What are the responsibilities for technical writers in the GenAI era?

Technical writers are a rare breed of professionals who are capable of articulating complex concepts in simpler terms. Technical writers thrived when the industrial era shifted to a knowledge-based economy where the need for software documentation and product documentation was increasing. The internet boom propelled the need for technical writing profession in the areas of project management, software product document and corporate governance.

Technical writers have built experience in many frameworks for content creation and how to deliver documentation in an agile way! However, all this foundational knowledge is being challenged given the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) capabilities.

Technical Writer with GenAI

Being a technical writer in a world dominated by GenAI tools and capabilities is a unique experience, as technical writers feel like superheroes! Given that GenAI offers many solutions in its arsenal, technical writers now have access to different tools to solve traditional problems both effectively and efficiently! Technical writers need to embrace this GenAI technology and have a mindset that this technology is going to assist them in newer ways.

New sets of responsibilities for technical writers

Being a technical writer in the GenAI era comes with new sets of responsibilities for which many technical writers are not prepared! Given that GenAI is still in its nascent stage, it is prone to hallucination, i.e., it might produce unfactual information sometimes. It is time to learn new skills and take up new responsibilities to thrive in this GenAI era. Let’s look at those new responsibilities.

1. Evaluating responses of GenAI-based agents

If your organization has deployed a GenAI-based assistive search engine that uses semantic similarity to create responses for your customer prompts, then this additional responsibility of evaluating the GenAI-based assistive search engine falls on the technical writer! Given that technical writers understand your product and services holistically, they are better suited to be gatekeepers of trustworthy content being fed into GenAI-based assistive search and evaluate its responses.

The technical writers need to learn about evaluation frameworks such as OpenAI Evals and RAGAS frameworks. They need to build new skills on how to create ground truth and assess the responses of GenAI-based search engines’ response against the ground truth.

2. Producing trusted content

To ensure that GenAI-based search engines produce accurate responses, the underlying content needs to be always accurate and up to date. If your organization is highly agile and product updates are happening every week, it is high time to ensure that software documentation is always kept up to date. This helps GenAI-based agents to serve reliable information to your customers. This also helps with the change management aspect for your customers to adopt semantic search engines powered by GenAI

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