Giving away my Legos to AI

As a writer — creative and technical — I refused to use Grammarly, an AI writing assistant. This refusal was a matter of pride and principle. I also had an amorphous fear of “losing my edge” as a writer.

I even know the scientific explanation for Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos, but I resisted the help.

Then I saw this tweet. It resonated so deeply and only galvanized my resistance! ✊

But then, things went into overdrive at the tech startup I work at. I struggled to keep up with the content reviews people requested from me while also struggling to write and review my own content.

I broke down, started using Grammarly, and never looked back. I have the VSCode plugin and Chrome extension installed. 🦾🤖 I’m ready for anything!

I don’t use Grammarly to generate my writing, but I do use it to check my writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, passive voice, tone, etc.), which I believe doesn’t require a novel human touch to handle low-hanging fruit.

For rule-based, routine, or repetitive tasks like this, I’ve granted myself permission to give away my Legos to AI. This has freed me up to spend more time writing content that does require a novel human touch.

This doesn’t mean I don’t use AI to write content at work. I use ChatGPT to generate routine content. I also use it when I can’t nail the best phrasing and need to get unstuck. I can’t resist editing what it gives me, but it does a fantastic job of getting the words flowing. Finding a way to enter a topic and get a first draft down is often the most unproductive use of my time, especially when writing routine content.

If you’ve worked in tech in the last decade, you’ve likely encountered the concept of giving away your Legos to new teammates as a way to enable teams to scale.

I’ve decided to welcome AI as a new teammate and give it all the Legos I can.

Are there any AI tools you’ve given Legos to? How did it go?

A few additional thoughts:

• As a technical writer at a startup, AI has no prior art to ingest until our team completes our research and writing and publishes clear and accurate docs tailored to our audience. Once the docs are delivered and ingested, the novel human work is now available for others to learn from and share via a multitude of platforms, including AI.
• As a poet, AI doesn’t have a place in generating my work. However, through Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s brilliant COMPUTATIONAL POETRY workshop, I learned how to use code and AI as sources of true randomness that enable me to break free from my well-worn poetic patterns. Even when I consciously work to destroy my patterns, I inevitably create new ones.