In my several months of working with ChatGPT, I've found it to be an extraordinarily effective tool for text editing. It's become my personal editor, assisting me with a vast array of text-related tasks such as crafting blog posts and emails.
I'd like to share two scenarios where I've found ChatGPT particularly useful:
1) Transforming Drafts Into Formal Text:
The power of advanced AIs like ChatGPT is truly impressive. They can take a simple draft and turn it into a polished piece of text. The depth of your draft will depend on the level of control you wish to have over the final outcome. If you're just writing informal text, providing ChatGPT with a topic or a title, maybe even a key point, is often enough. ChatGPT can then elaborate and produce a complete text piece for you.
If you're aiming for more controlled results, your draft may need to be more detailed. However, this doesn't require excessive effort. You can write your draft comfortably, without worrying about typos or grammatical errors. These minor mistakes are taken care of by AI, which automatically corrects them in the process.
2) Translation:
Tools like ChatGPT and New Bing excel in high-quality translations. The results are so seamless that it's hard to tell whether the text is translated or originally written in the target language. It's beneficial if you already have some proficiency in the language you're translating into, but this isn't a prerequisite. If you're unsure about the quality of the translation, you can either hire someone to check it for you (which costs less than hiring a translator), or you can reverse validate the translation by translating it back into the original language using a different tool or session.
One challenge you might encounter with these tools is partial editing - making changes to specific parts of the AI-generated text. At the time of writing this post, performing such edits can require some effort and strategy. A method I've found useful involves referencing the exact part of the text, such as "the 4th sentence of the 3rd paragraph," and providing specific instructions, like "rewrite the 4th sentence of the 3rd paragraph in a friendlier tone, keeping the rest of the text unchanged," or "shorten the 4th sentence of the 3rd paragraph to less than 20 words, and just provide the rewritten sentence."
As a final note, AI can also handle larger writing tasks, like drafting an entire book. You can still use the above methods, but in this case, it would be beneficial to use a divide-and-conquer approach: break down the task into smaller parts and work on them individually, utilizing AI's capabilities to transition from "draft to formal text" and perform "partial editing".
If you're working on a long-term project, choose an AI tool with a persistent "memory" or contextual understanding ability, like ChatGPT (especially GPT4).
There is one crucial aspect I haven't covered in this post – the importance of providing necessary context for AI-driven text editing. Context is essential, but to maintain brevity in this post and because context provision is a common topic across various AI applications, I'll dedicate a separate post to it.
I hope you find this post helpful. Thank you for reading.
