ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022.
By that time, Daniel Adeyemi was already an established writer working for various publications across the globe.
“I learned to write and wrote by myself for a very long time before ChatGPT and other Gen AI tools came along,” Daniel said. “So I have to occasionally remind myself, ‘Hey, you have a brain. You can do this without AI. You used to write before AI chatbots came out and became a thing.’”
Daniel is an award-winning journalist, a brand and product marketer, and an avid pursuer of the truth. He’s worked and spoken extensively with over 200 founders and CEOs, regulators and investors focused on innovation in Nigeria and Africa, covering their activities and providing millions of readers with insightful information to make better decisions.
In his pursuit to tell these stories, Daniel encounters AI time and time again.
His experience - journalist, tech consultant, and brand marketer - gives him a unique perspective on AI and how writers can use it today.
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toth shop (ts): what comes to mind when you think of AI?
Daniel Adeyemi (DA): Well, you know there's always been AI. I think about YouTube and its recommendation algorithm. YouTube knows me so well. But most recently, in terms of usage, I think about the chatbots – Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude.
ts: How do you find yourself using AI in your work?
DA: I use it in different ways, but mostly to review what I write or generate more text for something I’m too lazy to write about. Now and then I learn about a new use case. Recently, I was trying to copy a table from Notion to Google Sheets, and it was difficult — I didn’t have permission to export. Then, I read on a Reddit thread that you can take a screenshot of the table, put it into the Gemini, and tell the bot to extract the text in the image to a table that I can easily copy. And it worked. For me, I use it to make life easier.
ts: In terms of your writing, how do you find yourself using it?
DA: I use it more for brainstorming than anything. If I want to interview someone on a topic, I’ll ask it to generate questions to get me started. For writing, I use it more to rewrite. It gives me a sense of what I could use or how I could rephrase things. With time, I hope I can write that way on my own. It’s like with Grammarly when you kind of know after a while what the errors are and how to fix them yourself. In all, I’m cautious about not being overly dependent on this technology.
ts: What about your perspective on AI as a journalist?
DA: It’s here to stay despite the multiple concerns that are often brought up. As a journalist, I’m reminded of how AI models are trained on other people’s content without the appropriate copyright rights. Now, I don’t think this is fundamentally an AI issue but rather a symptom of the way the world is. Publications copy stories from each other all the time – many times without attributing their source. So I tend to ask myself, “What's the difference? Many publications are doing the same thing.” I believe to truly fix this issue, we need to implement universal, higher standards.
Aside from this, I’m excited about AI’s ability to help with those low-priority tasks, like rewriting sentences or catching grammar errors. It’s definitely saving me time.
ts: What are you seeing when it comes to AI and the tech space ecosystem in Africa?
DA: I've been asking myself that question since last year. Every time people talk about AI it’s mostly OpenAI, or the big ones like Google and Microsoft. In Africa, AI adoption is still coming up. A lot of people just connect to Open AI or similar platforms. There's a lot of piggybacking on the technology that exists or the models that exist because it's very expensive to train data sets. Of course, we see it here in healthcare (radiology) to help doctors find diagnoses faster and in business to help improve processes. But it’s still very up-and-coming. I wish there was more happening but we’ll see, it’s still early days.
ts: As a curious thinker and writer, what questions are you asking about AI?
DA: On Children’s Day, I wrote a piece where I interviewed children about AI and what they think about AI because I’m curious about how children or elderly people see it. Their responses were fascinating. I wanted to know other people’s perceptions because I think I’m in the tech bubble. I use AI all the time and am exposed to it.
Another thing I’m curious about is how fast AI keeps getting better and how long the cost is going to continue being subsidized. I like that I can access most capabilities that I need for free but for how long?
For now, I’d just keep looking for more use cases and interesting discoveries.
Read Daniel’s piece “Six African Children tell us how they use AI to learn and pick career paths” and connect with him on LinkedIn today.
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