Rick Buchanan's Blog - Posts Tagged "ai"
ChatGPT versus my greatest nemesis... the book blurb
Recently on the Amazon KDP forums there was lively discussion about the growing concern of low-quality chatGPT produced content flooding the Amazon marketplace and displacing indie authors who count on it as a major source of their distribution and income. Curious, I went online to find out more.
Is chatGPT the innovation that will replace creatives, a useful new tool or simply a toy that has been blown out of proportion?
I decided to go right to the source and try chatGPT myself. Here are some of my takeaways:
1. It's incredibly easy to use. There is virtually no learning curve. You simply type in what you want it to do.
2. It's fun. I found myself spending hours just dorking around with the thing to see what it could do. It ate up a whole afternoon before I actually got around to seeing how useful it could be as a writer's tool.
3. You get out of it what you put into it. I found that to get it to give me useable output I needed to type in a great deal of information. The more specific the information you provide, the better the output. To give you some context, I absolutely HATE writing book blurbs. They always come out sounding dry and sterile. I can write draft copy all day, but a two-paragraph book blurb leaves me with a pounding headache. What better use of an AI tool for a writer than to outsource this dreaded task to the machine. Below is an example of a blurb it produced for my first novel Legacy of Darkspire:
Actually, not that bad. However, I had to input a five-paragraph summary of the novel and go through three iterations of refining my original request to get that output. It takes some work and to be honest, it still isn't perfect, but 15-20 minutes of work on my part and it produced a good starting point for me to work with.
4. It isn't going away. Tools like this are expected to be game changing for the internet, impacting everything from search engines and virtual reality, to common writing tasks (admin, marketing, legal, technical writing, etc) that are often repetitive and follow a pattern. Microsoft has made a huge investment in purchasing chatGPT to incorporate into the Bing browser and its MS Office suite of products. Love it or hate it, it's here to stay. Even the OpenAI.com site itself is planning to monetize the chatGPT, setting up paid subscriptions for improved access and advanced features.
At the end of the day, chatGPT is a useful tool and a natural progression in making technology and the internet more accessible for your average person. As powerful, sophisticated and just downright cool as it is, it's still driven by human creativity and that's something that we're still a long way from being able to automate.
Is chatGPT the innovation that will replace creatives, a useful new tool or simply a toy that has been blown out of proportion?
I decided to go right to the source and try chatGPT myself. Here are some of my takeaways:
1. It's incredibly easy to use. There is virtually no learning curve. You simply type in what you want it to do.
2. It's fun. I found myself spending hours just dorking around with the thing to see what it could do. It ate up a whole afternoon before I actually got around to seeing how useful it could be as a writer's tool.
3. You get out of it what you put into it. I found that to get it to give me useable output I needed to type in a great deal of information. The more specific the information you provide, the better the output. To give you some context, I absolutely HATE writing book blurbs. They always come out sounding dry and sterile. I can write draft copy all day, but a two-paragraph book blurb leaves me with a pounding headache. What better use of an AI tool for a writer than to outsource this dreaded task to the machine. Below is an example of a blurb it produced for my first novel Legacy of Darkspire:
Actually, not that bad. However, I had to input a five-paragraph summary of the novel and go through three iterations of refining my original request to get that output. It takes some work and to be honest, it still isn't perfect, but 15-20 minutes of work on my part and it produced a good starting point for me to work with.
4. It isn't going away. Tools like this are expected to be game changing for the internet, impacting everything from search engines and virtual reality, to common writing tasks (admin, marketing, legal, technical writing, etc) that are often repetitive and follow a pattern. Microsoft has made a huge investment in purchasing chatGPT to incorporate into the Bing browser and its MS Office suite of products. Love it or hate it, it's here to stay. Even the OpenAI.com site itself is planning to monetize the chatGPT, setting up paid subscriptions for improved access and advanced features.
At the end of the day, chatGPT is a useful tool and a natural progression in making technology and the internet more accessible for your average person. As powerful, sophisticated and just downright cool as it is, it's still driven by human creativity and that's something that we're still a long way from being able to automate.
