ChatGPT vs. Procrastination: No Contest!
Image by GrumpyBeere on Pixabay
Hello readers! It’s been a while since I last wrote on this platform. To be fair, I’ve been busy. I just started a new job as Digital PR and Content Manager for CIPR Communications while also continuing to do work on the side for a few select clients. Life is very full, full enough to be pushing the edges of the possible while still maintaining a semblance of work-life balance.
I dare say that my current workload would be impossible without help from my trusted droid sidekick ChatGPT. Prior to joining the CIPR team I dabbled in AI. Now I’m a nearly full-time AI user, and every day I learn about new aspects of what these tools can do. In addition to Chat, I’m also becoming well-versed in Perplexity, another AI writing tool which in some areas is even better than Chat, particularly for anything current events-ish.
Just in case any of you have got the wrong idea, I do NOT outsource my writing work to robots. I am still very much the author of my own content. The end products I deliver to clients bear little resemblance to the blobs of content that ChatGPT excretes for me. Chat is still a beginner writer (to be fair, it’s less than two years old) and its handiwork generally contains more clichés per square inch than Avril Lavigne lyrics. For example, practically every blog post ChatGPT generates on tech-related subjects begins with some variation of “In today’s digital landscape….” We still have a ways to go, clearly.
So yes, I do rewrite what AI generates for me so as to make it sound like, well, me. After about 20 years as a professional writer, I’ve managed to develop a distinctive style. I’m not altogether sure what that style is, but I definitely know what it isn’t, and Chat is not that. For one thing, nobody has yet been able to create AI with a sense of humour and witty analogies aren’t ChatGPT’s forte. I suspect we’re still a long ways away from a robotic Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw.
What it’s done, more than anything, is pretty much cure my longstanding case of writer’s procrastination.
Like many writers I know, I don’t struggle with the actual process of writing once I’ve gotten started, but starting has always been the bane of my existence. I call it the “Blank Page of Doom” syndrome or BPD for short. Whether it’s a short blog post or a novel, the feeling is always the same: you open your laptop, open a new Word document, and are then faced with the BPD. It doesn’t seem to matter how long I’ve been doing this for. The BPD always feels like at Everest Basecamp and readying myself for the ascent. Intellectually, I know I can scale this peak, but psychologically it feels like an impossibly arduous task. If anything, the more writing I do, the worse it gets.
That is, of course, until I discovered AI. Tools like Chat literally obliterate the BPD in a matter of seconds. Chat isn’t brilliant at everything, but a procrastinator it is not. Ask it to write a blog post on Topic X and it does so immediately, filling your BPD with beautiful, rich, malleable content. Yay content! I still have to go through the process of rewriting it to say what I want it to say, but climbing a mountain is a lot easier when there’s a map to follow than when there isn’t.
Before the advent of writing AI, the closest I could get to this was filling the page with “lorem ipsum” content. In both cases, it’s essentially dummy text with which you can manufacture good written content, and with lorem ipsum you at least get a sense of the outer contours of what you’re sitting down to write as opposed to the BPD. Chat is several steps better than this because it saves you a lot of time on the research end, while also arranging things in sections that make some sense.
I’m still waiting for the AI tool that will help me overcome my procrastination in other areas of my life, such as planning my grocery shops, cleaning the kitchen, making dentist appointments, and the myriad other things I’m often guilty of procrastinating on. But in terms of what I get paid to do, I’m lightyears ahead of where I was a year ago in terms of the stress and turmoil that comes with procrastination. I think it’s also making me a better writer, as it forces me to ask questions about why I like certain turns of phrase over others, and how I can be even more parsimonious with my words than the AI.
When ChatGPT first emerged, I worried about my job becoming obsolete. Now I think it’s made me more invaluable than ever. I’m better at my job because of it. At the same time, though, I’m really glad I built up my writing chops in a pre-AI era. I don’t know what I’d do if I was learning to write with these tools in my back pocket. Maybe I’d be just fine. We usually are, despite everyone’s fears about emergent technology.
In case you were wondering, this blog post is entirely the product of my brain without an AI assistance. Once we have AI that can truly read our minds, I will be in deep trouble professionally. Unless, of course, said AI can read minds in a way that reflects our inner thought grammar, because I think in much the same style as I write.
