In a vast ocean of new AI powered products being released every day, trying to swim against the current might drown you. ChatGPT, and many other new powerful chat bots, is an incredible tool for productivity, allowing one to get quick and contextualized answers for problems, get help writing and fixing code and, in my case here, get great help for building articles. Today, I’ll share my process for creating posts, which includes heavy use of chatGPT(and google, obviously).
Why?
First, why should you use ChatGPT or any other AI model to write an article? What are the benefits?
The answer is simple: Speed. Like any tool, it won’t do all the work for you, but it’s surprisingly capable of generating the structure of an entire article. When you ask ChatGPT, “Write me an article about X software,” it provides text that can serve as an introduction, two paragraphs, and a conclusion. This can save you a significant amount of time. With GPT-4, you could even copy and paste an entire book’s worth of text on a subject, ask for an article, and the AI would do an even better job. Within seconds, you can go from having nothing to having half of an article completed.
Conception
First, it’s important to point out that chatGPT isn’t good at doing everything for you. As I’ve pointed out in a previous post, those bots are not always accurate and sometimes they will straight up lie. You can’t write full articles with just a chatbot alone, regardless of how advanced, you need to know about the subject beforehand or to look up on google for trustworthy sources about the subject.
In my case for example, I only ever ask it to write articles about subjects I know: Game making, Technology, Video editing, etc. Sometimes, if I’m out of ideas, I’ll ask it to give me a list of topics that I can write about. ChatGPT is surprisingly good at this kind of task, since each topic is just a small basic idea, and the bot has memory of what was written beforehand(so asking for new ones not listed previously is easy) it can give you quite an extensive, varied, list.
Validation
As I said before, chatGPT isn’t always accurate nor does it always speak the truth, so with the basic article written by it what I do is I verify all the information written, ensuring only what is correct remains. After that, I do some re-writing of some of the text in the paragraphs, since chatGPT isn’t that good of a writter sometimes(repeating names or terms too often a lot of the time), including additional information.
Whenever I’m lazy however, I might also prompt it to include information about an extra thing. With its memory of whole conversation, you can ask the bot to simply re-write the whole article including X or Y and it’ll try doing so but remember: chatGPT uses GPT-3.5 currently, and it only knows things that happened up until 2021. So until a GPT-4 based chatbot becomes available, which should allow you to copy paste multiple articles about an subject as context before asking it what you want, you may not always get the information you want or need.
Final details
To end the article, comes the manual part: Adding images, tags, setting up specifics for the SEO, etc. No matter how good chatGPT becomes, without images to illustrate and beautify, an article isn’t complete. Tags are super important for making it easier for users to search for content they want in the website and for search engines to better understand and index the pages and, while it can suggest some, it’s not the best at it just yet.
To conclude, I re-read the whole thing once or twice, and ask chatGPT for feedback on my writing. It’s not the best at criticizing writing style but it is surprisingly good at coming up with suggestions for what could be added. It can also help point out spelling mistakes, and suggest different ways of saying the same thing, which helps avoiding repetition.
