ChatGPT and the Professional Writer, Part 2

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.

In my previous post I talked about the malicious threat posed by the hack writer known as ChatGPT. Now, let’s talk about the positive things we can do with that writer.

First though, let me say that I’ve edited my share of bad writing. I cut my incisors on the tabloid weekly World Coin News, where my boss was Colin Bruce – unruly, unkempt, terminally disorganized, occasionally hungover, and altogether brilliant.

Colin was more than happy to turn the copy editing over to me, and after about 10 minutes I knew why. He had assembled a stable of beauts.

There was the writer who was a model of consistency, in that he wrote the same story – I mean the exact same story, with the very same lede, the same body, the same people quoted, and the same ending, always within 50 words of the previous story.

You know Groucho Marx’s line about how one nickel carefully used could last a family a lifetime? This guy was that way with his one story.

Then there was the fellow who was about 10 emperors into his history of the Roman Empire as told through its coins. He was on installment 43 of … oh, let’s say infinity. He made reading Gibbon seem as smooth as gliding through Harry Potter while drinking Glenlivet.

There were the users of the wrong big words, the users of the wrong small words, the writer looking to set a world record for the greatest number of words strung together without punctuation, the person who wrote a 750-word story on the back of an envelope, and the VP who wrote the story of having to set up at a trade show without help – or as he put it, “spending the whole day hauling and erecting myself.”

That was my first encounter with bad writing in all its shades, but not my last. I’ve seen it all, and cut enough words out of it to build my own University of Excess Verbiage.

Because I’ve seen so much bad writing, and because you know it when you see it, I know ChatGPT is bad.

So the question becomes, what do you do with a bad writer who’s itching to write more?

The answer is: You find ways to put them to work that don’t cause you more work.

Here are some good occupations for such a writer.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash.

Research and Organization

You have to be careful with ChatGPT because it tends to make up its own facts – like the “fact” that it’s actually 2022, for instance. But as long as you employ a trust-but-verify approach you can let ChatGPT do some of your organizational groundwork.

A perfect example is the list story. We still haven’t killed the list story, though BuzzFeed gives it the old college try every day.

If you ask ChatGPT to come up with the 10 essential tricks every skateboarder should know, it’ll produce a reasonable list. Do it a couple of times and weed out the outliers and that reasonable list becomes pretty darn good.

Especially if you have a smidge of knowledge about the subject you can have ChatGPT frame your piece, and then you can write higher-quality words on that frame.

SEO

I only have one beef with SEO: It’s anti-writer.

I know some people in the business would take issue with that characterization, to which I say: Okay, SEO isn’t anti-writer. It’s pro-algorithm.

(In fact, those folks would rather do away with the human element entirely, and make SEO of robots, by robots, and for robots, and I’m okay with that. Leave me out of the equation entirely.)

I'm proud to say I’m awful at writing for SEO. But because ChatGPT has sopped up all the internet’s egregious attempts to rank on page one, it’s actually good at SEO.

I can give ChatGPT a subject, my lede and some keywords and tell it to write an SEO-optimized lede, and it will. It’s hideous literature but it absolutely works as SEO. And that makes the pro-algorithm folks happy, which ultimately makes my bank account happy.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.

Subject lines

I’m also horrible at writing email subject lines because I write them in ways that would make me want to open an email, and I am so not the target audience.

Again, because ChatGPT has hoovered all the detritus off the floor of the internet it can craft subject lines for days that look like everyone else’s subject lines, won’t get caught in spam filters, and stand a liar’s chance of actually getting opened.

Clever? Absolutely not. Good writing? Only if you consider, “Do this one weird trick each day to empty your bowels completely,” to be the pinnacle of motivational literature.

But effective enough? Sure.

Tweets

The Jeopardy category is, “He Calls Himself A Writer But He Sucks At ...”, and the answer is, “This semi-entertaining time-waster became a cesspool of disinformation when bought by terminally weird oligarch Elon Musk in 2022.”

The question is … you know the question.

My tweets are not only bad, they’re dull. In denying my inner smart-aleck I’ve gone completely the other way. I wouldn’t click on one if Nicholas Cage punched me out and dragged my insensate finger to the mouse.

ChatGPT writes perfectly fine tweets that are suspiciously cheery for a bot that has read a billion screeds on everything from fake moon landings to Little Debbie snack cakes.

I don’t mind handing a robot the keys to that particular Yugo. Let me do something I'm actually good at.

Remember how cool it was the first time you didn’t have to use an adding machine to tabulate a long list of numbers, but just clicked “sum” in Excel? Yeah, I don’t either, but I'm sure it was epic.

ChatGPT can be like that. It gladly handles the internet-imposed drudgery so real human writers can focus on the cool stuff.

I am more than good with that. You?