How Chat GPT Made Me Lazy (for a week!)

When I started using Chat GPT I was like a child with a shiny new toy. Until, that is, I realized it was making me lazy…

A turbocharged bauble

If you’re anything like me, the first time you use Chat CPT you will be entranced. You ask it an essay question, and within fifteen seconds it has splurged out a reasonably sophisticated and credible answer. Amazing!

“This is fantastic,” I thought, as I proceeded to draft up five or six blogs with it. Blogs that I topped and tailed and added certain paragraphs that were unique to me, which I hoped would inject a veneer of my personal “voice” above the typicality of the Chat GPT product.

In my first few blogs, I overwrote the drafting GPT had provided me with considerably.

But soon, I noticed that I was injecting less and less of my own voice into these stories and was letting Chat GPT do the talking.

I quickly began to realize that, after a few Chat GPT blogs, there was a certain level of predictability to its product. But still, I thought, I can write a post now in about fifteen minutes whereas previously it took an hour of drafting, plus thinking time.

Disclosure

Then I accidentally came across a Medium article that explained that Medium expected open disclosure when Chat GPT was used. No problem! I came up with a disclosure statement that I could add at the end of my articles that didn’t seem too offensive and would do the trick.

I kept submitting stories that had been partly drafted and researched using Chat GPT, and they kept getting accepted by publications.

As I became bolder, I injected less and less of my personal voice into “my” stories and relied more and more on Chat GPT.

It looked as though my brazen approach was going to reap dividends.

I foresaw myself becoming an unstoppable blogging machine.

But I wasn’t thinking straight.

The bottom line is I was becoming lazier and lazier.

ILLUMINATION saves the day

Yesterday morning I had quite a shock. I woke up to find that my favorite Publication, ILLUMINATION, had rejected one of my stories because the editor had put it through an AI tracker and had discovered that the majority of it had been created by Chat GPT.

The editor was most apologetic and really helpful. “You’re a good writer,” he said, “with a distinctive voice. You don’t need to rely on AI to write a good story.”

At that moment, I snapped out of my AI-worshipping reverie. Chat GPT had put me in a trance, so much so that I had practically become completely unthinking in my attitude to stories and their presentation.

I thanked the editor and vowed never to use Chat GPT so comprehensively again. It was fine for doing research and structuring a story, much as you might look at the SERPS to see what competitors are writing about in a niche area; but I would never again let Chat GPT rule the roost in my drafting.

From now on, my personal voice would prevail.

What to do with my historic legacy?

But there was a problem. I had four stories in draft form in Medium that had been created with a preponderance of Chat GPT and that I hadn’t yet submitted to a Publication. What should I do with those…?

It seemed a waste to delete them entirely, so I decided I would publish them under my personal account on Medium, and then rewrite them with my own personal drafting and voice without the benefit of Chat GPT and submit the rewritten articles to Publications in due course.

In that way, I could get some positive double leverage from a negative situation.

A hard lesson learned

All that glitters is not gold. AI writing promises the earth, but in fact, it is a veneered bauble the gilt on which soon rubs off.

If you aspire to be a real writer, rather than just an unthinking blog splurging machine, you will use Chat GPT sparingly, and perhaps indeed only for research purposes.

There are plenty of other conundrums that CHAT GPT throws up, including who owns the copyright in its product, and who is responsible when it gets facts wrong. There is no easy way of checking Chat GPT’s sources, and that is a problem.

Equally, it’s a big question as to when and how Chat GPT plagiarizes the work of a third party. Presumably, to be on the safe side, you need to run your Chat GPT splurge through a plagiarism checker every time the AI generates content for you.

The bottom line is that for a week Chat GPT lured me into a laziness trap. I became so allured by it, I began to imagine writing two or three stories a day with effortless ease.

Alas, I have since remembered something Chat GPT made me briefly forget: if you want to be a writer, you must write, preferably every day. Let’s face it, it takes me an hour and fifteen minutes to write an 800-word story, fifteen minutes of headline drafting and thinking time, and one hour of writing.

If I Aspire to be a writer (which I humbly consider myself to be already) then if I can’t write for an hour within the isolation of my own voice without relying on AI, then shame on me.

In that case, call me something else: an “AI auto-blog administrator,” or something like that.

At the end of the day, while I may have fallen for the trap for a week, I’m not a lazy writer. So it’s time to put my half-gilded bauble back in the drawer and bring it out for novelty purposes only.

I guess it’s up to everyone else to draw their own conclusions about this story I have just related. But don’t judge me too harshly.

It could happen to anyone.

And it probably is.

This story is all Robert Porter’s genuine writing, with no AI writing intervention.