Category: Writing

  • Step 5: Waving the white flag

    This is the last installment of the series documenting my foray into employing AI as an author/assistant for a book project. You may gain perspective if you read some of the earlier posts before this one. As we’ve seen in several of the last posts (Steps 1, 2, 3, 4), ChatGPT offers rich text outputs…

  • Step 4: Fast forward

    In the last three posts (1, 2, 3) we evaluated ChatGPT’s ability to create compelling text for a book about retirement income. Most recently I felt the need to invent two characters whose financial situations and household conversations are intended to include all the boring factual details that ChatGPT was able to provide, but with…

  • Step 3: Character references

    In the last post, I introduced a couple of characters — a married couple who are facing the financial challenges of retirement planning. Carla and Matt will be tasked with introducing many of the basic ideas that the book wants to communicate through their household conversations. I felt compelled to do this because ChatGPT’s extrapolation…

  • Step 2: Injecting personality into AI text

    Bland, generic writing from an AI (as described in the previous post) is not exactly advantageous for the financial writer or his clients. How was I going to imbue it with style? Here’s what I tried first: Let’s rewrite Chapter One. Your summary is below, but I want to see a more casual and discursive…

  • Step 1: Giving the outline to AI

    This post begins documenting my experience of writing a book with AI. As mentioned in my last post, I had submitted a traditional book proposal to a major publisher in October 2008 and was turned down because I was not a celebrity. Also, the stock markets had dropped almost ten percent in a single day,…

  • I asked AI to write the book I never got around to

    One of the most intriguing aspects of the current wave of generative AI tools is speed: vast amounts of text can be generated in seconds. Why not write an entire book with the help of AI? In 2008 I enjoyed a bustling career as a freelance financial writer, addressing topics like retirement investing, wealth management,…