The Writer's Assistant: Co-Creating with ChatGPT

In addition to assembling the Healthy Executive toolkit — where I share my journey to optimal health and performance and explore how we can all leverage the power of exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, and other health and longevity practices to achieve our full potential as business leaders — I’ll also be taking you behind the scenes as I experiment with?ChatGPT?as my writer’s assistant.

As the Industrial Revolution moved humans away from physically manufacturing and towards the design and operations of machines that did the work for them, I see OpenAI reflecting the start of a creative AI Revolution. I’ll be exploring how ChatGPT can assist in the creative development process to assist brainstorming, drafting and copy editing. Additionally, I will share where I see limitations, bias and challenges with the tools.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to help write and generate content. It works by learning from what you type and suggesting words and phrases that you can use in your writing. It's like having a virtual writing assistant to help you come up with ideas and words for your writing.

How I Used AI to Come Up with the Healthy Executive

I often joke that the reason I never started a band is because I’m terrible with coming up with names. Perhaps it’s also the lack of musical talent and inability to sing or play instruments…

So I used ChatGPT to help ideate some blog names.

I wanted to then make sure I found something that I could digitally own.

I then took my planned weekly themes and asked for help labeling and organizing them in common themes.

First Impressions

I’m really impressed in the quality of the outputs and the usefulness of the tool. If ChatGPT is this good now, I can’t imagine how incredible it will be in 2-3 years.

Here are a few things I’m paying attention to as I continue to use the tool:

1. Prompt engineering?is definitely equal parts art and science. The quality of the output is entirely dependent on the quality and specificity of your input.
2. ChatGPT?should be seen as a?drafting tool. The outputs included a lot of duplication and I didn’t find all of the recommendations aligned with my voice and vision. That said, it was directionally helpful in stimulating my thinking where I had some writer’s block, and filled in the gaps where I needed assistance completing some thoughts.
3. ChatGPT produces?inaccuracies and must be fact-checked. As I checked some of the domain availability and costs, I found some errors. I would not blindly trust that ChatGPT is providing high quality and accurate output.
4. ChatGPT should be?used with intellectual honesty and transparency. We’re already seeing?college students use ChatGPT to write their essays?for them. I believe that there should be disclosures when using AI generative assistance, as it is a digital performance enhancing drug. This is not to say it shouldn’t be used - in fact, I plan on using it as part of this creative exploration of Healthy Executive. But I want to be upfront and transparent about how, when, and why it’s being used. I believe this will help others learn from it, and hopefully it also helps stimulate some conversation around ethical frameworks for hybrid human/AI creative development.

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