I Learned Everything About ChatGPT So You Don’t Have To
5 Things Every Writer Should Know About Generative AI
In the months since ChatGPT launched, it’s been nearly impossible to keep up with the countless articles written about the chatbot.
As a writer, I wondered if ChatGPT would decimate my entire career, or go the way of the metaverse, becoming a much-hyped technological innovation that no one actually uses.
Teaching Myself ChatGPT
Most people I know have heard about ChatGPT and used it a little bit. However, many are either too busy or too hesitant about the technology to immerse themselves in the world of AI.
Over the next month, I decided to learn everything I could about ChatGPT, to help myself and others answer important questions like: How the heck does ChatGPT work? Will it take away my job? Could I get a job using ChatGPT? Will robots replace humans in the great race to erase humanity on planet Earth as we know it? Can ChatGPT help me write less passive-aggressive emails?
Why Creatives Might be Best at Using GenAI Tools
I got my first taste of the ChatGPT hype machine at SXSW in March. During a panel on “The AI-Powered Future of Creativity”, Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed, said that AI would shift culture because it has the ability to change the way we communicate.
“When people hear about AI, they think it’s going to be precise — they think it’s this tech thing that’s going to be really good at math,” Peretti said. “The people who are best at using these generative AI tools are not the engineers or mathematicians: it’s people who are creative.”
Peretti compared generative AI to the introduction of mobile phones and social media, in that tools like ChatGPT are easy to use, accessible and useful.
Here are 5 Things Writers Should Know About Generative AI:
1. ChatGPT isn’t writing, it’s ‘word math’
ChatGPT is an AI language model designed to make mathematical predictions about language. ChatGPT isn’t actually writing: it’s predicting what word should come next. Because of this, AI-generated writing tends to sound a little, well, robotic. But that doesn’t mean that the writing it produces can’t be useful, informative or inventive. Understanding how ChatGPT works is key to figuring out how you can use it for your own writing and copy purposes.
2. Prompting is the new copywriting
As part of my quest to teach myself everything I could about ChatGPT in a short period, I enrolled in an online course taught by Lance Junck, a ChatGPT enthusiast who runs his own business dubbed The GPT Agency.
Junck often reminds his students that when it comes to generative AI, “garbage in, garbage out”. This means that when you put in a garbage or half-assed prompt into ChatGPT, you’ll get a worthless or laughable result. In order for ChatGPT to produce high-quality copy at the level of an experienced writer, you need to get good at writing prompts.
Writing detailed prompts following the RELIC model (Role, Exclusions, Length, Inspiration and Context) is a skill in and of itself. While it takes time to get good at prompting, knowing how to do this will definitely be an asset for professional writers who can polish and tweak the copy ChatGPT provides.
3. ChatGPT is pretty good at some types of writing — and pretty terrible at others
When these types of chatbots were first introduced, there were plenty of articles about how bad generative AI was at conversational English.
“ChatGPT can write you anything, but it can’t write you anything good,” opined Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic. “When a bot calculates the probability of one word following another, clichés become very likely, because they’ve appeared so many times before.”
This is where I think it’s important to distinguish between writing intended to inform and writing intended to persuade or tell a story. If you ask ChatGPT to write an article explaining how [blank] works, the result is pretty good: you’ll get a clear, well-written piece on most topics and subjects with information cited from (mostly) reputable sources. You can ask ChatGPT to explain something to you at the level of a third grader, or as a PhD candidate. It does both these things quickly and without much error.
However, the cracks in the ChatGPT machine learning start to show when you ask it to write marketing copy with a specific tone or style. The result is often close to what you want, but not quite. Generative AI can’t replicate the ability to tell a compelling story that hooks readers: that’s the job of creatives and storytellers who use their unique voice and lived experiences to write what no one else can.
4. If you’re a writer, ChatGPT will not replace your job, but it will change it
Because ChatGPT can spit out decent copy in a matter of milliseconds, certain types of writing previously written by humans will be replaced by AI. This is a good thing for writers, who no longer have to spend their days chewing away at the chum of content writing for the internet, crafting bland SEO copy, product descriptions and metadata about what time the Super Bowl starts just so that it boosts web traffic.
So much of the writing I was tasked to do at my previous job was informative and not that exciting, but it met the needs of whatever project I was working on. I now wonder how much time I might have saved if I’d been able to use ChatGPT to write a first draft, or input a rough draft into the tool and ask it to revise what I’d already written.
5. Writers will be expected to learn and use ChatGPT
Even if you have no interest in AI and are already sick of hearing people talk about it, the (virtual) reality is that it’s unavoidable. From what I’ve learned about ChatGPT in the past few months, it’s clear to me that in the near future, writers will be expected to know how to use generative AI and implement it into their writing and editing process.
In some ways, I think this will be a good thing, because rather than plugging away at the keyboard, typing out rote copy that a computer could (and now can) do, writers might have an opportunity to focus more on the creative, storytelling aspects of their work. Writing will never be easy, but maybe with a little help from AI, we can make our writing better in less time.
*In case you were wondering, I did not use ChatGPT to write any part of this article. But maybe I should have? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
