1. Brainstorm with AI
Since AI-generated writing can get penalized in some contexts (this is more of a problem in SEO-driven work than creative writing), one of the best ways to use these tools is actually not to use them for writing.
Use them for brainstorming instead. When you’re stuck, chatbots are incredibly useful as idea partners you can bounce thoughts off in seconds.
You can:
- Ask for article ideas
- Share an unfinished draft and ask what should come next
- Request feedback on a section you’ve written
- Ask for pros and cons of an idea you’re considering
Also read: How to use AI to write a book
2. Use AI to Generate Writing Prompts on Demand
When we say "prompts," we don't mean instructions given to an AI. Many stalls in the writing process stem from not knowing where to start. A prompt provides a set of constraints and direction.
Consider these examples:
- Turn a stuck paragraph into five next-step prompts “Here’s my paragraph. Give me 5 prompts that would naturally lead to the next section.”
- Create scene-specific prompts for fiction. “Give me 5 prompts that force my protagonist to make a decision about X.”
- Get prompts that refine your angle for nonfiction: “I’m writing about X. Give me 5 prompts that would help me write a stronger intro with a clearer stance.”
- Ask for prompts based on constraints: “Give me 5 prompts that can be completed in under 150 words,” or “Give me 5 prompts that require a contrast between two ideas.”
- Use prompts to rewrite weak sections. “Generate 5 prompts that would help me rewrite this paragraph with more tension.”
Also read: How to Write Effective AI Art prompts
3. Use AI for Research
As a writer, you know that research can be as time-consuming as writing, especially when dealing with statistics, tables, or unstructured data. Have you ever tried condensing a research paper into a note?
Fortunately, this isn't that much of a problem anymore because AI is arguably best at summarizing. Here are a few ways you can take advantage of this technology:
- Upload a document and ask for the key points only.
- Give the AI two sources and tell it to list where they disagree.
- Extract usable facts from articles, like dates, numbers, quotes, and direct claims.
- Ask what questions the material doesn’t answer. Those gaps often become the strongest parts of your final piece.
You can replicate all of those workflows by simply copying a source text and pasting it into any AI chatbot.
Also read: The best AI tools for research
4. Use AI to Proofread
Proofreading is one of the easiest tasks to outsource to AI because it’s mechanical, repeatable, and easy to verify. You’re not asking the model to write anything creative — it just has to catch mistakes in your writing and fix them.
If your text is long (more than a couple hundred words), this works best when you give AI text snippets instead of the whole text at the same time. This is because AI has a limited context window — the more text you give it, the less accurate it becomes.
5. Use AI to Rewrite in a Different Style
Here’s a fun angle that doesn’t get mentioned much — what would your text sound like in a completely different style? Playing with stylistic transformations can spark interesting ideas. For example, what would a Kevin Hart–style joke look like if it were written in a formal tone? That’s an extreme case, but there’s a more practical use.
When you’re working on a long piece and your style drifts, certain sections can start to feel out of place. In those moments, you can ask an AI tool to bring that section back in line with the rest of the text. It saves time without turning the whole piece into AI output, as long as you don’t run the entire document through it.
7. Use AI to Rewrite in the Voice of Authors you Like
In the same vein, if you love a particular writer’s style but can’t quite match it, you can use AI to approximate it — as long as you’re not presenting the result as that author’s actual work.
This is simple to achieve. Give the chatbot:
- A short sample of the author’s writing
- The text you want rewritten
Then ask it to blend the two. If the writer is really well-known, the model often already has a sense of their voice, so you can name them directly without providing an excerpt. For example:
- Hemingway for clean prose
- Shirley Jackson for unsettling atmosphere
- George Orwell for straightforward clarity
8. Use AI as a Writing Coach
More to the point. When you can’t quite land a specific style, it might simply be that you don’t yet know what actually defines it — or you haven’t practiced it intentionally.
Admittedly, using AI as a writing coach is a common suggestion, but it gets more useful when you push it past basic critique. Asking for a list of flaws is fine, but you can get a lot more out of it.
Try asking a chatbot, for example, to explain rhythm, or to walk you through how to train your ear for it.
Questions like that force the model into deeper territory, and you’ll usually get insights you haven’t encountered before — focusing on a specific element of craft tends to produce richer, more technical guidance instead of surface-level advice.
9. Stress-Test Your Angle
Another angle worth exploring is using AI to stress-test your arguments before you publish anything. When you’re too close to a piece, it’s easy to overlook weak points or gaps in logic.
Instead of asking for general feedback, ask the chatbot to argue against you as forcefully and intelligently as it can. Treat it like a debate partner whose only job is to poke holes in your reasoning. This works for essays, opinion pieces, and even fiction — if a character’s motivation feels shaky, a chatbot can point it out.
10. Improve Flow
When you're writing about something you know inside and out, every jump and transition feels perfectly logical to you — but that’s not always true for your reader.
Spotting and fixing jarring transitions is usually an editor’s job, but if you’re a one-person team, the best editor you can hire is AI.
To make the most of it, paste your entire article or chapter into the chatbot and ask it to:
- Map your sections into a clearer outline
- Flag paragraphs that feel out of order
- Identify missing transitions or unsupported claims
Bottom Line
Using ChatGPT (or any other chatbot) to write for you usually isn’t the best idea—especially if you’re creating content that needs to rank well in search. Even though some people say their AI-generated content performs fine, Google has cracked down on it before and likely will again.
That said, there are plenty of ways to use AI writing tools to speed up your process without taking that risk, and hopefully you’ve found at least a couple of the approaches we’ve shared here helpful. The more intentionally you use AI, the more it amplifies your real skills. Treat it as support, not a shortcut, and it becomes one of the most effective additions to a modern writing workflow.
