Sparking creativity with AI

When you are against a deadline, AI can write entire essays for you. Unfortunately, those essays can be riddled with factual errors or plagiarized content. A simple rule of thumb is to never use AI to generate final content; instead, use it to jumpstart your own thinking by suggesting topics and angles for stories.

Here are 5 steps for generating content ideas for a company memo.

1. Choose a Generative Al Platform:

Pick a platform to use and set up an account. Two of the more popular examples are ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

2. Feed Relevant Context and Data:

In the prompt box, provide the model with a topic and some relevant information that you would like to explore. For example, “Discuss the pros and cons of remote work on company culture. The audience for this post is young professionals who are keenly interested but anxious about potential policy changes. While the audience appreciates a professional tone, provide empathetic language in three distinct approaches. Limit each to 150 words.”

3. Generate the Content:

At this point, the model will go to work. Within seconds, you will have suggested subtopics and a range of pros and cons to consider as you develop your own memo.

4. Iterate to Refine:

If you aren’t entirely satisfied with the initial output, add more pointed guidelines to your original prompt. Be specific with your requests to ensure the output addresses any particular topics or issues you want. Then have the platform re-generate a new response that incorporates your feedback.

5. Make it yours:

Again, AI generated copy should never be used as final content, for three reasons.

First, it frequently returns errors, charmingly called “hallucinations.” Second, it can plagiarize copyrighted content which can make the output illegal to publish. And finally, you have standards, doggoneit. You don’t cheat on tests, and you don’t pass off the tool’s output as your own thinking. Instead, you take its suggestions and put them through the ultimate platform: your experience and perspective.