How this former NYT columnist uses ChatGPT to brainstorm, do research, and find the perfect metaphor

How do you walk through the process of brainstorming an idea instead of using Google?

Right off the bat, it tells me, you know, about the main people in the administration who are talking about this. It gives me links to articles that I can read. This is the stuff that when I was writing a column every week, it would take me probably half a day or so to just find all the stuff and kind of figure out what I was gonna write about.

I'm presuming in the past you would've done this with colleagues in a newsroom, and you could have these conversations live.

You know you're not talking to a colleague, you know you're not talking to a human, but in many ways it sort of has that same function because the interface is similar. Probably it's not as smart as that person, but it's maybe 80%, and it's great, and instant, and available all the time.

I think there's a lot of fear that ChatGPT or AI-generated writing is slop, and it's all generic. I love seeing this idea of you making the writing more specific and more impactful.

Quickly, I, you know, just discovered that it was so useful that now when I write, I have, like, two windows open on my screen. One is ChatGPT, and one is the document I'm working on. [upbeat music]

Hey, everyone. Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive on a mission to help you build better with this new technology. Today, we're talking about how AI is transforming the writing experience with none other than Farhad Manjoo, former columnist for The New York Times and one of the most interesting voices in tech writing out there. Farhad's gonna give us practical tips and tricks on how to make our own writing better using AI, and you're definitely not gonna wanna miss his special word-finding technique to discover that perfect idiom or metaphor. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Enterpret. Enterpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best-in-class products. Enterpret unifies all customer conversations in real time, from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads, and makes it available for your team for analysis. What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice of the customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority, like customer-centric industry leaders Canva, Notion, and Linear, reach out to the team at enterpret.com/howiai. That's E-N-T-E-R-P-R-E-T.com/howiai. Hi, Farhad. It's amazing to have you here. I'm super excited to see some of the workflows you use in your writing, but before we get in it, I have to ask, as someone who writes for a living, what made you curious about these tools versus skeptical?