This is an as-told-to essay based on an interview with Morgan Young, a 20-year-old content creator. She says artificial intelligence tools help her brainstorm ideas and pitch herself to brands.
The interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
I'm a student, an intern at an entertainment company, and a content creator. I use generative AI for all of these roles, and I find ChatGPT and chatbots to be the most helpful.
I started using ChatGPT within the first three days that it came out. I'm proud to be one of the early adopters.
I learned about ChatGPT from Reddit, TikTok, and AI creators on LinkedIn. Then, as it became more popular, I started reading articles and experimenting with it myself to better understand how to use the technology in my own work.
Now I use it every day to outsource certain tasks. But while it does help cover some of the things on my to-do list, it doesn't necessarily cut down the time it takes me to do my work. For me, the biggest benefit to using tools such as AI is not so much saving time; instead, it's about making my final products better.
AI speeds up the process of researching and pitching to brands
LinkedIn, where I post content about Gen Z, college, and career growth, is my main platform. I'm a LinkedIn Top Voice and have more than 14,000 followers. ChatGPT helps me create a lot of my content and build my online brand.
I most often use it for tasks including brainstorming and researching.
When researching, the questions that I ask are completely subjective, so it's hard to say whether the answers the chatbot gives me are right. But I have realized that the more specific I make my prompts and the more context I give, the more helpful and relevant the answers will be. That's why my requests are typically two paragraphs long with as much information as I can include. But I make sure to never reveal anything confidential.
I've also started using it to improve my outreach for brand partnerships.
As a creator, I'm responsible for creating any pitches I send to brands I hope to work with and for communicating with them throughout the process. But I am not great at business writing — including creating contracts and using formal business language — so it's helped me improve those skills and ensure I come across as professional.
By experimenting with it, I'm using the suggestions AI provides to learn from. Learning through experimentation has helped me become a better businessperson and improve the professionalism of my brand.
AI helps boost my creativity and break writer's block
Because LinkedIn content is mostly written, everyone always asks me, "Do you use gen AI to write your content?" The answer is "no."
But I do use it for generating ideas. There are few days where I have writer's block anymore because AI helps me come up with ideas I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, specifically for headlines and hooks.
I once conducted an experiment to see whether the hook that I came up with or the hook that generative AI came up with for the same post would perform better, and the one that generative AI wrote did better.
Plus, my headlines used to be in the form of an email subject line — simple and straightforward. But when I recently put out a post on "summer internships for 2023," I used generative AI to pose the headline as a question and as an attention-grabbing statement so I could see which one I liked best.
AI is definitely effective in using key words and buzzwords to make content catchier, which is helpful because my brain doesn't always work that way.
But for the things I do generate with AI, I have to edit them heavily. My content usually does well because people enjoy my sassy, unfiltered, Gen Z voice — that's not something I can get out of AI.
