After an earlier mini blog post, How Can Writers Use AI, that briefly discussed some ways medical writers use generative AI, Damiana shared how she uses AI to overcome the dreaded writer’s block. Overcoming writer’s block is a great example of how to use AI as a tool to stimulate human creativity.
Human creativity, ethics, empathy, and strategy (the complex kind requiring a pivot to respond to unscripted external forces) are just four areas in which AI can’t compete with humans. Medical communicators who have refined their practice employ these skills at complex levels every day. Whether it’s writing a script about the daily life of a lung cancer patient for the sales team of a pharmaceutical company soon launch a new lung cancer drug or strategizing the best way to write a grant proposal to be responsive to an agency’s needs, medical writers with advanced practice use skills AI has not mastered every day.
AI has humans beat, hands down, at rote tasks. Usually the example given here is factory work, assembling cars for example. But medical communicators perform plenty of rote tasks—applying a style guide to a manuscript, for example, or filling data into a formulaic document—and AI can perform much of that work faster and cheaper than a human can. If your practice primarily involves this sort of work, you are right to be worried about AI coming for your job.
Part 2 will discuss the benefits of refining your practice, not just to get ahead of AI but to keep your work fresh and interesting, too.
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