Rather than being alarmed or anxious, writers need to understand ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses. It is better at structure than it is at content. It is a good brainstorming tool (think titles, outlines, counter-arguments), but you must double check everything it tells you, especially if you’re outside your domain of expertise. It can provide summaries of complex ideas, and connect them with other ideas, but only if you have put a lot of thought into the incremental prompting needed to shift it from its generic default and train it to focus on what you care about. Its access to information is limited to what it was originally trained on, therefore your own training phase is essential to identify gaps and inaccuracies. It can be used for labor, such as reformatting abstracts or reducing the length of sections, but it can’t replace the thinking a writer does to determine why some paragraphs or ideas deserve more words and others can be cut back. It can be inaccurate: in fact, rather stubbornly so, persisting with inaccuracies even after they are pointed out, while at the same time presenting its next attempt as corrected.
https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.1072
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