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“How I Overcame My AI Aversion with Wordtune” – A Writer Explains
3 min read
9 min read
December 11, 2023

“How I Overcame My AI Aversion with Wordtune” – A Writer Explains

“How I Overcame My AI Aversion with Wordtune” – A Writer Explains

Table of contents

When it comes to content curation for work, day after day, for clients and companies who have a distinct brand voice, a little AI helper goes a long way—the elf to my Santa, if you will.

I’ve been quite steadfast in my stance to almost shun AI technologies and renew my vows to writing: what with all the hallucinatory predictions that a robot will one day sit at my desk and write my novels. (In the Black Mirror multiverse, I wouldn’t be surprised.)

But as the past couple of years have wrought on, I’ve softened my staunch position. 

When you’re switching from LinkedIn blog posts to writing fresh copy for websites, to researching top-performing keywords, and back to tweaking brand strategies based on recent numbers; suddenly—an AI companion that’ll do the basic housekeeping for you doesn’t sound so bad.

Cue: Wordtune.

I’ve stuck with Wordtune for two years now, and that’s a lot, considering my initial position on AI for professional writers. And the reason is that at the end of the day, I maintain creative control over every word. 

In fact, this sense of creative safety combined with the speed of automation has helped me edit, ideate, and write almost 8-10 pieces of content daily—a mix of both short-form and long-form. 

I’d say that’s roughly double of what I’d been doing before.

From LinkedIn articles and Instagram captions to creating blog outlines and writing full first drafts, I've come to lean on Wordtune for consistent, high-quality generations. 

What Does a Brand Manager Do?

I quite like what Stephen King has to say about the power of a brand: “A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.”

The way the role of a Brand Manager is structured largely depends on the mission statement of the organisation. 

But Seth Godin’s comprehensive definition is the sum of what I do: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

In my logistical purview, I look after everything from copywriting to client relations to research to maintaining a consistent social media calendar for different personal brands.

At the heart of these seemingly quantifiable operations is human emotion—that which escapes objective definition but is intuitively discernible. 

My job is to refine, redefine, reimagine—and if needed, completely change—how you perceive a company or a person. And I do this through creative writing.

There’s a lot of writing, yes (which is why I like what I do), but a lot of successful brand management I’d say walks the tightrope between soft skills like interpersonal communication and cultural intelligence; along with a dedication to, and passion for storytelling. 

In brand storytelling, the precision and quality of emotionality cannot be mass-manufactured. When I talk to my clients, I tell them that AI tools will give you stories like plastic fruit—the words might look the same, but they’ll never make you feel the same way as the real deal. To capture that elusive element of making someone feel deeply, I quite literally flip through my university notepads to go back to the same question time and again—”What makes a good story?”

5 Reasons to Leverage AI for Professional Writers 

1. AI Saves Time

You know how some people end the meeting early saying “I’ll give you your time back”?

Well, I can’t do much in those four minutes, but Wordtune really does give me my time back—a couple of hours every day, in fact. 

And as someone who lives to write and read, I’ll collect every morsel of time to think, dream—and be.

If you’re in the content game, I don’t have to tell you how often I find myself staring at the blinking cursor, willing the words on the screen to arrange themselves in proper form, only to delete everything and start from scratch. 

And often, the sentence I’m staring at is insultingly simple, like this one:

2. AI Conserves Brain Power

I’d be happy to spend hours deliberating over an em-dash if I were writing for myself—and I have—but when it comes to measurable end results, I’ve found that Wordtune is the coconut oil to the bubble gum in my hair. In other words, it “un-stucks” me faster than I would myself. And when it comes to keeping clients happy; snappy copy is sometimes a tiny fix like this one:

I love a good old-fashioned thesaurus check, and Wordtune’s interactive one is often just what I need in the moment. 

3. Code-Switching for Zingy Copy: 

When you’re writing across platforms, across clients with different backgrounds,

sometimes, try as you might, it becomes one big blob of words without any distinguishing features. The same adjectives, the same tepid metaphors—all in the interest of getting everything to everyone as intended, and on time. 

Here, what I’ve found to be useful is to focus on the meat of the content: What do I want to say? Does this resonate with my client’s mission statement? 

And then, I see what Wordtune can do with the words I’ve fed it—usually, it’s adding a transition, breaking up a sentence, or switching the order of the clauses. 

But this simplicity of the model is why I’m waxing lyrical about the software here.

4. Weaving Wordtune into my Workflow:

As a Brand Manager, I work across several platforms usually all at once: LinkedIn,

Instagram, Google Docs, Teams, Canva—you get the idea. And so, for every click, I don’t have the time (or superhuman dexterity) to switch to a different window only to rewrite a sentence. If I’m really stuck, I’ll do it, sure—but I’ll be inconveniencing myself by trying very hard to weave it into my workflow. And this would also defeat the purpose of relying on technology to save time. 

That’s why I like Wordtune’s little AI helper hovering at the margins so that I can click-click

for help when I need it without derailing my train of thought.

5. A Companion, Not Enemy (Yet)

There are hundreds, if not thousands of articles and opinion pieces that blare with severe warnings that one day, writers will be replaced by faster, better, writing machines. And here I’ll say that I don’t doubt faster, better writing machines will be available much more readily—but absolutely no AI or ML model can truly replace human creative writing

A duplication of emotionality and creativity isn’t a capsule of true emotions. I can already recognise the lazy patterns of AI-generated writing because I read Chuck Palahniuk and Mona Awad novels during the night and AI-written content during the day. The contrast is becoming starker, quickly. For the lack of a more eloquent word, it’s “AI-like”: feigning enthusiasm and without teeth.

The crux of the matter is—I don’t rely on AI models to do my thinking or writing for me—I leverage them mindfully like I would set an alarm on my smartphone. 

TL; DR—AI for professional writers is a complementary tool, rather than an opposing force if embraced with intention.

Wordtune vs. ChatGPT

I’d be lying if I said I don’t have a ChatGPT Plus subscription. I, like many others, have gotten to know my alleged “enemy” very well in the past year or so.

I’ve also tried my hand at Quillbot, Jasper, and Wordsonic. The reason Wordtune is the “last man standing” in my Chrome browser extensions is like I said earlier—a combination of simplicity, and my own jest to think and create independently should there ever be a global Internet outage.

While ChatGPT+ is rightfully touted as a game-changer, I’m wary of how much one could come to rely on the model as a monolithic source of facts.

More than that, the software has the effect of a digital pacifier—ask any question and you shall receive. And that to me, is mildly terrifying. 

How many of us actually cross-check each line it spits out with credible sources? Add to that, our chronic shortage of time. I for one believe that this furious speed of all-encompassing answers will come at the price of dulling my critical thinking skills over time.

When I use Wordtune in my workday, I’m not worried about the genesis of an idea, or whether the information is factually correct. 

I’ve done my research, I have an idea, and now I want a tiny bit of help to make wads of content sound sharper. 

Wordtune does exactly what I need it to do without hijacking my thought process—it meets me halfway when my eyes are blurry and sinus sockets aching. 

At the end of the day, AI models are ultra-smart smart toys. You have to know how to play with them to truly enjoy what they offer. 

ChatGPT is rendered ineffectual without spiffy, reiterative prompts. Similarly, I don't expect any other AI software to overtake me as a thorough editor or creative writer because they too, have their limitations. 

Truth be told, I prefer them like that. 

What can I say, I like my machines a little flawed.

Parting Note

I’ve been able to save time, and therefore, money, by defining ethical boundaries for myself when it comes to AI-powered writing assistants. 

I don’t confer with AI if I’m writing a poem or a personal essay. My novel writing is a strictly AI-free zone.

But for work? A software like Wordtune is my smart companion. 

I know it can’t do everything—and I don’t expect it to. More so, I don’t want it to. 

I’m good at what I do. 

That said, I'll take the help I can get.

Brinda Gulati
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