I did it. I caved. I read too may articles not to. Whether people in my profession like it or not, chatbots are changing the writing landscape and teachers and professors are adapting to the new technology seemingly overnight.
My husband’s cousin says its great for generating content for his IT newsletter. It has saved him time and energy and he can tweak it by asking it to do more specific things. My husband (whose co-workers generally have grad degrees or more) said that they have used it to generate blog post titles and the suggestions have actually been pretty solid. I have seen articles interviewing realtors who say it saving them a ton of time on content creation. I have seen it suggested that ChatGPT is also a fantastic “study buddy” who can help generate questions on a topic you’re going to be tested on. It does seem to have many uses in field of writing, so I tried to see if it could title a blog post I had been thinking about composing.
They all sounded like clickbait. So I gave it some feedback and its responses were way better!
I settled on #5 and then asked it to write a blog post based on the title. That’s where it got interesting.
Its first attempt read like a Wikipedia article — factual and logical but devoid of any voice. I suggested it give me more sophisticated syntax and poetic style. Its next attempt was markedly better in style, but still too broad. I said I needed more specific stories or narratives to incorporate into the ideas of the piece. It gave an example of “cooking grandmother’s lasagna” but that’s about as close as it got to being relatable. I asked it to write more like the New Yorker. It just shuffled sentences and paragraphs around. I asked it to write like The Atlantic and it did the same thing. In frustration I finally said “this needs to be more literary” and it just couldn’t do it.
What are my conclusions? Nothing definitive because my understanding is that these bots are only going to evolve and get smarter the more we use them and tinker. It seems to have the 5-paragraph-essay (blech!) down to a science, but it could not create a unique voice. I wonder how long that will last? Let’s just say, for now I am going to keep writing my own blog posts!
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