I’ve been doing some exploratory work, setting up the early foundation for leveraging material from stuff that I’ve created over the last 10 years, and it’s an interesting deep-dive into how to repurpose earlier content.

On the one hand, it could actually be a fairly easy straightforward issue. Simply just reprint the material and redistributed it. The problem, however, is that a good amount of the content was actually bought by somebody else. So, there’s the copyright issue. I can’t just go in redistribute stuff that was sold to somebody, and I gave them the license. So, now they own that version. To then just go and reprint it again doesn’t work. So, what I have to do is take the material and re-create it, but I sure as heck don’t want to spend months and months of my time just rewriting on a text editor.

AI Fixes Everything!

Enter the value of artificial intelligence or AI. Since I know what the material is, it’s not a matter of scraping content from the Internet or pulling it from somewhere else. I’m the writer that actually created the material in the first place. All that needs to happen here is that it needs to be spun again so that the material is not a carbon copy of what I’ve sold a past client. The question is whether AI can do a respectable enough job of rewriting my old material.

The model I’m working with right now is ChatGPT 3.5. To be quite frank, what I’ve found with AI so far in terms of that model has been wanting. On the one hand, ChatGPT can produce content, but it reads so generic and so stilted that it’s obvious how computer-generated the language is.

So, if I use that model and tool, it’s a given, I’m still gonna have to spend time editing the material for it to get back to my voice. I’ve already run some experiments literally telling the model not to pull any information from anywhere else. Don’t add content from anywhere else. Just reword this article using my style of voice.

The Results So Far

What I got back with a 700-word test sample was a 450-word hatchet job that literally had generic babble all over it. So, I’ll chalk this one up to user error that I didn’t give it enough instructions. It's kind of like when you use Midjourney image AI and you just tell it make me an image of a man on a cliff. Well, what you get is some sort of semi-generic version of some little guy standing on a cliff next to the ocean.

But what if you wanted the image really to be the man teetering on the edge of a cliff in the middle of an urban setting, and down below are streets and cars and fog, and mayhem. You're not going to get it because obviously you need to add the detail to the script to spell out exactly what every aspect should look like, or at least get closer to it. Maybe you wanted the image to look photographic. Well, then you need to literally tell the machine, I want the image to be hyper-realistic photographic.

Sometimes it even helps to tell the AI what type of camera lens you want it to be  representative of to get something close to a realistic photograph image instead of the cartoon versions that comes up.

So, back to the writing AI model, I’m suspecting that the script work that I have to apply to this past material needs to be far more instructional and detailed. How exactly I need to phrase that, I’m not sure. It’s probably going to take some more experimenting until I find the right mix so that one I don’t get the same hatchet job with it dropping a third of my article off. The output also needs to sound something reasonably close to the way that I write in the way that I expressed myself in content.

Traveling to Rome

If I can pull it off, then the end product will definitely be a very efficient and automated way that I can leverage past content. I have something like 20,000 articles to work with, but the question is, does AI have what it takes to help? So far, I’m not impressed. I have yet to find an AI that truly produces really good writing. I suppose that’s a good thing for writers who remain out their in content freelancing, but unfortunately, the allure of AI tools has been too much, and it’s been decimating to most of the freelancing market in general.

Anybody who thought that they were producing was even passable content that could be called quality is beyond me, but that is the reality. So, now when in Rome, act like the Romans.