Writing My First Book, Hoping to Find Out How ChatGPT Can Help

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I am working on writing my first book (actually my first two books), and I was hoping to find out what are the best avenues to use ChatGPT to help? Brainstorming, Research, Planning, Setting a tone, Proofreading… Any ideas on how ChatGPT can help would be appreciated.

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Drafting an outline for your book and sending it as prompts to ChatGPT can help improve the results that you get. Remember that your ability to explain what the book is all about to ChatGPT and what your desired goal is, will greatly improve your results.

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Great advice. Especially fiction, producing an overview will let AI know where the plot is going to go. There’s not a lot you can do about having it continue on minutae such as setups and character traits in chapter three when you are writing chapter ten, because of the limited context length, memory, and amount of input that you can send to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT also simply has limits. It won’t write a scientific paper in the style of an algorithmic researcher; it will write in the style of ChatGPT.

  • Note: you can own all the outputs of OpenAI’s language models, but as the writing is not generated by a natural person, even if it took just as much prompting and refining as the output you get, there is no copyright protection for works of the AI. Can you prevail in your plea for damages and relief by suing someone for reproduction of your AI’s work? That seems unlikely unless they don’t show up or you can outspend them on lawyers.

Perhaps the best way to use it is “produce a table of grammatical errors and places where writing could be improved”.

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I think this is @PaulBellow 's speciality, tagging for visability.

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Yes to all! I pretty much use it for the whole process. Once I get to the writing stage, it easily doubles or triples my hourly writing speed for the first draft.

If you have any specific questions, let me know.

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Paul, thanks for the advice. When you say it ‘accelerates’ the writing process, how so? Does ChatGPT help with the coordination of events and characters within the story? Using it as a knowledge base to keep track of facts? This is actually a work of fiction that I will be using as an instructional/moral story. I understand the capabilities of ChatGPT(or maybe not), but I am concerned that I might be missing the bigger picture as to how I can use ChatGPT to enhance my writing process and improve my stories.

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There are probably apps that use OpenAI to help author documents, and that’s one of the things my own product Quanta[.wiki] will eventually support in a clean way, but all of them boil down to two things:

  1. Telling ChatGPT what role it’s supposed to play, in the “System Prompt”, such as: “You are a neuroscientist helping me write a research paper on my latest findings. Your goal is to improve my writing, by creating a better version of each piece of text I provide”.

  2. Providing enough “context” that the AI can tell what your beliefs, objectives, goals, and conclusions are, so that it knows how to back you up.

You can accomplish this today by providing those kinds of prompts to ChatGPT, but like I said, I’m working on a better way to manage the “prompt engineering” where people can basically outline their thoughts, in a tree structure, and let ChatGPT generate each “draft”, or let you refine “drafts” of each paragraph in the larger document, one paragraph at a time.

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