How I Used ChatGPT to Help Me Write (The Right Way)
And why I adopted ChatGPT so late, like just last week
Let’s talk about the idea part first, but it will relate to why I’m just starting to use ChatGPT at a snail's pace still.
Finding ideas to write about was never the hardest part of writing.
I tell you what is hard, when you can get unlimited ideas from AI, and you don’t know what to do with them.
That’s the real problem that many writers are struggling with.
This can be statistically proven by the amount of AI-generated content that is out there.
Yes, people and companies do pay for this type of content if you can package it well.
But if you are just trying to write a simple story and need some basic guidance on how to start writing with the ideas in front of you.
This is for you.
My article from last night did well, and I used this concept of narrowing down the ideas into one main idea and wrote an article about it.
The original ideas were as below (some I already forgot what they said):
No Email List
Promoting your work or not promoting enough
Write a better offer, something like that.
After editing and adding my own way of thought and voice.
1 — No Relevant Email List
2 — Not believing in self-promoting or marketing
3 — Your offer is okay, but your description sucks
The prompt was something like: “Write me 20 reasons why writers are not making money with their writing online.”
It gives me 4 sections and 20 points of why.
I looked at them and picked the one I know most about or think is more relevant to the topic that I’m going to write about, which is why writers are not making money with their writing.
Let’s do another example together.
You just need one prompt or ask a question
First, you need to know how you take in information because AI can bring you into an endless loop of ideas to read about.
It’s very much like content consumption that can also burn you out in another way.
I ask it to “give me 20 ideas about why writers are not getting traction on writing platforms”.
The first thing I realized it does more than one layer task, and the content it provides is randomly grabbed from different sources. Some of them do sound a bit like direct copy and paste, too.
With that in mind, we have to know what we want to do with it.
If you want to write ideas with your original voice, then you have to put meaning into each idea that it gives you.
I think these 8 are pretty bad. I would keep 1 and 3, and try to write something to relate back to why writers are not gaining traction.
Here’s what I would say,
The title of the article would be: “3 Reasons Your Article is Not Getting Any Traction Even if You Copy The Best Ideas”
Okay, it’s a bit too long, for this example, let’s keep it at that.
The 3 points of focus, I would put:
1 — Your headline is boring and unclear
What you’re going to do is explain how to make it easier for the reader to understand what the article is about.
2 — and 3 —, I’ll let you figure that out as this is a basic example.
My reason for using ChatGPT this late in the game
Maybe it’s the right time, and not too late.
Here’s why, if I do not have to ability to infuse ideas and write about them, then having a million ideas would not do me any good.
This is where all the AI-generated content creators are in a loop of addiction to the technology.
It’s like having a person working for you for free, and is probably 100 times faster than you in gathering information and writing out a summary in a correlated way to the prompt that was given.
What you can do is to learn how to use the information that was given to make your point.
As you write, you may discover that you’re improving your way of thinking and putting ideas together to tell a story to prove your point.
Takeaways
Using ChatGPT in your writing can lose your original voice, and the flow of words from your mind will be cut dramatically.
You should only use ChatGPT for idea generation.
If you really need it to rewrite something, it’s best to only take out the main idea of the rewrite, even if you ask it to rewrite and improve it better for 10 times, it’s still missing something.
It can’t reproduce the sense of human urgency in different situations, it can try to copy something from the internet and make it sound good, but there is a very high risk that it was just plagiarism, that you don’t know where it got it from.
Some may use it to check for grammar errors, I would use it lightly as you did, need to reread what it is trying to change before accepting it by thinking at default that AI is always right with grammar.
We still want to say things our way.
Thanks for Reading
This story was originally published on [Medium] and is cross-posted here for a wider audience.
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One of academia’s main concerns with AI is that it often fails to credit the original authors. It might avoid plagiarism because it generates new text after analyzing large amounts of data from multiple sources, but our context would likely be flagged by AI detection tools before any plagiarism checks.