Tools like ChatGPT are great at generating plausible sounding words – and they produce vastly more than what you put into them. All it takes is a thoughtful command or two.
But just because the act of writing is now much less trouble, that doesn’t make reading any easier. The burden on readers is just as heavy as it was and the old rules still apply.
Words must be so thoughtfully chosen and arranged that readers can’t help themselves. Your headline must tug eyes into focus, convincing readers to invest more of their attention, so they finish the first sentence, and the next, and maybe – just maybe – they get to the end of everything you’ve written and believe you.
Writing is the product of thousands of conscious and unconscious decisions about every word we type; choices guided by an infinite personal framework shaped by a lifetime of accumulated knowledge, thought, and experience, continually tested and refined to ensure the words we choose marry with their intended meaning.
Using ChatGPT to write involves few choices – perhaps only the words used to type a prompt. That’s it – AI does the rest, using prediction to find words that you’ve thought next to nothing about.
When the process of writing has been effectively dehumanised like this, anything you ‘write’ treats readers less than who they are – humans; seekers of meaning and learning.
What a slap in the face.
And don’t think for a minute your readers won’t notice. So much AI generated text reads like word soup or, at best, it just sounds bland. It’s easy to spot and quickly written off as synthetic – a cheap imitation of original thought spat from a machine.
You might be OK with that. How about your readers – will your ChatGPT handiwork capture their attention and encourage them to keep reading?
I doubt it.
When readers sense there isn’t a real human connected to the words, message acceptability goes out the door. That’s fatal for communication, because standards of humanness are much higher for intellectual products, like stories.
Competition for attention is fierce. Words are your weapons. Machine generated text is a process geared to averageness – a rubber knife trying to poke a hole in the armour plating guarding audience attention.
Don’t be seduced by ChatGPT.
Write human for humans.