ChatGPT is high on the hype cycle, but I find it helpful as a writing partner and copy editor.
I don’t rely on ChatGPT to author new content, instead I ask it to critique my content and provide structural guidance–grammar, syntax, continuity, and flow. It provides advice on making sentences tighter and perhaps more concise or impactful depending on my needs.
In the simplest cases, I’ll just ask it for a synonym or to clarify punctuation usage. In other cases, I’ll feed it a paragraph or paragraphs and seek feedback.
I find ChatGPT to be a tad verbose for my taste especially when proposing dialogue tags. I simply ignore most of them and move on.
I know authors who leverage generative AI to do more heavy lifting, but they are writing more mainstream content, so the body of trainee work is more extensive.
Since generative AI is a large language model trained on a massive quantity of, in my case, fiction, it will be predisposed to render advice with this bias. Keep in mind that most of this training is on material that is mediocre at best–quantity over quality.
Nonetheless, it does understand sentence structure and grammar fundamentals, so it can still be invaluable.
One of my favourite responses is that my submission is already concise and pointed.
As my current endeavour has a prostitute protagonist, I was amused when after I reminded the AI of this and received the response that it was painfully obvious that she was a sex worker. Certainly, to the point.
Follow me as I share my generative AI exploits.
Ridley Park 