Maybe you’re wondering how much of the text on this website was written by an artificial intelligence machine and how much I actually typed with my own hands. This question probably applies not just to this blog, but to other websites too — corporate ones especially.
For this blog I guarantee old-school-original-human-thinking. It all comes from my head and gut, pretty unfiltered and fairly unpolished. You could also call it: authentically Reiner.
If you know me, if you’ve had coffee or beer with me, you should hear me in these lines.
AI: Not ‘Whether’, But ‘How’
I’m reading more and more texts that definitely weren’t written by humans. They read too marketing-heavy, pompous, generic sauce or just plain boring. Some people seem to think it’s enough to enter a simple prompt into an AI machine and automatically get text they can publish without further review.
That’s too short-sighted.
The question isn’t whether you use AI anymore, but how — not if, but how. And that depends on how much the human contributed to creating the text and how well the machine was briefed. Because having a human involved isn’t automatically a quality mark. It needs to be a smart, experienced, empathetic and curious human with enough playfulness.
Personal Reiner Notes
In my “Notes from Digital Land” I use a different workflow than usual in my work. The blog isn’t my main project, just a quick dumping ground for thoughts. I do this to catch fleeting ideas and not bore my family at dinner.
Usually I dictate thoughts into my Apple Watch on the side and transcribe using OpenAI’s Whisper model.
Often I’ve been thinking about the topic for a while, so the dictated stuff gets published as a new note with a bit of textual massage work and cuts. I deliberately don’t rewrite the text or have ChatGPT improve it. These are my personal Reiner notes with all their strengths and weaknesses.
AI in Client Work
In my client work, the AI machine plays a different role. Depending on the task and customer expectations, I use machines for research, brainstorming, validating assumptions, then later for editing, copy-editing, SEO, image briefing, social media posts and translation.
I deliberately go step by step, checking and adjusting results to end up with a satisfying product for my client. When I do it right, it remains a predominantly handmade piece that achieves exactly what was planned: affecting something in the reader.
Future with AI: The Focus Areas
How do I move forward with AI? Working with AI tools is great fun for me. It’s entertaining and takes tedious work off my hands that AI simply does better. So I’ve decided to offer three focus areas going forward:
- Creating search-engine AI texts with human briefing and quality control.
- Creating content that’s difficult or impossible to generate with AI (interviews, reports, expert articles, whitepapers, podcasts).
- Creative texts (only for my own purposes and projects).
New AI Services
Since I’m diving deep into prompt generation and AI workflows, I’m offering additional services from now on:
- Consulting and coaching in ChatGPT and co: prompt magic, but only with concrete examples
- Agile workflows combined with AI
I actually didn’t want to offer consulting and coaching anymore because coordinating meetings with Germany is always tricky due to the time difference. But I simply notice that I’m passionate about this topic and my experience as a text producer and “productivity hacker” could be very helpful.
So: bring it on, I’m open for business. Get in touch here.
First published in German at reinergaertner.de, where I’ve been at it since 1997. AI did the heavy lifting on the translation. I did the heavy squinting at the result.