AI tool.

Although I also bet that quite a few of those talented professionals are using AI somewhere in their own process. Perhaps for research, brainstorming, transcription or speeding up repetitive parts of the job.

And why wouldn’t they?

I have a similar relationship with AI and design. My background is in Art & Design, so I still get a slight nervous twitch when somebody suggests asking AI to create a design.

But I also use some of Photoshop’s AI features, and Canva has introduced really cool tools that can save time. I’m protective of the creative process, but I’m curious too. If technology can remove some of the fiddly work and leave me with more time to concentrate on the parts that I enjoy, then I want to know about it!

Keep the human in the process

For me, it all comes back to this.

AI can help you get started, organise your thoughts and save a considerable amount of time. But if you ask it to do everything, give it very little input and publish the first answer it produces, the result is likely to look a lot like the AI slop already filling our feeds.

Good AI-assisted work still needs human thought behind it.

And if you’ve got better things to do than spending an afternoon negotiating with ChatGPT or Claude, this is also where a VA can help.

We can sit in the middle, helping you get the thoughts out of your head, turning them into something useful and getting that work out into the world (with a little assistance from our robot friends).

You still provide the expertise and have the final say. You just don’t have to do all of the work yourself.

And, for full transparency, this article was written with the help of AI (as much as I’d love to have ten spare hours to write every article from scratch, I don’t. And I guess that proves the point!).