Category: Tech Comm

How Some Technical Writers Use AI

For Context and Background

I started following Tom Johnson’s blog in 2016. I credit him with helping me relaunch my career in tech comm after a layoff in 2009 and several years struggling as an underemployed single mother. He always has his ear to the ground and writes about “trends” before they become trends.

More recently, I’ve connected with a number of other technical writers on social media, including Fabrizio Benedetti. He’s based in Barcelona, enjoys retro tech, and writes thoughtful posts about the profession.

Both men are on the developer docs side. While I focus on end user docs, their content and opinions are still valuable to me (plus there’s a lot of crossover between the two types of tech comm, at least at a high level).

So when they post about how they use AI in their jobs, I read with interest.

My Love-Hate Relationship with AI

On a personal note, I have yet to find a use for AI in my tech comm job, although I do play around with it in my personal life, and I’m training on Salesforce’s Agentforce (a topic for another time).

But in my role as a Technical Content Manager, there is one huge show stopper that prevents me from engaging with AI at all, and that is data privacy.

The company I work for builds B2B software products, and our user documentation is protected by a client login. I cannot expose that documentation in any way to open source AI — whether it’s Claude.ai or the OxygenXML Positron Assistant, which is built on the OpenAI API. If I did, I would have to agree to release proprietary information into the public domain.

Although some newer content management systems (CMSs) incorporate AI “copilots” or “assistants” that don’t expose your data, those tools are just laughably expensive. One tool developer quoted $85K a year for a subscription to their cloud-based CMS.

Technical Writer Posts on Using AI

My personal experience is only one use case — your mileage may vary as they say. With that in mind, I wanted to share three posts about AI use cases from other technical and content writers:

  1. Unpacking Issues from AI (Tom Johnson)
  2. How I’m Using AI as a Technical Writer (Fabrizio Benedetti)
  3. Am I the AI Luddite? (Alan J. Porter)

A Note on ‘Luddites’

“Luddite” has been a pejorative for as long as I can remember, conjuring up images of old men shaking their fists at clouds.

But the original Luddite movement was not anti-technology at all. It was pro working class and promoted socially responsible progress vs. exploitation of resources and people.

For an excellent discussion on the history of this movement, check out the following interview from the Majority Report.

Does Everything in Tech Need to Be a ‘Revolution’?

This is an early morning hot take with more questions than answers. It’s a response to a LinkedIn piece I read over the weekend — Why Technical Writing Needs Its Next DOCX Moment. I don’t agree with a lot of it, though it’s not my intent to call out or criticize the author. I just wanted to push back against an overly rosy “I drank the Kool-Aid” view of AI, especially as it relates to tech comm.

As technical writers, we are not required to jump on bandwagons or cheerlead for every emerging technology. It’s okay to hang back behind the marching band and the baton twirlers. Healthy skepticism and asking questions are part of the job.

Some of my questions are:

  • Is AI a “revolutionary game changer” or a glorified automation tool?
  • If it’s the latter, if AI is merely a next gen automation tool, what’s wrong with that? Why does every technological advancement need to be “revolutionary”?
  • Why aren’t incremental changes or enhancements good enough, as long as they’re beneficial to end users?

Despite the fact that the AI bubble burst earlier this year, the big tech firms are racing to outdo each other to build gargantuan data centers plus dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them going, as they continue to make false promises about the technology. That sounds utterly insane to me.

I am not opposed to AI or any other new technology per se. I just think we need cooler heads to prevail over the more mercenary impulses of the tech industry. Technical writers (in our advocacy for users) and tech journalists (who help shape the larger discourse) can and should inject a healthy dose of critical thinking into the mix.