Webinar recording: Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective
Listen here:
Because the event has passed, this post has been updated with the webinar recording and slides.
Here’s the webinar description:
Experiments and use cases for AI from a tech writer’s perspective
Since AI has gone mainstream and promised to transform many professions, including tech comm, many of us have been exploring and experimenting with AI in different use cases. We know it’s important to learn these AI tools, but in what situations do we use AI, and how can AI help? Conversely, in what situations does AI backfire? In this presentation, I’ll share some personal experiences in using AI for different writing-related use cases, explaining what I’ve found helpful. These use cases and takeaways are all experiential, based on my experiments with using AI both in the workplace for documentation-related scenarios and writing on my blog.
My slides are here:
The event was held on Eventbrite.
More details
Here’s a little more of why I chose this topic and what I covered. Last month I published a podcast titled AI and APIs: What works, what doesn’t. In that podcast, I tried to describe 10 solid use cases for using AI with documentation, especially API documentation. However, since giving that presentation, I noticed an increasing attitude of skepticism and apathy toward AI. Whether it was just my social circles or a broader sentiment, I got the sense that people were tired of the hype about AI without seeing more direct application of AI to improve their lives and make their work easier.
Rather than focus the use cases on documentation, in this presentation I wanted to be more informal and explain how, when, and where I’m using AI tools, whether the scenarios related to documentation scenarios or not. In the presentation, I covered about 20 different use cases, with hands-on prompts to make the scenarios more concrete and relatable.
Related Resources
See 30+ ways I’m using AI in everyday writing life as a technical writer, blogger, and curious human for the post that contains more details about the prompts.
See also AI-powered API documentation in my API doc course for more in-depth articles about the main use cases covered in this presentation.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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