How To Use AI To Make Freelance Life Easier

Written by Christina Poulton

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

You will have used AI without realising: it has been in everyday use for over a decade and is powering lots of aspects of internet searches, social media, banking, and things like Alexa and Siri.

The big difference now is that it’s available for anyone to use and without needing any computer programming knowledge. Free to use AI Chatbots mean you can interact with them as if you were chatting with a person on messenger or whatsapp. Try out Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini and Bing AI to see how they work. Start with something simple like “tell me a story” or ask it for top tips for working in your industry, just to see it in action. 

AI can be used for hundreds of different things. If you’re freelance you can use AI to save time when you’re writing for work, and also as a support and access tool. 

How can AI help?

It might be that you find it difficult to get started, or get your ideas out of your head and into words. Or you might know exactly what you want to say but the writing itself is a barrier. Or just that you’ve got 50 different things to do and having something to make that easier and quicker would be welcome.

Using prompts

You can ask any of the AI Chatbots to write for you e.g. a report, funding bid or workshop plan, but they work best when you give them a clear prompt to start them off. If you say “write me a project proposal for a piece of public art” you’ll get something pretty impressive back, but it’s going to be generic and the AI will make up information to fill in the gaps. 

If you provide the creativity, then it can focus on doing what it does best- structuring information and writing at speed. A better prompt might then look something like this:

“Write me a project proposal for a piece of public art. Show how it meets the commissioning priorities of X, Y and Z. Include this information about the project…” then add some bullet points about your idea.  

Chat GPT can then generate a 500 word proposal in less than a minute, for you to adapt as you like. 

If there are writing tasks you have to do regularly it’s worth taking some time to create a prompt that works really well- test it and keep tweaking it until you’re happy with the results. Then each time you do that task you can just add in the specifics and let it run. 

Generating ideas and research

AI is good at generating ideas fast- again let it do the heavy lifting and you bring the creativity and finesse. You could give it the copy for a show and ask for 20 examples of tweets about the show, then pick and adapt the ones you like. Ask for 10 suggestions of warm up games, ideas for what to include in a workshop about marketing, or recommendations for driving traffic to your website. 

Though Chat GPT often outperforms Gemini and Bing in terms of writing style, it’s not connected to the internet in the way that the other two are, so for anything involving recent events or where you want current online sources, you may find Gemini and Bing are better. These two also include links to their sources so they can be particularly useful for research tasks e.g. how to make a music project more environmentally friendly or how to find a beatbox tutor for a young people’s workshop. 

Writing documents

As well as giving prompts, you can use AI to help you write in other ways. 

Using transcripts

If you’re more confident talking about something than writing about it, use a recording app on a phone or computer that automatically generates a transcript. Paste it into an AI chatbot and ask it to use the info to write a project description or summary, for example. You could give it a Zoom transcript from an interview and ask it to generate a case study, or copy the transcript from your youtube video and ask it to create a blog post version.

Creating document formats

The chatbots are pretty good at standard document formats so if you need an agenda, project plan, workshop outline, presentation structure or policy, just ask and then you can customise as needed.

Summarising and expanding

GPT, Gemini or Bing can take an existing document and summarise it down for you, or re-write it in a different style. If you only have bullet points, notes or tweets you can also ask them to expand this into a full piece of writing. A very simple prompt you can use would be to give it some bullet points you’ve written and say, for example, “turn this into some paragraphs about my project that I can use for a report.”

In the creative sector we spend a lot of time doing 5 jobs in one, working over hours or doing tasks which we don’t get paid for so I’m all for AI which can make it quicker and take some of that off our shoulders. Take 10 minutes to think about which aspects of your work you could delegate to an AI assistant so you can focus on using your creative brain. 

The last thing is that if you’re working on your own, you sometimes just need a bit of feedback or support. If you need a robot cheerleader, just ask and they’ll never tire of telling you how brilliant you are!

Christina has on demand training you can follow: Using AI for Writing Funding Bids and more