Notion couldn’t have timed it much better to introduce AI functionality with the current hype surrounding AI in general due to the GPT-chat bot becoming available for public use. The Notion AI is still in Alpha, which means that you shouldn’t rely on it for anything, and there is a waiting list for access. You can sign up for the waiting list here.
As soon as Notion announced its AI functionality, I added myself to the waiting list and was given access to Notion AI during the new year. This article is based on my initial thoughts on Notion AI.
Three ways content creators could use Notion AI
As Notion AI is still in the Alpha development stage, I recommend that you be careful when using Notion AI as it could produce incorrect results. I consider it a tool that could help you do what you are doing better.
Using AI to plan content outline
As a content creator, I thought the best place to start was to ask the Notion AI to create the outline for this blog post.
I was impressed with the layout it came up with, and it made me think of things that I wouldn’t have even considered. I will use it again when I haven’t any firm ideas on how to lay out my content.
Notion AI, help me write
I gave the page the same title as the title and selected the first option listed under draft with AI, which is assist is help me write. I clicked on the option, and it opened the dialogue box pre-populated with the page title, which I accepted by clicking the dialogue box generate button.
Once the content has been created, you can keep it, try again, or discard it. For this article, I discarded it as I wanted to try the blog post option.
Notion AI, blog posts
I clicked on the Blog post option from the new page, and I had to populate the dialogue box with the blog title, as it didn’t use the page title by default. I used the same heading as the help me write example: “Notion AI, my first thoughts”.
The language used is very formal and aimed and seemed very corporate, but by changing the dialogue, I could change the audience to individual users.
Challenges of using Notion AI for content creation
Firstly we need to remember that Notion AI is still in the alpha development phase, which means that it is still in active development and things are likely to be broken or not fully developed. You can find out more about the stages of software releases here.
The AI tools in Notion, such as the writing and outlining tools, aim to help content creators improve their workflow and help them generate ideas. We need to ensure that we check and double-check what it does.
We also need to ensure that we add our perspective, whatever that is, as it is that perspective which makes us human and makes our content interesting, especially as the underlying AI technology improves.
Conclusion
Just as I came to the end of this article, I changed the title as the article became more concerned about using Notion AI for content creation to reflect this. Meaning that the titles used in my examples don’t match the title of this blog post
While writing this article, I saw an option to use Notion AI to help brainstorm, and I’m planning to explore that functionality and write about how I found it. Until then, you might want to read about my first thoughts on ChatGPT.