Cyborg Writing: Using AI Tools to Conquer the Blank Page

Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. Many of us have countless ideas for blogs, articles, and books; but find the process of expressing these ideas in the written form a difficult hurdle to overcome. In this article, I will discuss how to use the latest wave of AI technology to help overcome the challenge of transforming your idea into written content in an efficient manner without entirely depending on a machine to do your writing for you.

"The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page" ~Octavia Spencer

Starting is the hardest part. The most challenging part about any writing is sitting down with a blank page in front of me, the cursor blinking menacingly. This happens when I write an article, a book chapter, or even something as small as an email. This problem is compounded in more prolonged or more complicated writing, where I have many ideas but don’t know precisely how to put them together. The intimidation factor can be dialed up to eleven if the final product is important or if I have high expectations for the output. The blank page can be a daunting symbol of all the work that lies ahead, and it can be challenging to know how to get started.

Many tips, tricks, and strategies have been developed over the years to combat this issue, many of which I have tried. There is starting your writing with an outline or just putting words on paper in a “vomit draft.” But both the outline and the “vomit draft” still start with a blank page. Looking at the blank page isn’t seen as a blank canvas upon which a masterpiece will be written, but the beginning of a process that will eventually fall short. This problem can impact writers at all levels, from students to professionals. It is often more pronounced for those who are perfectionists or have high writing standards.

The blank page problem extends outside of the writing itself, as it can make it challenging to get started on a project, leading to frustration, procrastination, and an overall lack of productivity. It can also lead to stress, anxiety, and a lack of confidence in one's writing ability, as the blank page can make the task seem insurmountable.

“Editing is hard but nowhere NEAR as tough as facing that blank page and blinking cursor each day. You’re all alone and no one else can do it. At least with editing you have someone in the trench with you.” ~Sarah Dessen

So how can you overcome the blank page? You can stick with the existing outlining strategies, vomit drafts, and even general brainstorming sessions. Or, you can use new technologies to skip the blank page altogether.

The magic formula of Voice recording, Transcription, and ChatGPT

Many of us may see the blank page as daunting, but we do not have the same mental hurdle in talking through the idea, especially if we are speaking out loud to ourselves.

"Who has not stared at the blank page and not been able to think of anything to write for what at least felt like six months? Getting started is the hardest bit, obviously." ~Jesse Armstrong

Using the voice recording tool built into your phone (or in an app) to record yourself explaining your ideas out loud, you can get your ideas out and start organizing them more coherently. Talking through your ideas can be more accessible and less intimidating than trying to get them down on a blank page, and it can also help to get the creative juices flowing.

We could record ourselves talking for some time, but with modern technology, we can take those recordings and almost magically get them into a draft on the page. Once you have recorded your ideas, the next step is transcribing the voice recording into a written form. There are multiple transcription services and options available. I record directly into an app called Otter.ai so that the transcription is immediately available, but apps like Otter.ai also allow you to upload your voice recording and have it transcribed. (Many apps have this function, for example: using Zoom will auto-generate transcriptions, and Google has a voice-to-text feature) This can save you the time and effort of rewriting the recording and give us the raw material for the latest technological step in this process.

Here is where AI can now be employed, specifically ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI. It is a machine-learning model trained on a large text dataset capable of generating human-like text responding to prompts or questions. In December of 2022, ChatGPT was launched and grew to over one million users in five days (faster than any other platform to that point). While ChatGPT is designed to generate text appropriate for use in chatbots or messaging applications, it is capable of understanding and generating text in various languages and styles and can perform tasks like summarizing and rewriting the inputted text.

With the transcription in hand, you can then use chat GPT to help you take the next steps in the writing process. After copying&pasting the transcription into Chat GPT, you can ask it to generate a summary of your transcription. This will give you a condensed version of your ideas that can help you better understand the main components of what you are trying to express and is often easier to work with. From there, you can ask chat GPT to create an outline of an article, blog post, or even an entire book based on the summary. This outline can serve as a roadmap for your writing, helping you to organize your ideas and structure the writing. Depending on your needs, you can ask chat GPT to generate subcategories or further outline the article.

"You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page." ~Jodi Picoult

It is also possible to ask ChatGPT to write out sections of the outline it generated or write the whole article for you. There have been numerous proponents of using ChatGPT to replace copyrighting and content generation. In a previous article, I showed how you could use ChatGPT to write and publish a book in under three hours (See the article here). But as I mentioned in that article, and as many others have pointed out, the writing that is being generated can be repetitive and often feels like a machine wrote it instead of a person. There are also issues involving copyright and online indexing.

-??????Under the current US Copyright law, machine-generated content cannot be copyrighted. There are some exceptions where there is material human involvement. Still, the consensus among copyright lawyers I have seen says they do not expect OpenAI-generated text to be protected by current copyright law.

-??????Google has recently come out and said that any content generated by AI would be classified as spam in their crawling and indexing. This means that much of the value of the writing would be lost as it could not be indexed for web searches.

How I wrote this article

After writing a previous article on a case study using ChatGPT to write a book, I started thinking of how to use this technology to make my regular writing more efficient. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, one of the most significant pain points in the writing process is facing the blank page. I have many ideas and can often talk about them, but turning them into comprehensible writing can always be challenging. This means I end up with a backlog of article ideas (some even good ideas) that never get written because I need help to organize the thoughts and get a workable first draft on paper.

I decided to use these new tools to make the process easier.

Step 1- Recording

I started by opening the Voice Memo app on the iPhone, hitting record, and talking. I didn’t have an outline or a set of cohesive thoughts; I just started talking through what I thought the article could be. I spoke for just over 11 minutes.

Step 2 - Transcription

I then took the .mp4 file of the recording and uploaded it to Otter. AI. Moving forward, I will voice record directly into the Otter.AI app since there is a limit on the number of uploads allowed per month on the free plan.

Step 3 – Using AI

When the transcription was done, I copied and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked questions to get the article's raw material/first draft.

-??????I asked for a summary of the transcription.

-??????I asked for an outline of an article based on the summary.

-??????I asked for a full article based on the transcription.

-??????I asked for individual articles on the outline sections it had given me.

I took these outputs and copy&pasted them into a word document. The summary was for my use and understanding, as was the full article. The individual draft articles that were written were over 3,200 words of text, much of which needed to be more varied, and I knew was not going to be used.

Step 4 - Rewriting

Using the first draft that ChatGPT gave me, I then wrote this article. The first pass was removing a lot of the repetitive text and seeing what I wanted the piece to look like. I took to heart the adage that “writing is rewriting.” I then went paragraph by paragraph and put what ChatGPT had written into my own words. Expanding on specific areas, cutting others, and sometimes adding new thoughts that weren’t in the original recording.

Step 5 - Editing

And as part of my usual writing process, I put everything through Grammarly to check for spelling and grammar errors, as well as some suggestions on how to reword phrases for clarity, engagement, and delivery.

"What is it about the blank page that makes me want to hurl myself into a game of solitaire? I ask myself these kinds of questions while I'm playing solitaire." ~Jennifer Gilmore

While using these tools does not magically create an article out of thin air, it alleviates many of the most significant pain points in the writing process and drastically cuts down the time involved in the early steps. Being able to go from a spoken idea to an initial draft in minutes allows the writer to focus on crafting the writing itself and not get bogged down in the minutiae of the process. This will let more ideas get to a point where they can be fine-tuned into articles for distribution instead of remaining only as ideas or half-written drafts.