It’s been quite a bit a year before ChatGPT, with the major language model (LLM) now taking exams, producing content, searching the web, writing code, and more. The AI chatbot can produce its own stories, but whether they are any good is another question.
If you’re involved in writing in any way, tools like ChatGPT have the potential to complete your way of working, but at this stage it’s not inevitable that journalists, authors, and copywriters will be replaced by generative AI bots.
What we can say for sure is that ChatGPT is a reliable writing assistant if you use it correctly. If you need to get words lined up as part of your job, here’s how ChatGPT lets you take your writing to the next level, at least until it replaces you.
Find the right word
Using a thesaurus as a writer is not particularly frowned upon; Using ChatGPT to come up with the right word or phrase shouldn’t be either. You can use the bot to look for variations on a particular word, or get even more specific and say you want alternatives that are less or more formal, longer or shorter, and so on.
Where ChatGPT really comes in handy is when you reach for a word and you’re not even sure it exists: ask for “a word that signifies a sense of melancholy, but specifically one that comes and goes and doesn’t seem to have any cause” and you’ll get “boredom” back as a suggestion (or at least we did).
If characters are talking, you can even ask for words or phrases that are typically said by someone from a certain region, age, or character traits. Since this is ChatGPT, you can always ask for more suggestions.
Find inspiration
Whatever you think about the quality and character of ChatGPT’s prose, it’s hard to deny that it’s pretty good at coming up with ideas. If your imagination has hit a wall, you can turn to ChatGPT for some inspiration on plot points, character motivations, scene settings, and so on.
This can be anything from broad to detailed. Maybe you need ideas about what to write a novel or an article about: where it takes place, what the context is, and what the theme is. If you’re a short story writer, you might want to challenge yourself to write five stories inspired by ideas from ChatGPT.
Alternatively, you may need inspiration for something very precise, whether that’s what happens next in a scene or how to summarize an essay. At whatever point in the process you get writer’s block, ChatGPT can be a way to get through it.
Do research
Writing is often much more than putting words in a row. You’ll need to regularly look up facts, figures, trends, history, and more to make sure everything is accurate (unless your next literary work takes place entirely in a fantasy world you envision yourself).
ChatGPT can sometimes have an edge over conventional search engines when it comes to knowing what foods people ate in a certain year in a certain part of the world, or what the procedure is for a certain type of crime. While Google may give you SEO spam sites with conflicting answers, ChatGPT will actually return something coherent.
