AI can be scary—particularly the idea that Amazon will be flooded with low-quality AI-generated books, making it even harder to sell our titles. I can tell you, as it stands now, AI's writing is pretty terrible. 😂 So, here in the years before we're all replaced by robots, let's USE AI to improve our writing lives!
1. ChatGPT Can Parse Contest Results
I ran a contest for readers to pick what animal they’d like to see on the cover of my next book (if you're looking for things to put in your newsletters, readers love these little contests!). I received hundreds of submissions, and let them write-in whatever animal they wanted, so I knew it would take me a long time to sift through the results to find out which animals got the most votes.
ChatGPT to the rescue!
I pasted the list into ChatGPT and asked it to list how many times each type of animal appeared. It did. BAM! I found out how many people voted for each animal (including breeds, for example—it recognized “Russian Blue” as a cat) in seconds!
That would have taken me an hour to do!
Some essential facts about this informational series:
- I use ChatGPT-4 (big upgrade from 3)
- I'm aware it may grow up to destroy the world Terminator-style, but for now, I'm making it work for me to keep from worrying myself to death.
- AI lies. It fills knowledge gaps with things it reasons MIGHT be true. If you're using it for research, double-check everything!
- There is another AI site that provides reference links to the things it spits out called Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/ (There are a lot of AI sites now.)
- In all these examples, I'm not suggesting you use AI word for word - because it pulls information from many sources, you never know if it is plagiarizing someone somewhere.
- AI is most useful for kicking your own brain into gear!
- This article was written by a human. (me) 😁
