There is no doubt that the arrival of AI has changed my workflows. In this post I discuss how AI is used to help create content for BetterU.
The origins of BetterU stretch back to July 2017 when I wrote my first blog post.
Almost 1500 posts later, here we are in 2025 and the humble Student Health and Wellbeing Blog has evolved into BetterU: a constantly updated showcase of student wellbeing-related activities happening at Flinders. I’m genuinely chuffed with what we’ve created and excited about what’s to come.
One of the major challenges for me, as the primary writer for BetterU (for now), is this: there’s far more content I want to publish than I have time to write.
So, in full transparency, I do use AI (currently chatGPT and Gemini) liberally in the development and writing of blog posts and articles. Amusingly though, this post, about using AI, is all my voice 😂
To be clear, there is always a person behind each and every post. I (or a colleague) bring the idea and core content for a post. AI is then used (to varying degrees) to quickly shape it into something blog ready.
A couple of recent examples:
- This post on Managing Big Emotions. I had listened to a great podcast episode with Ethan Kross, thought the content was definitely relevant to students, and then used AI to help me take the episode and turn it into tangible recommendations for regulating emotions. In the post you see my account of the episode and then AI’s contribution of the emotion regulation summary.
- I had an idea for an article about how our lives are storyable, but then it was a couple of weeks of back-and-forth with chatGPT turning my brain dump on the idea into an actual article. The end result is the story I wanted to tell, but frankly, just better.
- AI recently helped me summarise a great podcast over at All in The Mind on how our focus is changing over time and what we can do about it. AI was able to quickly extract practical suggestions from the podcast and express them in actionable terms.
Like many of you, I’m actively working out where AI can enhance my work, and where it might detract from it.
I believe using AI to summarise high-quality content and share it on BetterU is a good use case. The priority is getting you accurate and useful information, not so much that it is purely written by me.
Still, I think it’s important to be upfront about its role.
So here’s the deal: on BetterU, you can safely assume that most news-style articles have had some level of AI input. That might just be light editing and proofreading, or, at the other end of the scale, helping write sections of content based on my direction.
Our goal remains the same: to offer students practical, up-to-date information on looking after their wellbeing. And we believe using AI helps us do this better.
If you have thoughts about this – supportive, critical or curious – I’d love to hear them. Drop a comment below or get in touch with me directly at gareth.furber@flinders.edu.au.