May Habib: AI and Content at Writer.com – Episode 120

Content Strategy Insights

May Habib The use of artificial intelligence in content design and content operations is emerging and evolving quickly. As is the case with many new technologies, it might at first look like robots are coming to steal jobs from humans. But, according to May Habib, AI is more likely to create more, and more interesting, work for people. May and her team at Writer are developing an AI platform that's designed to support human creativity and improve content operations. We talked about: Writer.com, her startup that makes an AI writing and editing platform the difference between large language models and actual AI how AI can support human creativity and content productivity the give and take between AI and humans across the continuum of creative and writing processes the evolution of the traditional style guide with the arrival of AI the difference between genuine human creativity and pseudo-creative AI creations the implications of AI for the structure of the content workplace the kinds of writing that will always be created by humans the many ways that AI-driven innovation can be injected into content practice one of the most exciting possibilities for the application of AI to content: to achieve the kind of brand consistency you can only get to this point by having the same leadership and the same talent working together for 20 year May's bio May Habib is CEO and co-founder of Writer, an AI writing assistant for teams. She is an expert in natural language processing, AI-driven language generation, and the evolving ways we use language online. Connect with May online LinkedIn Writer.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfHKuQ7fJv8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 120. Your news feed has included a lot of stories lately about artificial intelligence. From reports on auto-generated news stories to concerns about sentient bots, AI seems to be everywhere. Another place that AI is appearing is in the content workflows at prominent tech companies and other businesses. May Habib is the CEO at Writer.com where they're building an AI writing and editing platform designed to support human creativity and improve content operations. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 120 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us May Habib. May is the founder of Writer.com, an AI writing assistant for content folks. Welcome to the show, May. Tell us a little bit more about what you're up to these days at Writer. May: Hi, Larry. I am so excited to be on the show, and I am day seven Covid, so my occasional cough is not contagious, I promise. Writer is an AI writing and editing platform. We are about 50 employees based in San Francisco. We are remote first, so lots of us working all over the place. I myself split my time between London and San Francisco. We are on a super fun mission of really helping infuse AI and technology throughout this writing continuum, a continuum of ideation, writing, editing that all of us go through when we're working on original content for work. It's been a super, super amazing ride building out this product with, I think, some of the smartest people in the content world as customers. Larry: I know some of them, and I think you're right. But it's interesting, and you said that you spent your time between London and San Francisco. One of the things like AI is always in the news these days. Just in the last few days, The Economist experimented with writing their lead story with AI, and there's also, we're right around the time of the famous Google engineer who thought his bot had turned sentient. Do you have to deal with that in your job? Like the ongoing glut of news about AI and it's... Well, I guess I'd love to get your take on how accurate do you think the news is about AI,