To GPT or Not to GPT: Exploring the Role of AI in Modern Writing
Finding the Balance: Writing with ChatGPT for Maximum Effectiveness. What is the Impact of ChatGPT on the Future of Content Creation?
Setup
As the world was going through the explosion of ChatGPT and everyone was starting to loose their mind both in awe and mesmerisation followed with the chaotic thought that comes with the advent of any new progress made in the field of A.I., that is what all fields will become irrelevant with this new technology.
I during this moment was exploring the power of writing for the first time in my life and had started to write some stories on medium just for fun.
So my little curious brain wanted to pit ChatGPT vs. Human( me in this case as I was the only guinea pig available for this experiment) in a battle of Content Writing and more in terms of writing in general. This later turned out to be an experiment in which I explore the role of AI in Modern Writing and how effectively we can use it in our day-to-day writing activities be it your diary writing at night or your content writing on any social media platform.
So to start with I choose fairly simple topic like AWS EC2 and ECS and asked ChatGPT to produce the stories for me . You can go through the links below to see how ChatGPT performed. The stories were entirely written by ChatGPT, I just simply presented it with the prompt and it popped out the answers for me to copy paste it in my story.
Why Do We Write?
Well before looking at the Impact of using AI for Content Writing, I briefly want to touch on the topic of why do we write? Then we can better understand how to use AI to achieve the main motive behind our writing.
I know I am still a novice in the world of writing, but since I have started exploring this avenue I came across 2 kinds of writings and the various reasons to why I do each one of them
- Diary Writing: This is the kind of writing you do if not on daily basis then on most of the days. It is something that is personal to you, maybe a very limited number of people even know about this journal that you write. Well there can be a number of reasons as to why one choose to do, so starting from simple ones like it can just be a hobby, interest, a place to record the daily activities and go through them in your old age along with your partner, dopamine release etc… Or it can be more than that, it can be a way to relax your unsettled mind, it is a way to fight depression ( yes it works!! ), relieve your mind from the negative emotions, fight anxiety and so on…
DISCLAIMER!! People who know me do not try to bust into my house trying to find a diary cause you will not :P
2. Content Writing: This can be literally a form of writing that you willingly expose it to the public. It can be your blogs, newsletter, article on some Social Media like Medium, Books that you write or anything else. And it can cover any topic be it Fictional,Non-Fictional, Educational, Tech, Sci-fi, Poetry, Romance literally anything. As for the reasons why one choose this form of writing can be limitless some of the most common ones in my opinion are hobby, interest , passion , want to spread the knowledge that you have, a way of keeping yourself busy, wanting to contribute with others to complete a story, side hustle to earn some extra bucks , it can be your job or profession as a full time content writer.
Reasons to GPT
As stated in the setup that I had used ChatGPT to write two full stories I had a lot of mixed feelings and needed time to get the turmoil of my emotions in place. So let me try to present my view point on the reasons to GPT for Content Writing ( note that I will be talking about only content writing in this section, my view points on diary writing are covered in the later section )
- Speed: No matter how good a writer you are , no matter how fast you can type, heck you can even use a voice-text translator but you will not be able to match the speed of ChatGPT when it comes to writing where you can literally write an entire book on any topic in a single day given you are good enough in writing the correct prompt for those. But hey it’s quite easily possible. Take my case the 2 stories that I wrote using AI were completed in merely 5 mins, which would have taken me atleast 2–3 days to complete.
Reasons Not to GPT
As stated earlier that I would discuss about diary writing in this section, the reason for that was I could not find a single reason why I ( personally ) would not like to use an AI to help me write down my diary given the main motives behind writing down a personal journal are inline with what were stated in the earlier section.
For me using an AI defeats the purpose of writing as a hobby in my free time. It does not induce that dopamine release which you get by writing down your thoughts when you are feeling depressed or anxious or having an unsettled mind, or trying to get your mind rid from the negative emotions.
I know some people ( like how I was earlier ) might not believe that writing might help in these things but you bet my ass it does. In a sense what I am trying to say is that you do feel that inner peace that comes from writing down your thoughts, which cannot be replaced by an AI.
Let’s now switch gears where we discuss the reasons not to GPT for Content Writing ( spoiler alert for all the optimistic AI developers stop reading now!!! )
- Loss of Creativity: well if you are a content writer or involved in any filed that require some level of creativity you and others evaluate your worth based on your creativity, which if we tend to rely too much on a AI start to lose slowly but surely. To understand this better let me present you with an example which I can relate to, since I am a developer and I tend to write code on daily basis I mostly search on google any logic that needs to be implemented and copy and paste that in my code and slowly slowly that has led to the degradation of my logical reasoning while coding, this can be related to writing where if you rely so much on an external source to do your entire task you start to lose that touch of creativity you had in the first place when you started.
- Self Learning: I guess we all must have felt or atleast heard that, you learn more when you try to teach someone else. I think writing is like that you learn and explore more when you write something down which in turn inculcates a habit of self learning. By now you have probably guessed what I will say next, using GPT for content writing lowers that aspect of us since we are getting everything served on a silver platter so no real reason to concentrate on self learning.
- To robotic: After writing 2 entire articles using ChatGPT I found that the tone of the entire article sounded too robotic and had no human touch to it. It felt like that I was not being represented in my own stories. Like every painter has their own way of painting and you can identify that by the strokes of their paint brush, by the colors and the patterns and much more… , similarly every writer has a tone, a tint of their personality and thoughts in the stories that they write. It is said, “ Every time you write, you are writing down a piece of your soul” so how can you expect a soulless AI to replicate that for you.
So in my humble I am not running around like a headless chicken freaking out that an AI is going to take over Content Writing, so in my personal opinion I do not see myself using GPT either for my Diary Writing or Content Writing since the Cons far outweigh the Pros that we have.
Finding the Right Balance
Now one might say ,” Well Yash then ChatGPT is trash and is of no use for a content writer”. I would say no that is not the case the trick is to find the right balance like I did with this article, YES!! you read it correctly this article rides right in between that sweet spot where you can make use of ChatGPT for all the right things and avoid the Cons discussed earlier.
So, here is the trick that I used for this article.
- Titles and Sub titles: I will admit this I am bad at coming up with titles and sub titles for my stories so I used ChatGPT to suggest me those. Both the title and subtile for this story came from the AI of course I selected and mix matched a couple of those to make the final one but it did eliminate me with the headache of coming up with all those on my own :P
- Not entire Story: A no brainer over here, never try to use AI to write down your entire article you can always take help in the form of some sentences here and there from the GPT but try to remain as original as possible. This article is close to 98% Me and 2% GPT.
- New Topics: AI is good at suggesting new topic for your stories or articles so use it for that, and who knows what topics did ChatGPT recommended me to write next so stay tuned …… :D
