Unlike some, I’ve been finding ChatGPT useful. I have a website I am designing, of which the client has sent me no content and the topic is obscure safety regulations. I have been using ChatGPT text instead of lorem ipsum text in places and plan to have the client approve it before launch. This is an experiment because many clients don’t have much time to give feedback, and I can see them doing something like reading the first line, saying “looks good” and then missing some wild inaccuracy buried in the middle. They know I am using ChatGPT. And I have told them that it’s not always correct. So we shall see what the results are.
As a writer, I have used it for a story that I was stuck on. I had written part of it but never outlined. And I was all up in my head about it. I just couldn’t make that next step. As an experiment, I gave Chat GPT the details of the story I had so far and then asked it to write a plot outline. The results were about 5th-grade level in my opinion and far too simple to base a story on–also ChatGPT mixed up my characters in a few places–but a few things in the outline sparked my imagination once again and I was off to the races. I am thrilled and inspired to write the story with my own words and ideas that a chatbot helped me generate.
I see AI as a tool for writing, akin to a spell-correct, not a replacement. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities. Though I have sympathy for anyone who put all their eggs in the content creator basket, I still think that anyone in the writing industry can use it to pivot and continue in their professional work, just from a different angle.
It can be hard to adjust to radically new things. It can even be hard to adjust to tiny tweaks in the things we already know. But we can’t stop progress. My attitude has always been to jump into new tech with both feet. Lest we forget the lessons that Kodak gave us. 😀
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No AI was used in the creation of this text, however some of the elements of the featured image were AI generated 😉
