Though AI can be a risky tool, it’s still a tool that can be honed to make the writing process easier and improve the quality of your work.
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm in a very short period of time, as users continue to test the boundaries of what the AI chatbot can accomplish, and so far it’s a lot.
And a lot of that is negative like Samsung workers accidentally leaking top-secret data while using ChatGPT, malware scams being pushed, privacy and data collection issues, and rampant plagiarism including its use in writing college essays.
And while ChatGPT can and has been used for wrongdoing, to the point where the Future of Life Institution released an open letter calling for the temporary halt of OpenAI system work, AI isn’t all bad.
In fact, if you writing anything in any capacity, then you have used AI to enhance your writing in some way. The most common, of course, is grammar and spelling correction tools found in everything from email applications to word processors. So how do you bridge the gap between using AI as the tool it is without crossing over into plagiarism city?
In fact, there are many ways ChatGPT can be used to enhance your writing skills, and this especially goes for creative writing, which can take a lot of time and effort in terms of researching, developing, and organizing ideas and information. By using AI as it was intended — as a tool and not a crutch — it can enrich your writing in ways that help to better your craft, without resorting to it writing everything for you.Summarizing other works
A key part of any writing task is the research, and thanks to the internet it’s never been easier. However, while finding the general sources you need is far less time-consuming, actually parsing through all that information is still the same slog it’s always been. But this is where ChatGPT comes in. You can use the AI bot to do the manual labor for you and then reap the benefits of having tons of data to use for your work.
The steps are slightly different (opens in new tab) depending on whether you want an article or book summarized. For the article, there are two ways to have ChatGPT summarize it. The first requires you to type in the words ‘TLDR:’ and then paste the article’s URL right next to it. The second method is a bit more tedious, but increases the accuracy of your summary. For that, you’ll need to copy and paste the article itself into the prompt. Summarizing a book is much easier, as long as it was published before 2021. Simply type into the prompt ‘summarize [book title]’ and it should do the rest for you.
This should go without saying but for any articles or books, make sure you read the source material first before using any information presented to you. While ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that can create resources meant for future reference, it’s not a perfect one and is subject to accidentally inserting misinformation into anything it gives you.
