NO! I can’t emphasize this enough. ChatGPT will not write your story for you, and if you don’t already have a strong understand of fiction, fiction plots, character development, how to make a story flow and an expert command for your native language, ChatGPT won’t help you. In other words, as I’ve told everyone else for the past month – If you aren’t already an expert in your field, ChatGPT won’t make you an expert, and you’re going to find the entire process extremely frustrating. Not to mention, you won’t know what to do with the output that ChatGPT gave you.
What Is ChatGPT?
It’s a condensed version of the Internet. Basically, the developers for ChatGPT fed this program almost every page of the Internet and told it to parse it. It’s way more complicated than that, but basically that’s what it is. In other words, if you’re used to looking through 10, 15 and even 20 websites for your information, ChatGPT will reference those and spit out the info in an easy to understand paragraph or list. ChatGPT really likes lists, so most of the information will be a list of about 6 items, especially if your asking for factual information. If you’re asking it for fiction, it’ll crank out two or three paragraphs.
Why Can’t ChatGPT Write My Book?
First of all, it only spits out about 300 words at a time. Secondly, if you ask it too many questions within 60 minutes, it’ll lock you out until the mysterious timer resets. Thirdly, it’ll reset itself if you leave it idle too long. However, it does save your conversations, so if you hit a glitch, you can refresh the page and go back to the conversation you were working on.
What’s an Example of a Story ChatGPT Writes?
Let’s take a look. I fed ChatGPT a basic prompt - For fiction, two characters, Mia and Thomas, are searching for the Lost statue of the Chocolate King. Turn this into a short story.
ChatGPT Wrote:
Mia and Thomas had been searching for the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King for weeks. The legend said that the statue was made entirely of chocolate and had been lost for centuries. Mia and Thomas were determined to find it and bring it back to the world.
They had been following clues and hints left behind by those who had searched for it before. They traveled to remote locations and scoured ancient manuscripts for clues. Finally, they had narrowed down the location of the statue to a small village in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
As they entered the village, they were greeted by the locals who were amazed at the sight of outsiders. They explained their mission to the village elders who listened intently. The elders informed them that they had heard of the statue and believed it to be hidden deep within the forest.
Mia and Thomas set out with a local guide who took them through the dense jungle. They battled through thick vines and waded through murky waters until they finally stumbled upon an ancient temple. The temple was overgrown with vegetation, and the walls were covered in moss and vines.
Inside the temple, they found a small chamber that seemed to have been untouched for centuries. In the center of the room was a pedestal, and on top of it was a small statue made entirely of chocolate. Mia and Thomas couldn't believe their luck; they had found the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King.
They carefully lifted the statue and brought it out of the temple. As they emerged from the jungle, they were greeted by the locals who were overjoyed at the sight of the statue. They celebrated long into the night, and Mia and Thomas were hailed as heroes.
Finally, the statue was taken to a museum, where it was carefully preserved for future generations to see. Mia and Thomas had achieved their goal, and they felt a sense of pride and accomplishment knowing that they had found something that had been lost for centuries. They knew that the world was a little richer now that the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King had been found.
That output is 366 words, and as a stand-alone short story, it’s terrible. It’s cliché. It’s written at a supar level, and you’ve read this before. The big clue is the mention of the Amazon rainforest. Whoopdedoda. Another story about trekking through the Amazon rainforest and meeting the natives and blah blah blah blah. The chocolate statue even ends up in a museum. That’s anticlimatic.
So, What Can You Do With That Output?
If you really want to write a story with that premise, you can parse it out. The entire plot of the story is there. The beginning, middle and end. So, what you might want to do with something like that is ask ChatGPT to turn that into chapters.
Based on the above short story, turn the major events into chapters with headers
ChatGPTP
Chapter 1: The Search Begins
Mia and Thomas set out on their quest to find the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King. They followed clues and hints, traveling to remote locations and searching ancient manuscripts for leads. They were determined to find the statue, no matter how long it took.
Chapter 2: The Location Revealed
After weeks of searching, Mia and Thomas narrowed down the location of the statue to a small village in the Amazon rainforest. They arrived and spoke to the village elders, who believed that the statue was hidden deep within the forest. With a local guide, Mia and Thomas set out into the jungle.
Chapter 3: The Temple
Mia and Thomas battled through thick vines and waded through murky waters until they stumbled upon an ancient temple. The temple was overgrown with vegetation, and the walls were covered in moss and vines. They ventured inside and found a small chamber that seemed to have been untouched for centuries.
Chapter 4: The Statue
In the center of the chamber was a pedestal, and on top of it was a small statue made entirely of chocolate. Mia and Thomas couldn't believe their luck; they had found the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King. They carefully lifted the statue and brought it out of the temple.
Chapter 5: The Celebration
As they emerged from the jungle, they were greeted by the locals who were overjoyed at the sight of the statue. They celebrated long into the night, and Mia and Thomas were hailed as heroes. Finally, the statue was taken to a museum, where it was carefully preserved for future generations to see.
Chapter 6: The End of the Search
Mia and Thomas had achieved their goal, and they felt a sense of pride and accomplishment knowing that they had found something that had been lost for centuries. They knew that the world was a little richer now that the Lost Statue of the Chocolate King had been found. The search was over, but their memories of the adventure would last a lifetime.
Now, you have an annotated outline. This is useful. ChatGPT even gave a description of what goes into each chapter. Now, all you have to do is flesh that out, and I would recommend fleshing it out by hand. Remember, ChatGPT regurgitates the Internet, and you need to put your spin on this story. That means you need to write it. However, ChatGPT was a great tool in getting the basics of the story laid out in an organized fashion.
Here’s the other thing. Wannabe writers are sending so much shit generated by ChatGPT that the editors are getting very good at spotting it. In some instances, ChatGPT is sending multiple writers very similar stories. This means that you’re not getting uniquely generated fiction content. You must put your own spin on anything that you have generated for you by an AI bot.
I don't recommend it for anything more than idea generation. Some magazines and publishers are also considering anything generated by an AI bot as plagiarism. I don't consider it plagiarism. I'm not willing to use a word so strong because you had the text generated for you via a prompt that you typed into the machine. You didn't open a book or a website and copy and paste the contents into your story and claim it as your own. That's plagiarism. However, that's not to say that ChatGPT won't plagiarize from existing texts, and you need to make sure that all of the content it generates is free and clear of plagiarism. the bad news is that for fiction, you may not know that it's plagiarized a paragraph because it came from an obscure book written in the 1950s that you've never read. This is why I say use it like a writing prompt card. The best-case scenario for someone using an AI bot to write their story is simply getting ignored. The worst-case scenario is that the publication will ban you from all future submissions, and in some cases, entire publishers have closed themselves to new submissions due to the influx of AI-generated shit. So think twice before you submit anything that was 100 percent generated by an AI bot. Remember, the reason you're a great author or that you become a great author is you. No one can write like you. No one creates a story like you.
