AI time suck

I'm struggling to get on the AI bandwagon. My initial experiences with Chat GPT really seem to be out of step with what I read online, so I do have this thought in the back of my head that maybe I'm missing something. But I currently believe that the AI tools that are out there now are an illusion when it comes to productivity.

For my business, I need to write a lot of blog post content and I'm always struggling to publish fast enough. This seemed like a natural fit for generative AI and really fits in with a lot of the hype around content writers being replaced by chat bots. So for a couple of hours, I went through my list of topics that I wanted to write blog posts about and I prompted Chat GPT to outline and then flesh out articles.

At first, I thought, this was going to be groundbreaking. I had 20 articles that were 80% written, now I just needed to flesh out those final parts and I could be publishing 5X quicker than I was before. But the illusion lies in that 20% - all of the difficult parts of the blog post that actually add value for people are in that 20%. And when you haven't spent the time building up the rest of the article, getting your brain into the state where you can cover that important last mile is much more difficult. You have the urge to press the AI button again and again, hoping it will give you that last bit, but nothing comes out but filler.

In the end I found that even the 80% that was on the page was not even all that usable. I still had to go through and change it to my voice, make it more relevant to the important part of the post that I was going to add, and then add links, screenshots, etc. In the end I wasn't actually saving any time at all.

Now that tools like Chat GPT are going to start monetizing and they will cost real money to use, I think I lot of these supposed use-cases will get much more scrutiny and more people might come to the same conclusion that I have. It's very easy to get into an AI time suck that feels like doing work, but in reality, you're probably making your most important work harder to do, and procrastinating to boot.