Back-to-School Night: The Question of AI
The question of AI dominated back-to-school night this year. And for good reason: teachers seemed just as clueless about AI’s impact on learning as the parents asking questions. In my son’s English classroom where the teacher laid out the expectations for the year and highlighted the twenty-page term paper that would be due later in the spring, the potential impact of AI naturally came up. How will she monitor, guide, and police the students’ use of AI in crafting their original works? “We’re still trying to figure it out,” was the teacher’s response. In fact, “we’re still trying to figure it out” was the prevailing theme across all my son’s classes when it came to the subject of AI.
The irony is that we’re all quickly trying to get up to speed on AI’s influence—both positive and negative—just as the technology itself is rapidly evolving and changing every second. By the time my son sits down to write that term paper later in the academic year, AI will have vastly improved to the point it could be incredibly challenging if not impossible to know how much he relied on it. I love that some schools are bringing back blue books for tests. But when there’s a long-form assignment such as writing a research paper over the course of weeks, trust becomes a factor in knowing how that finished product got done. When I work with authors and they send me content, I ask about their use of AI. By some estimates nearly half of authors use AI in their creative process, from the initial research and outlining to marketing their publication. While AI can be great for gathering ideas, data, and raw material, I cringe at the thought of an author relying too much on AI for “original” writing. And I wince at the reality now that entire books can be generated by the technology, which can increasingly outsmart AI-detection tools.
I haven’t written much about AI yet, but I think it’s time we got into it. This article will be one in a series as we begin to cover wide territory, starting with a simple directive: get to know AI if you haven’t already—even if you’re scared of it. Like the invention of the wheel 5,500 years ago to the smartphone in our lifetime, AI is here to stay and will revolutionize our lives. Video did not kill the radio star, and AI will not kill the bestselling authors.
Choose two or three different AI tools and play with the free versions of the programs using prompts you might normally submit to Google or some other search engine. The ones I have bookmarked are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. I find it fascinating to input the same prompts into all three and see what each one returns. Claude seems to be the current favorite for writers specifically. You can use AI for specific tasks such as:
generating title ideas and chapter heads
identifying topics relevant for your writing
gathering studies to support your claims
helping create structured outlines and organizing the flow of chapters
refining grammar and style
crafting a rough draft of copy for your back cover
nailing your audience and building novel pitches for potential book buyers
That last bullet is a tip I recently received from an AI webinar hosted by the Author’s Guild. Here’s how that works: Upload your finished manuscript to an AI program and ask it to name target audiences for the book. This might give you fresh ideas about who could be interested in your book that you might not have previously thought about. Then ask the AI program to write a pitch for you targeting that audience. Brilliant! Of course you’ll want to avoid relying on AI for writing full pieces that lack your voice, tone, and style, and always review, edit, or rewrite the text before using it. Remember that AI is a tool, not a replacement.
Photo credit: By Neeqolah Creative Works on Unsplash