Ryan Bradley, writing for The Atlantic, outlines how he’s using AI to generate copy for work.

I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

The process itself takes place within OpenAI’s “Playground” feature, which offers similar functionality as the company’s ChatGPT product. The Playground presents as a blank page, not a chat, and is therefore better at shaping existing words into something new. I write my prompt at the top, which always begins with something like “Write a newspaper-style paragraph out of the following.” Then, I paste below my prompt the three or four paragraphs I selected from the list and—this is crucial, I have learned—edit those a touch, to ensure that the machine “reads” them properly. Sometimes that means placing a proper noun closer to a quote, or doing away with an existing headline. Perhaps you’re thinking, This sounds like work too, and it is—but it’s quite a lot of fun to refine my process and see what the machine spits out at the other end. I like to think that I’ve turned myself from the meat grinder into the meat grinder’s minder—or manager.

I keep waiting to be found out, and I keep thinking that somehow the copy will reveal itself for what it is. But I haven’t, and it hasn’t, and at this point I don’t think I or it ever will (at least, not until this essay is published). Which has led me to a more interesting question: Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?

I’ve surprised myself by deciding that, no, I don’t think it matters at all. This in turn has helped clarify precisely what it was about the writing of this paragraph that I hated so much in the first place. I realized that what I was doing wasn’t writing at all, really—it was just generating copy.