Use AI to enhance your writing

It's common to hear that writers need to combine AI with human judgment. But how, exactly? This guide shows exactly how AI can save you time and legwork, leaving you to provide the creativity and original thinking.

Mary ·

Before You Start

Goal: Leave with new ideas to make AI serve your writing goals, save you time and legwork, and free you up to produce creative ideas and original thinking.

Read the Key Takeaways below. Members are encouraged to read beforehand, but a quick recap at the meeting works too.

These takeaways draw on 18+ months' experience of using AI every day in my writing. I've leveraged AI in myriad ways to speed up and line edit my work, without ceding creative control. (While the focus here is on writing with AI, the same principles may extend to other creative work.)

Meeting Agenda · Approx. 60 mins

  • Member Updates · 10 mins
  • Icebreaker · 10 mins
  • Key Takeaways · 5 mins
  • Discussion · 20 mins
  • One Action · 10 mins
  • Wrap-Up · 5 mins

👋 Member Updates · 10 mins

Go around your Circle and share personal updates. Keep them brief and focused on significant changes or important decisions since the last time you met. It's OK not to have one every month. If you have a One Action update from last time, share that too.

🧊 Icebreaker · 10 mins

Invite everyone in the group to share. Keep answers to one or two minutes per person.

Tell us about a time you used AI for a creative project, and were disappointed with its initial response. What did it get wrong, and how did you improve on it?

🔑 Key Takeaways · 5 mins

  • Creative writing still requires human judgment that AI hasn't matched. One study found human-written stories passed 3 to 10 times more creativity tests than AI-written ones.

  • Use this framework to decide your role vs. AI's in any piece of writing: How big is the audience, how core is this piece to your organization's goals, and what's the desired level of emotional engagement? Here's an example from my real life:

    • Lean In newsletter: Large audience (90K), core to our goals, high desired emotional engagement. I write everything myself. I'll then ask AI to imagine it's my audience and critique the newsletter, and, finally, proofread it.
    • Email to colleagues: Small audience, low importance to goals, negligible emotional engagement. I'll have AI write the email based on my notes, then cut a bunch of words, since AI can be wordy.

  • Here are some of my favorite recent ways to use AI:

    • Bad first drafts. If I'm intimidated to begin, I ask AI for a draft or opening paragraph, giving it all the appropriate context. This "bad first draft" gives me something to react against, and makes me realize that I already have a strong point of view and outline in mind.
    • Thought partnership on line edits. If I'm struggling with a sentence, I'll ask AI's advice and go back and forth with it. It's similar to doing the same thing with a real editor, but faster.
    • Reviewing with a specific audience in mind. When I've asked AI to do this and given it full context on the audience, its feedback has been convincing.
    • Finding quotes in recorded transcripts. Transcribed interviews can be loooong. If I remember the rough form of a quote and can't find it, I ask AI to find it. AI is also pretty good at tidying up verbal fry in a transcript without introducing errors. (Note: Check your company’s AI policy before sharing interviews or work documents with an AI tool.)
    • Taking dictation. If I know what I want to say, and want to capture it in a more colloquial, lively way, I'll speak a first draft or series of paragraphs out loud into my AI tool.

  • Give AI the same context you'd give a collaborator. Provide the supporting research, the audience, the goals, what's already worked before, and any raw materials to draw from.

  • Do a deep final edit yourself, but ask AI to proofread. You hold final creative control; AI catches small errors that are easy for humans to miss. It can also help fact-check — ask it to find source URLs you can check yourself, rather than trusting its judgment.

  • Create systems to prevent AI writing tics. Add standing instructions to your AI tools about what to avoid — the word "actually," constructions like "it's not this, it's that," and sentences built around abstract concepts instead of human subjects.

  • AI still can't do everything. In this author's experience, humans are still needed for humor, empathy, realistic detail, and genuinely original thinking and creative ideas.

🏋️ Discuss as a group · 20 mins

  1. What are some of your favorite ways to use AI in your writing?
  2. What have you gained by using AI to help you write? (Is there anything you might have lost?)
  3. How do you decide how much to rely on AI and how much on your own words?
  4. Share with the group how you define high-quality writing. How does AI help you achieve it?
  5. What parts do you need to contribute for writing to meet your quality standards?
  6. Which parts of writing do you still think need to be 100% human?

🎯 One Action · 10 mins

Commit to one concrete action — big or small — you'll take before next meeting. Go around the Circle and share (1 minute or less per member). Vocalizing it helps hold each other accountable.

Pick one technique from today's discussion that you haven't tried before — an audience-specific review, a transcript search, or dictation — and use it in a real piece of writing this week. Come back ready to share what worked and what you'd change.

📅 Wrap-Up · 5 mins

Before you break, plan your next meeting and close on an energetic note. Go around your Circle one by one and finish the sentence:

Now I am feeling… (choose one word).

  • Set the day, time, and location
  • Choose the next topic or resource
  • Confirm who's leading the discussion
  • Decide how you'll stay in touch in between