Am I Worried that Chat GPT Will Take My Ghostwriting Jobs?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock all year (which honestly sounds nice right about now), I’m sure you’ve heard all of the buzz about whether ChatGpt will take all of our jobs as authors. I will admit that I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know what the future holds, and I am not working behind the scenes on any of these tools. I think there are places where AI tools work well, for instance, in crafting social media or blog posts. Longer pieces, especially books, are a lot tougher, and it’s not because of the technology.
I want you to think back to maybe seven years ago. I was working at a school where they had just gotten 3D printers. I remember going to the lab and being taught how to make a cool key chain with the printer out of the map of Baltimore City. At that time, there was a lot of conversation about everything the printer could do and how people would be able to print their own houses, hands and braces and more. I was not nearly that ambitious. I just remember thinking I wanted to return and make more cool stuff.
If you want to see all of the exciting stuff that I made, I have nothing to show you because I never went back. While I realize that a 3D printer is much less accessible than ChatGPT, I was free to print whatever I wanted while I worked at the school and never did. The 3D printing technology exists, and you can do amazing things with it, but how many people do you know that have used one to print anything at all?
The problem is that you have to know how to use the tool. When I first used the printer, someone was there holding my hand through it. But could I go down there and replicate it with the same results? No! Was I going to put in the time myself to fumble through it until I could get results? Also no.
Sometimes when a new technology is launched, there’s this impetus to focus on the capabilities of the technology and not take into account actual human behavior. We’ve had spell check forever and Grammarly for quite a long time and how many things do you see posted daily that are spelled incorrectly or grammatically incorrect? The issue is that creating a tool and providing access to it doesn’t mean that most people will use that tool correctly, either because they can’t figure it out or don’t feel like figuring it out.
When it comes to writing books, tools like chat don’t manage the biggest issue for many aspiring authors, which is not just writing the words but navigating the entire process. What I see from my ghostwriting, editing and coaching clients is that things like organizing the structure, coming up with a theme, setting your goals, accountability, and having someone to bounce ideas off of and hand-hold them through the process are the non-writing aspects where a lot of folks get lost and give up.
Ultimately, I don’t think that ChatGPT is about to put me out of work anytime soon, and I’m taking it as an opportunity to show people how to use a structure and leverage the tool to help them get their writing done. I think it can work well as an assistant- but if you want someone to help you do something, you have to know what to tell it to do.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use ChatGPT to finish your book, I have an upcoming program to teach aspiring authors how to leverage the tool.