By Cathalynn Labonté-Smith
When you hear “ChatGPT,” do you feel an impending sense of doom, or wonder, “What the eff IS it?” ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large language model developed by OpenAI that creates human-like language when given a prompt. You are the one training Chat each time you use it. Chat saves your sessions, but you need to retrain it each time.
It’s a myth that Chat steals your content and adds it to the database. In fact, Chat is rigidly protected against its database being invaded. Although there are search engines, like Microsoft’s Bing that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to capture searches and other information about users and add it to their databases. For now, your copyrighted material that you may copy and paste into Chat is secure.
If you have used Grammarly, then you’ve used AI already. GrammarlyGO will have Chat built into it. Microsoft’s AI Co-Pilot will be built into Office, and will take meeting notes during a Zoom, summarize emails then draft replies, request a chart in Excel, and turn a Word document into a PowerPoint in seconds. Microsoft is feeling out of the market to see if we’d be willing to pay $100/month to subscribe to it. Pardon me, Microsoft? My feeling is, NO, I’d rather re-subscribe to cablevision and through in the old landline also for that kind of subscription fee.
How does chat work?
Chat generates natural language responses often indistinguishable from those produced by humans. It’s a large language model trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet. It learned patterns in language to generate natural-sounding text. It can be used to write the following:
| Content: |
Generate ideas, overcome writer’s block, or write content quickly based on a topic. |
| Dialogue: |
Chat converses with users and generates human-like responses. Experiment with it for fiction or drama. |
| Text completion: |
Chat suggests words, phrases, and sentences to complete text. Useful for writing emails, reports, cover letters or other documents. |
| Language translation: |
Translate text from one language to another. A valuable tool for translation of creative writing. Just for raw translation only, you still need a translator to make sure the translation is correct. |
I use it to suggest improvements to my writing like an on-call team of editors, or to draft questions before interviews. The first time you use it you will see why Chat is the fastest “writer” in the world, as it writes in seconds what may take a writer an hour or more to produce.
Limitations of Chat
Chat has limits, so edit and fact-check content. For example, Chat insisted my book wasn’t written by me. Also, be aware that some publishers now have policies against AI-assisted content.
Here’s some limits to be aware of with Chat:
- It uses a snapshot of what data is available online updated every six months. However, Google and other competitors claim they will make their tools live.
- It lacks common sense, so it may not understand that “I put my shirt in the washing machine and it turned into a frog” is impossible in the real world.
- If the training data is biased or incomplete, the model may generate biased or incomplete responses.
- It struggles with nuances of language and context, such as sarcasm, humor, or metaphor.
- It’s unable to understand emotions, which are important for sentiment analysis or emotional writing, so it’s better for technical types of writing.
- It can generate harmful or inappropriate content, depending upon input.
- It can plagiarize from its dataset, which includes Wikipedia and thousands of public domain sources from the University of Toronto from 2021.
Use Chat for brainstorming or to get through writer’s block. For the most part, you will find its responses too general and unsuitable for your specific piece of writing.
Power Prompts to Try
New jobs are opening up for people who know how to ask Chat the right questions. Who knows how to ask great questions? Why, journalists, authors, librarians, historians, archivists, and other knowledge professionals do.
To start, open a free Chat window at chat.openai.com/chat. Click on the Try ChatGPT button to enter a prompt. The following are only some examples of how common ways writers can use Chat to:
- Simplify a complex topic for a target audience’s reading level.
- Clone your writing style to draft new articles on topics, change the genre or other elements of a piece of writing.
- Take advantage of expert advice when building an argument. You can also use chat to simulate interviews. Imagine simulating an interview with Jane Austen? You can use it to break through writer’s block with brainstorming topics or to research topics.
Simplifying a complex topic with Chat
Writers have a wide range of audiences, from different age groups, reading levels, and subject expertise. Chat helps you adapt writing to target audiences appropriately.
> Hey ChatGPT. I want to learn about (insert specific topic). Explain (insert specific topic) in simple terms. Explain to me like I’m ________ years old. (Example: “Explain ChatGPT as if I were a ten-year-old.”)
Cloning your writing
You can also copy your writing sample into Chat and it will clone your writing style to turn it into another genre, or a different story on a new topic.
> Write about (insert text topic) as the above author would write. (Example: “Write a How-To about tight-rope walking like Cathalynn would.”)
Taking advantage of experts
Call on subject matter experts at any time in Chat not only for content, but also to support arguments.
> I will provide you with an argument or opinion of mine. I want you to criticize it as if you were
> Person: (insert expert name) Argument: (insert desired topic) (Example: “Person: Stephen King. Argument: Sequels.”)
Temperature settings
Chat can take a number of parameters that you can put within in a prompt, like temperature, that you can set from 0 to 5, with 0 being the least and 5 being the most.
>Write a flash fiction about learning to ride a horse with temperature=0
No drama in the above story, so let’s crank up the temperature with this prompt, that more closely describes how I actually learned how to ride a horse:
>Write a flash fiction about someone who has to ride a horse with no prior instruction, no saddle, and an unruly horse on a gravel road to go find the other horse that escaped. The horse gallops then suddenly stops and the new rider flies over the horse’s head and hits road hard enough to have the wind knocked out of them temperature=5
Summary
Chat is powerful, incredibly fast and will help you meet deadlines and do rough drafts quickly. Ultimately, the writer is still the creator in control of their own excellent writing, and Chat is a tool—just like word processors, grammar checkers, and other past inventions. AI in the writing profession has already been here for some time and Chat is too useful not to be the next great writing tool. After working with Chat, you may wonder how you lived without it.
A shorter version of this article appears in WordWorks 2023 Volume 2.
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Cathalynn Labonté-Smith grew up in Alberta and completed her BFA in creative writing at UBC in Vancouver. Having worked as a freelance journalist, technical writer, and teacher, she founded the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society and now lives in Gibsons and North Vancouver. Her book Rescue Me: Behind the Scenes of Search and Rescue (Caitlin Press) is a BC bestseller. |
