ChatGPT: My New Assistant

AI is suddenly everywhere and people are talking about it on every single platform. I recently had an article flagged by a client as being written by AI, even though I did write it all on my own. This got me thinking about ChatGPT and whether it really could take over my job as a writer! That's what everyone is scared of, right? Robots taking your job?

Embracing Technology

When I was 15 and 16, I worked as a nanny for a family. The parents were both animators, some of the originals who did the hand animations for Disney movies. This was right when CGI and 3D animation was starting to get big and they were 100% against it.

I cared for their children and watched as the parents entered into panic over the fact that their jobs were now being done by computers. They hated computers. They hated technology. They were completely against it and wanted nothing to do with this new animation software.

Eventually, they ended up working menial jobs, despite their incredible background and talents.

When this whole situation with my article appearing to be written by AI, it reminded me of that couple. The way I see it, I have a choice. I can either be scared of the new technology and hide from it, trying to get jobs and continue on my original career path, which will undoubtedly change. OR, I can embrace the future, learn more about AI and start using it to enhance my own skills.

How Can a Writer Use ChatGPT?

Obviously, I'm not going to start using AI to write my articles and the posts I create for my clients. However, it would be silly not to use such a powerful tool as an assistant. Here are a few ways I currently use ChatGPT to help me as a writer:

Generate Blog Ideas

I write dozens of articles on the same topics, which means it can be hard to come up with original ideas after a while. Instead of falling back on the same old ideas, I ask ChatGPT to generate a list of blog ideas based around the topic or keywords I've been given. This is a great way to get the mind working and often I end up combining a few of the ideas to create a whole new blog post.

Create Better Meta Descriptions

I'll be the first to admit that I'm terrible at coming up with great meta descriptions. They usually sound like something you'd read on the back of a cereal box . . . boring, dry facts. To help myself amp things up a bit, I get ChatGPT to come up with a few meta descriptions for the articles and this makes it so much easier. With some ready ideas, I can adjust them slightly and add them to the meta data on my articles.

Find Keywords

Keywords are still very important in content, but it can be tough to know where you should start. I've begun using ChatGPT to get a list of suggested keywords, which I then plug into Jaaxy to properly research. This has been quite helpful when I get stuck on ideas.

Do Some Research

Over the past 18 or so years of my writing career, I've become very, very good at researching. However, it takes a lot of time to sift through the Google results and find good websites as sources. With ChatGPT, the time I spend searching for authority sites is drastically reduced, since I can simply ask it to find me facts from authority or .edu sites. You can even ask it to give you the URLs to make life even easier.

As a side note, you should NEVER depend entirely on the AI to come up with facts for you. Make sure you go to the source and check things out. There are a lot of sites out there and not all of them are accurate, so the AI can get things wrong. Always fact check before using any information that is provided by an AI language generator.

Create Solid Outlines

I tend not to be great at outlines. I'm more of a pantser, as they say in the wrting world. Unfortunately, that's not a great way to create articles and can result in the final product sounding choppy or awkward. In my work, I have to go back once the article is done and rewrite sections to make it flow better.

ChatGPT can take a topic and generate an outline for you, which allows you to move smoothly through the topic. This is incredibly helpful for me. It's not doing the writing, just providing the main points that you can then write around. For pantsers like me, this is crazy useful.

In short, I feel like AI is here to stay and it would be silly to ignore it. Why not make use of the tools that are available to us? While change can be scary, it's often what we need to move into new levels of success.

What are your thoughts on using AI?