Using AI for text content

[Mbira]

As I'm sure you all have been experiencing, AI is blowing up and many of my artist friends are freaking out. I decided to try chatGPT and feed it basic info about some upcoming gigs. Within a couple seconds it wrote up an almost perfect press release. I had to generate a couple versions and cut and paste the bits that worked best, but I had a press release emailed within just a couple minutes. I then asked the AI to format it as a fan email and I sent that the the fans...but first I fed the email back to the AI and asked it to come up with a good subject line. It gave me 5 options and I picked the best one. So fast and easy! I have to say that I'm convinced this is a great tool for that kind of stuff.

 

[midwayfair]

When I went back for a CS degree a few years ago, my final year was a lot of AI and machine learning, and I got to participate in a research project in my job right after graduating. chatGPT is amazing compared to what I got to see even that recently.

AI is a tool, and it really bothers me when people go around chicken littling over the availability of a tool, even though I totally understand the concern. To some it's a hammer for nails, but to others it's a hammer to the head.

I would worry about the mistakes and lack of thoughtful engagement when using it for something like this. But of course you can use it to autogenerate the boring parts and custom write the important parts -- because it's a tool.

 

[living sounds]

It's interesting. I played with it and have seen a lot of transcripts. It's great for some things and abysmal for others. Indeed, it will write perfectly useable work emails, acceptances speeches and the like. It can create excel sheets, programs, transcribe them etc. I've seen an example of a story where the user talked to characters within the story as well as to the narrator and the AI "understood" who was the addressee every time, quite remarkable.

I had it generate the same speech in the style of Trump and then in the style of Obama. Those hit the mark. But when I asked it to do the style of Lincoln and others, they all just sounded like Obama again. It is incapable of doing anything truly inspired, creative and the like. It won't write a Gettysburg Address or "Stairway To Heaven" anytime soon.

When I talked with it about pro audio or other specialist topics it became very clear that it was merely interpolating from existing information, no more and no less. And when I asked it about a book I read as a child and have been trying to find the title again, it actually made up several book titles (one of them actually a video game) and misattributed them to existing authors. Ultimately, it is really unreliable.

It's not yet the game changer some people seem to think it is, but it's also very early still.

 

[JohnRoberts]

When I went back for a CS degree a few years ago, my final year was a lot of AI and machine learning, and I got to participate in a research project in my job right after graduating. chatGPT is amazing compared to what I got to see even that recently.

AI is a tool, and it really bothers me when people go around chicken littling over the availability of a tool, even though I totally understand the concern. To some it's a hammer for nails, but to others it's a hammer to the head.

I would worry about the mistakes and lack of thoughtful engagement when using it for something like this. But of course you can use it to autogenerate the boring parts and custom write the important parts -- because it's a tool.

it may be an improvement. I often see misspellings in news crawls on TV, no doubt because kids don't read as many books these days.

Yes it may challenge copywriting careers but that isn't much different than automation replacing other mundane jobs... use it like a tool.

JR

 

[midwayfair]

no doubt because kids don't read as many books these days.

Yes it may challenge copywriting careers but that isn't much different than automation replacing other mundane jobs... use it like a tool.

JR

Children are definitely reading plenty of books, because they're still assigned in schools. People 18-35 are slightly more likely to be reading a book right now than you or I: Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past

What has absolutely declined everywhere is the copyEDITING. You've noticing it in news crawls, lots of people noticed it in newspapers starting in the 2000s. [Story time: I was a science editor straight out of college the first time (2006), and the company I work for gradually moved itself to a situation where there were not enough editors to actually do the job, and it took about 4-6 hours to edit a manuscript, so I wrote a program to do basically all the style guide and special character coding for us, and in some cases was able to do the manuscripts in under an hour -- run the program, then read the article to make sure there aren't any egregious writing errors. I literally automated my own job. I am actually quite bitter about it (I still got laid off when they lost the contract because they made no efforts to keep their editing staff at workable levels), but the company was trash, and science publishing is a parasitic industry, so it's probably for the best in the long run, even if leaving that job put me in a "career" I hated for the next seven years until I decided to study something else.]

CopyWRITERS might end up looking more like copyEDITORS. You still can't send gibberish copy out the door, even if your average consumer of news can't tell the difference. There are almost certainly news articles being written by chatGPT right now. Someone last year caught Amazon selling books generated by chatGPT (not suggesting Amazon was generating them, just that it can't tell the books were gibberish). A human is probably still looking at those news articles.