Over the past 4 months, I ghostwrote two nonfiction books with AI riding shotgun.
Some of what I discovered was game-changing, and not gonna lie…some of it was unsettling.
Here are the 10 lessons that surprised me most:
- You won’t save time: If you try to use generative AI to generate text, you won’t save time. Why? You’ll have to fact check every word. Instead, leverage AI for the tasks to which it’s best suited.
- Find hidden gold: For research, you can use Perplexity.ai to help surface primary source documents you would never find using Google.
- Beware the fake footnote: Do not ask Perplexity to create a footnote for you. Even if you give it the correct url for the source document, it will do a switcheroo. It will return the citation with a mix of real and fake information, including a fake url.
- Employ an excellent AI detective: Once you manually build an outline for the book, ChatGPT can be very effective to point out holes in your logic and missing information.
- Watch out for the paradox: The more docs you upload to a custom chatbot knowledge base, the more confused your custom bot gets.
- Save $$$ with an aggregator: Subscribing to an LLM aggregator like Launch Lemonade gives you access to multiple chatbots and models for the same $20/month it costs to subscribe to just one.
- Don’t fall into the autopilot trap: The more you use generative AI, the more tempting it is to put your brain on autopilot and let the machine do the thinking for you. That’s how we end up with fewer real thinkers in the world—and more people who are susceptible to misinformation.
- If you spot it, you got it: The more you use generative AI, the easier it becomes to spot AI-generated text and the more confidence you get in your own human writing.
- Only you can weave a true story: The more you use generative AI, the more you realize that human fact checkers are critical for parsing the truth. Human storytellers are irreplaceable for weaving a narrative that makes sense.
- The future is in your hands: The more you use generative AI, the more you realize the future of humanity depends on. . . humans.
After 4 months of testing, one thing is clear: AI can speed up parts of the process, but the soul of the story—and the responsibility—will always belong to humans.