The AI Razor
Thanks to today's über-powerful tools, it's not at all hard to shave off a few hours of manual work.
Can a new technology, system, or process save us time and make work suck less?
If there's one big, hairy question that has driven my career, that might be it. (Not surprisingly, that same simple query has also irritated a slew of hidebound colleagues and clients over the years, but I'll save that post for another day. Or beers.)
I've written before about how all folks in the publishing world should noodle with AI. Thanks to ChatGPT and its ilk, we are now able to automate many once time-intensive, manual processes. And by we, I'm including authors, editors, publishers, and ghostwriters.
In today's post, I'll describe how less than half an hour of messing around will pay dividends on all future writing projects.
Scenario
In 1997, I started teaching myself the rudiments of Visual Basic for Applications. If you've ever written a macro in Microsoft Word, Excel, or Access, you've used VBA. Today, though, my VBA skills aren't what they once were. I spend far more time playing with Python.
In an age of AI and powerful low-code/no-code tools, why not play around?
