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Using AI can Revolutionise your Freelance Career
While AI has been used for years, it’s only recently that it’s become so accessible. With that accessibility and widespread usage, it’s also become a hugely debated topic. Discussions of ethics and theft have become rampant, and it’s very much understandable with things like AI-generated works of art that have been trained on copyrighted art created by human artists. Having said that, AI becoming so easily accessible isn’t always a bad thing; for small businesses and freelancers it can be a huge time saver, a tool to improve productivity and even creativity. Industrial Vision Systems have discussed use cases for small and medium businesses, but as a freelancer I wanted to weigh in with a few of the ways that AI has helped me, and hopefully will help you too.
As a Content Creator - Idea Formation:
I love my travel and I love that I’m able to make a living creating content about it, but even with having my dream job I still struggle with writers block sometimes. There’s a kind of disconnect that comes from being creative for a living - when you’re doing it to pay the bills, not just as an outlet, you can sometimes lose the spark. This is where AI comes in.
As a content creator, you need to have a constant line of content in the works, and sometimes the ideas run dry. This is when I turn to tools like VidIQ or Buffer’s AI idea generator. With Buffer, you can give it a topic or a few key words and it’ll spit out some suggestions. If you have YouTube, VidIQ’s AI tool is absolutely genius; connect it to your YouTube channel and it’ll analyse channels with similar keywords and commonly searched questions to suggest topic ideas for your next video. Just make sure that if you decide to make your own take on a video that someone’s already done, instead of using a suggestion from the search data, you credit the original creator.
As a Writer - Checking Grammar and suggesting Rewrites -
When you write for a living you can easily get a little jaded, and it doesn’t matter how many times you re-read your own work - if you’re tired and over-worked you just aren’t going to spot that error. Using AI tools to proof-read your work, spot any errors and suggest areas to re-word can help you to improve the piece of writing you’re on, as well as being more mindful of making the same mistakes in future. If you’re a blogger, you can also put a piece of writing into an AI tool to check for SEO - it’ll give you a score and suggest areas to improve.
As a Small Business Owner -
As a small business owner you end up wearing a lot of hats - I’m a social media manager, writer, photographer, videographer, editor, business manager and accountant. Try as I might, I can’t be good at everything, and this is where AI comes in. Maths is never my strong point and I despise Excel - I often find myself struggling to do something even basic. With AI, you can explain what you need to achieve and ask it to create a specific formula for you. I know this might not be the most exciting use, but for someone who sorely lacks a head for numbers this is an absolute life saver.
Honestly, there are so many different ways that you can leverage AI to improve your work. Whether that’s helping you to think of new ideas, improving your content’s visibility on the web, coming up with social media strategies, analysing your work and looking for improvements, or even helping you to get your accounts done with just a little less stress, you’re guaranteed to find an AI tool to help you. There are some murky sides to AI - I would never suggest using it to create content for you, as AI models are often trained by using other peoples’ work without their consent, but a lot of the idea generation comes from leveraging search data which is publicly available and free to use. As long as you do your research and ensure that you’re using AI in a more ethical way, it’s absolutely something that you should consider to improve your productivity.
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