Can AI Improve AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is handy for generating acceptable text, especially when you lack the time or resources to produce custom-written prose. But AI-generated text is famously stereotypical and generic, rather like packages of hamburger (ground beef for those outside the US). That’s no surprise – after all, like hamburger, the text you get from generative AI is a blend of bits from lots of different sources.

So, what can you do with that? Let’s extend the hamburger analogy. When you buy a package of hamburger, do you just cook it up and eat it as is? Probably not. You almost certainly season it, add a bun, some lettuce, tomato, cheese – or, what the heck, cook it with some sauce and make a sloppy Joe, or serve it with noodles as goulash.

You can do the same kind of thing with AI-generated text, of course – go through and adjust it and individualize it. The challenge is that by the time you’ve tailored it to your needs, you might have invested as much time and effort as if you had written it from scratch.

So, is there an automated way to make the individualization more efficient? Can one machine help make the output of another machine more interesting and distinctive?

Using AI to improve AI

You can’t just feed AI an article written by AI and say, “Improve this.” While AI can produce drafts, it’s not good at the detailed judgments required to improve them. At most, it will just give you another equally stereotypical output. But it can offer useful ideas if you ask it the right questions.

The thinking you do when you improve an article involves a variety of judgements. You may look at a bit of the text and think it needs to be punchier, friendlier, more empathetic, simpler, or just shorter. AI can’t make those judgements for you. But when you can see that a sentence needs to be rewritten a certain way, that happens to be something that AI is very good at.

And that’s where you can save a lot of time and energy. Draftsmith is an AI application that can give you suggested rewordings that you can accept, adjust, be inspired by, or reject. You have the control, you just don’t have to do all the work.

How it works

Let’s take an example. Here’s some textual hamburger that an AI application generated when we asked it to create marketing text:

“Ensure your work stands out for its quality and precision by using PerfectIt. Adopt a proactive approach to maintain a high standard of presentation with this innovative proofreading tool. It’s an effective solution for those seeking error-free results.”

Ensure your work stands out for its quality and precision by using PerfectIt. Adopt a proactive approach to maintain a high standard of presentation with this innovative proofreading tool. It’s an effective solution for those seeking error-free results.

It’s not terrible, but then, neither is plain hamburger. It’s just not necessarily what you want, either. Perhaps you can look at it and see instantly what it should be. But perhaps you can’t, at least not right now. Perhaps you’re dealing with writer’s block, tight deadlines, or other things going on that cloud your creative judgement. That’s why you turned to AI in the first place.

So, let’s open Draftsmith up from the Word ribbon and see if it can help.

We’ll start with the first sentence, which feels a bit stiff. Using Draftsmith’s Empathy Tuner on the “More Friendly” setting, we get:

That’s friendlier. Maybe even a bit more friendly than we need. Can we take a different angle? Let’s try a different approach with the Engagement Tuner and select “Punchier”:

Better, but let’s see how “More Exciting” looks:

Ah, now we see it: we can use the “more exciting” phrasing, but with the details from “punchier”:

Now, let’s improve the second sentence, which is a bit high-level. Using the Readability Tuner, what if we try the “Eleven-Year-Old Reading” level?

That’s a bit too simple for this. Let’s move up to the “High School Reading” level:

Still a bit starchy. Maybe what we need is the “More empathetic” version:

Almost there – maybe just not quite that empathetic. A slight tweak gives us:

Finally, let’s punch up the last sentence. It’s not bad as it is, just not quite as exciting as it could be. Let’s see what the “More Exciting” version is:

Ooh, that is exciting. What do we have now?

“PerfectIt is the tool you need to make sure your work stands out for its quality and precision. We know you need to maintain a high standard of presentation, and that’s why we’ve created this innovative editorial application to help you. It’s the perfect solution for anyone who wants to get it right the first time.”

That’s a lot more like what we want. We had to do a little hands-on work ourselves, but the suggestions really helped to clarify and simplify the task. It’s ready to eat, so to speak!

The result is your own text in less time

That takes us right back to the hamburger analogy. When you’re short on time and want to make your life simpler, you don’t go to the store and buy raw hamburger and cook it at home. You go to a burger place! And if it’s an at least halfway decent burger place, they give you some options for how you have your burger. You can say “I’d like the banquet burger, hold the pickle,” or, “Can I have the Dave’s Special with extra mayonnaise?” You don’t have to create your whole burger from scratch, but you can choose from a clear set of options and make further adjustments to suit yourself. And if we’re being honest, it’s often better than what you’d make at home, unless you had a lot more time and resources.

And so it is with AI-assisted text. It may not be filet mignon, but you don’t always need or even want filet mignon. You can use AI as a tool to edit your AI-generated text, and you’ll get something pretty good on time and within budget.

Have you tried Draftsmith? Download a free trial and see how it can help you.