Using AI as a friendly critic

Preamble

Artificial Intelligence (AI)* is one of those topics where – depending on who you talk to – it’s either the spawn of the Devil, or the saviour of the Universe.

I don’t purport to have any expertise, but do like to dabble from time-to-time, so I can form my own opinion.

Long, long ago

In early 2023 I experimented using AI for various work and non-work related tasks.

In March 2023 I asked Bing AI Chat (now called Copilot) to comment on my writing style by looking at my personal website. That post is here: Comments on writing style by Bing AI Chat.

The last time I looked at Google’s offering, it was called Bard, and I was very unimpressed.

The present day

I have now retired from paid work, but am still (occasionally) inquisitive about if and how AI can be of some practical help.

Google has recently released a new version of its AI model, now called Gemini Advanced. As it’s eighteen months or so since I last dabbled, I thought I’d give it a go with a similar exercise looking at writing style.

False Start

I initially asked Gemini Advanced to read all of my blog posts and comment on my writing style. That was a complete no no, as it couldn’t access the site directly, despite a few efforts. It also failed to read individual posts.

Copy and paste job

I copied the text from an individual blog post (about travelling with dogs), and pasted it into the prompt. This time, Gemini Advanced gave me some useful feedback, and made some sensible practical suggestions. However, one of those suggestions was to use images, which of course I had, it just couldn’t see them.

Print to PDF

I then tried ‘printing’ the entire blog post into a PDF, and uploaded the PDF, with much better results. It clearly ‘understood’ the context, and gave me constructive feedback about each individual image. Here’s a snapshot from the feedback:

Conclusion

I don’t like the idea of using AI as a sort of ghost writer, which feels very much like cheating on a personal blog. However, I’m not averse to a bit of constructive criticism, and I will probably use Gemini Advanced again, particularly if I write about more complex subjects.

If you have made it this far and want to look through the actual transcript of the conversation with Gemini Advanced, there’s a copy in this PDF.

Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Footnote

* Yes, I know I’m probably not using the correct terminology, but I don’t care

Featured Image credit

British Library digitised image from page 194 of “When Life is Young: a collection of verse for boys and girls” https://flic.kr/p/hXHjvR