To chatGPT or not to ChatGPT… the question for content creators in 2024

Would Shakespeare have used ChatGPT? I don’t know, but I’d like to hope not. It’s definitely hard to believe that ChatGPT or any of its many competitors could possibly create the kind of work that endures and remains relevant hundreds of years later.

Having said that, does that mean the rest of us can’t use it? For fairly obvious reasons, firms and employers have serious concerns about the use of AI for writing and content. They hire people for creativity and passion, and to apply specialist, nuanced knowledge and skill sets. This is, of course, entirely reasonable.

However, I’m increasingly of the opinion that using ChatGPT is not a definitive YES/NO sort of thing. A fellow freelancer told me recently that ChatGPT is “like having an overexcited intern in the office”, which I think is a pretty good way of thinking about it. It’s not particularly experienced, it misses a lot, the work is almost never usable in the first instance, but it certainly tries hard!

Personally, I have come to value ChatGPT as a useful tool to support the work I’m doing. Like any tool, it needs to be used correctly though, and its limitations understood. Here’s what I’ve learnt so far:

1.??? Its biggest weakness is that it’s generic and personality-less. Use it to kickstart a process, to tweak things, to get you moving in a new direction, but don’t outsource the work to AI entirely. Basically – don’t think it’s going to replace you (yet), but it might make your life a bit easier.

2.??? As with any piece of content, the brief is essential. Nothing fills a writer’s heart with more dread than a client saying something like, “Can you give me 600 words on AI for sustainability?” We need to know your messages, the themes you/your clients are about, the audience, the tone etc. Asking ChatGPT to “fine-tune this article” is unlikely to give you anything helpful. You’ll get a better response if you tell it you need it to be shorter, less technical, and must focus on sustainability data.

3.??? Headlines. I am notorious for being bad at headlines, sub-headings and so on. Full disclosure – so is ChatGBT. You can spot a ChatGPT headline from 10,000 paces. But never fear, if you go back to the over-enthusiastic intern analogy, you can see that any help with headlines is helpful if you’re as headline-challenged as I am. 9/10, using the headline as it’s suggested is a bad idea. But it gives you a starting point and you can ask it to be shorter/funnier/more alliterative too. [yes, I asked ChatGPT to generate a headline for this piece. No, I didn’t use its suggestion which was, “Would Shakespeare Have Used ChatGPT? Exploring the Balance of AI in Creative Content Creation”.]

4.??? A second pair of “eyes” - if you’re a freelancer, or you work largely alone, one of the biggest challenges with this work is the echo chamber of your own mind. Write, edit, read, tweak something often enough and you lose all sense of perspective. AI can really help here. Of course, because it’s so two dimensional, don’t consider its response a gold standard. I usually input a paragraph or two I’m struggling with and ask a specific question “please check for logic errors” or “this needs to be much less complex”. Then look at the new version and use it as a springboard to edit your original version. And a warning: ChatGPT and its peers are not confidential. Please don’t input entire articles unless you are 100% comfortable with the lack of confidentiality and always remove any confidential or identifying data on any queries you ask.

5.??? Perhaps the way I use it most is for research and understanding. Newer iterations are extraordinarily helpful to get a better grip on something without having to scroll through endless Google links. As ChatGPT itself likes to remind me, it can be wrong, so using it to understand something is not necessarily going to give you a definitive answer, but the ability to finetune the question to adapt for what I really want to know is invaluable.

So is it Shakespeare? Definitely not. But can it help? Absolutely. As with any new technology, I think what we’ll see is increased understanding of how best to use it and how to adapt our working processes to benefit so that we can streamline and speed up the more tedious parts of writing and editing, and spend more time on really finetuning the message and/or getting creative.