# aicritic: make the AI your harshest critic
I now use AI to improve my blog posts (starting from this post). I love it, so let me share my process.
I fantasized about having an editor ever since reading https://mtlynch.io/editor/. I suddenly wanted feedback on whether my writing is adequate. The downside of hiring an editor: it's expensive, slow, requires talking to humans.
I realized that the modern AIs can do that quite well with the right prompt. So as an experiment I wrote my initial draft and used this prompt (with $CONTENT replaced with the draft):
What is the biggest issue in this informal draft blog post: $CONTENT
Right away it responded with this for my initial draft of this post (see @/aieditor):
The biggest issue with the draft is its lack of a clear focus and a compelling narrative. The post reads more like a stream of consciousness or a personal journal entry rather than a structured blog post. [...]
Wow. After some retrospection that felt very accurate. This is the type of feedback I want.
I then kept revising and asking the AI's opinion on my revisions using that prompt. This prompt is quite awesome!
Once the post's form stabilized, I continued to prompt it in various ways. Here are some examples:
The AI continued to provide valuable suggestions, so I kept prompting it until its feedback was no longer helpful. I went through quite a lot of revisions before @/aieditor became what you are reading now (too much to count). I never copy-pasted from AI; I always manually applied its suggestions. I don't want the AI writing the text instead of me. I just need some handholding. As a person who is wary of AI, this level of engagement still feels acceptable.
I found the process quite fun! It turns out criticism can be quite enjoyable if you ask for it and it comes from a machine rather than a person. It doesn't mean the feedback is always valid and I have to accept it. It's just nice to see my writing from a different perspective. I can highly recommend this practice if you do creative writing.
If you ever wondered how to make use of AI, well, here's the answer: ask it to criticize you. :)
published on 2025-06-16
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