A lot of the articles you will read will be written (almost) entirely by an AI
welcome to the future folks!
Last summer I got to know about the world of AI writing assistants from the amazing substack
.As someone involved in AI for a long time, I have been following with a mix of amazement and amusement the rise of generative AI.
The idea that “everything is a remix” is not new, but seeing those AIs writing or drawing stuff that is much better than what the average person can do puts things into perspective.
I have been wanting to experiment for a while, but I never found the time or the willingness to pay for the service.
Finally I found the time and an AI writing service called Rytr: Rytr has a free tier of 10.000 words so I could mess around with it without having to pay, although it was barely enough for me to complete this small experiment.
Generate the outline
Just use the “Blog Ideas & Outline” template and put a prompt in it, not even that complicated.
Here’s the initial output:
I left the settings pretty much on default and got some kind of outline.
You can see that both variants use the old and overused “X reasons to” that all content marketers use, however in neither of the variants there were 5 or 7 reasons listed. In the 7 reasons variant the list was:
1. Lack of Meaningful Feedback – Clear and specific feedback is essential for progress and success. Employees need clear direction on what they are doing right and wrong in order to improve.
2. Poor Fit Between the Organization's Expectations and Employee Needs – The system might be set up to measure what the organization needs rather than what the employee needs. The balance between these two aspects should be redressed over time to ensure that both parties are getting what they need from the process.
3. Poor Organization Design – Organizations that have a top-down management structure will struggle with collecting meaningful data on employees because it's
I can presume that this was a purposeful limitation on the number of characters to avoid consuming all your quota.
Then I followed the instructions and created a list of paragraphs with keywords, partly from the AI, partly written by me. You can think of this of a more detailed prompt for the AI.
Once you have this list you can select the title + keyword and press the action “Paragraph” to expand on the topic you want:
The final result is a pretty decent length article that has some obvious platitudes in it but that is absolutely decent content marketing.
I am a copywriter, how much should I worry about this?
The experience was very pleasant, I was able to put together a SEO-worthy article in a few minutes and I believe that if your job is to write generic content to do SEO spam this is probably fine.
But the article didn’t have any soul or any of my style, in all fairness I played with it for an hour top so the result is as good as it gets for such a small investment.
More advanced tools like Jasper or Sudowrite promise to be able to learn your style and a large look-back window to expand your content, and I believe that, if you are under pressure to write a lot of articles or books, you should absolutely try-out AI writing tools.
Will those tools replace humans? As for anything related to automation, if you believe that your job can be automated you should start now to move up the value chain: learn how to write prompts for AI, become a better editor and learn how to use AI to do enrich your work, instead of refusing to deal with it.
Generative tools are only getting better, not worse.
Now the resulting article, almost untouched. Try to read it like if this was posted by a Linkedin influencer.
Why Performance Reviews are Broken
Why You Should Stop Doing Performance Reviews
Performance reviews are a practice that is used in many organizations to evaluate the performance of employees. These reviews are typically done by managers and supervisors, who will then provide feedback to the employee on their performance. This feedback is usually in the form of a letter grade, ranking, or percentage.
1) Performance reviews focus on past events and not future goals.
2) Performance reviews focus on individual accomplishments rather than team success.
3) Performance reviews are subjective and can be biased.
4) Performance reviews don't account for qualitative aspects of work like creativity or collaboration skills.
5) Performance reviews are often used as a tool for punishment or reward which can lead to unethical behavior by managers and supervisors such as discrimination against certain groups of people or retaliation against employees who have filed complaints about harassment within the workplace.
Lack of Meaningful Feedback
Clear and specific feedback is essential for progress and success. Peers are not always able to provide actionable feedback.
In the past, feedback was often given in the form of a performance review. But this is not enough to help people improve their skills. In order to get meaningful feedback, you need to ask for it and establish a culture of constructive criticism.
It is important that you know what type of feedback will be most useful for your needs. For example, some people prefer receiving constructive criticism while others prefer positive reinforcement or praise.
Don’t connect feedback to compensation
Connecting feedback to compensation creates distortions in the process. People won’t listen to feedback but be focused on compensation instead
We can’t expect people to give feedback if they know that their compensation will be affected by it. It creates distortions in the process. People won’t provide feedback if they know that their compensation will be affected by it.
The company should not connect feedback to compensation.
Don’t give scores to people, we are not in school
Management needs to stop treating employees like they are in elementary school. Employees need to be treated with respect and have the opportunity to grow their skills.
We are not in elementary school where we are graded on a scale of A, B, C, D or F. We need to stop being patronizing and start empowering our employees.
The system might be set up to measure what the organization needs rather than what the employee needs.
A performance review is a meeting at the end of the year where an employee and their manager will discuss how well they have been doing. Employee performance reviews are often used to measure what the organization expects from an employee and what the employee needs.
The system might be set up to measure what the organization expects from an employee but not what they need. In this case, employees will feel like they are being measured on things that don't matter to them. They might also feel like their contributions are not being recognized for what they are worth.
Don’t do performance reviews, give feedback every day
Performance reviews are a waste of time and they don't really help the employee. Feedback is much more effective because it can be given every day and it's more specific.
Feedback replacement is the process of replacing performance reviews with feedback. This gives employees daily feedback on their work, rather than waiting for a performance review. It also provides constructive feedback, which is more helpful than vague critiques.