What do we mean by an “AI-assisted” article 📜?

Our comprehensive generative AI guidelines

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CC: Medium, Medium Staff

Last Updated: September 21, 2023

We recommend every content piece submitted to us (and in general), that uses AI in a significant way to have a clear attribution to the same. By “significant”, we imply that AI was used to generate the core ideas, content, and structure of the article. Medium’s generative AI guidelines also recommend adding it at the top of the article.

Here’s an example of how you can add it:

Note: This article was written with the help of AI assistance. All content is however thoroughly reviewed, fact checked, and structured as per my ideas and thoughts.

You can hyperlink this article into the note to give readers and the Medium editors more context as to what we mean by “AI assistance.”

(This is an evolving list as we learn more about generative AI technologies' effects and use cases.)

First, let’s understand what does NOT come under “AI assistance” and is strictly discouraged.

⛔ Copy/Paste the entire content from any text generation AI tool like ChatGPT without adding your thoughts and ideas.

⛔ Using AI to rewrite other blog posts.

⛔ Asking AI for everything, where you just become a rule-following bot to do whatever the AI tells you to do.

So, what’s allowed at The Research Nest and considered “AI assistance” (and what we recommend to everyone else)?

✅ Using AI to amplify your thoughts or express yourself better. You can give YOUR thoughts to an AI tool like ChatGPT and ask it to rephrase/explain them in a better way. You can use parts of such generated content in your article as and when required.

✅ Using text-to-image AI like Midjourney, Dalle-2, Stable Diffusion, etc., to add relevant images to your content. You can duly attribute them in the image caption.

✅ Using AI to generate some commentary and insights surrounding some topic.

✅ Using AI to generate generic sections of your articles like summaries, TL; DR, introduction, conclusion, code samples, etc., where it makes sense to use AI responsibly, operating over and extending on your own content. In this case, you can add the “AI Assistance” attribute for just that section of the article.

✅ Using AI as an AI in your content. For example, you are writing an article on Climate Change, and you can ask AI what it thinks about climate change as a part of it. The generated responses can be used as it is, stating what AI thinks in this context.

When is it OK to NOT add the “AI Assistance” attribute even if you used AI in some capacity in your work?

✅ When you use AI to create drafts from a list of points and format that you give. In this case, if all the points and the entire structure is conceptualized by you, we can consider it as your own work, while AI is just helping you with connecting the sentences. If the novelty in the content is completely coming for your points, we believe it's fair to consider it as your own work and AI just helped with saving time.

✅ When you use AI to get feedback on your content and then make improvements based on the same. Here, you ultimately edit your drafts and AI is used only in the capacity of a critic.

✅ When you use AI for less than 30% of your content and such content doesn’t fall under the “novelty” category. These could be some boilerplate introductions or connecting sentences.

✅ Brainstorming with AI. You can use ChatGPT and other such tools to brainstorm, go back and forth with ideas, collect information, inspiration, and formulate your thoughts, and then come over and combine it all to write your draft. Ultimately, it’s your own article and AI is used in the capacity of a research assistant and a thought companion.

What to do when you use AI assistance?

1. Thoroughly review every line of your content to ensure that it has your tone and voice and expresses the content exactly the way you wanted it to be.
2. Fact-check your article. Remember, AI tools are not 100% accurate. A good practice is to hyperlink all facts and claims in your content to their original sources.
3. If you generate code using AI, make sure that you have tested it yourself and it works as expected and intended.
4. Make sure all the necessary attributions are mentioned.

While generative AI is awesome, it’s not necessarily something that will give you an edge. In fact, it decreases the quality of your content and the capabilities of original thinking. Everyone has access to them, creating a level playing field, and relying entirely on them doesn’t help differentiate yourself, your voice, your vision, and your personal brand from others.

It’s great for churning content, but anyone can do that now, and such content loses its value. It will be considered as spam. Our goal is to create content that AI never can (at least, without personal and custom human intervention) and content that uniquely resonates and connects with human readers.

Use AI to be efficient, amplify thoughts, and break writer's blocks. Don’t use it to churn out soul-less content just for the sake of it.

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