It’s been quite a year for ChatGPT, with the large language model (LLM) is now taking exams, produce content, search the web, write code, and more. The AI ​​chatbot can produce his own storieswhether they are good or not is another matter.

If you’re involved in the writing business in some way, tools like ChatGPT have the potential to complement the way you work, but at this point it’s not inevitable that journalists, authors, and editors will be replaced by generative AI bots.

What we can say with certainty is that ChatGPT is a reliable writing assistant, provided you use it in the right way. If you have to order words as part of your job, here’s how ChatGPT could take your writing to the next level, at least until it replaces you, anyway.

find the right word

Using a thesaurus as a writer isn’t particularly frowned upon; neither should using ChatGPT to find the right word or phrase. You can use the bot to search for variations on a particular word, or be even more specific and say you want less or more formal, longer or shorter alternatives, etc.

Where ChatGPT really comes in handy is when you’re looking for a word and you’re not even sure it exists: ask “a word that signifies a feeling of melancholy but especially a word that comes and goes and doesn’t seem to have a single cause” and you’ll get “boredom” as a suggestion (or at least we did).

If you have speaking characters, you can even ask about words or phrases that would typically be spoken by someone from a particular region, a particular age, or with particular character traits. This being ChatGPT, you can always ask for more suggestions.

find inspiration

Whatever you think of the quality and character of ChatGPT’s prose, it’s hard to deny it’s good enough to find ideas. If your powers of imagination have hit a wall, you can turn to ChatGPT for inspiration on plot points, character motivations, scene settings, and more.

It can be anything from general to detailed. Maybe you need ideas about what to write a novel or article about – where it takes place, what is the context and what is the theme. If you’re a short story writer, maybe you could challenge yourself to write five tales inspired by ChatGPT ideas.

Alternatively, you might need inspiration for something very specific, whether it’s what happens next in a scene or how to sum up an essay. At any point in the process you get writer’s block, so ChatGPT might be a way to fix it.

Do research

Writing is often much more than putting words in order. You’ll need to regularly research facts, figures, trends, history, and more to make sure everything is accurate (unless your next piece of literature is set entirely in some fantasy world you imagine).

ChatGPT can sometimes have the edge over conventional search engines when it comes to knowing what foods people may have eaten in a certain year in a certain part of the world, or what is the procedure for a particular type of crime. While Google may give you spammy SEO stuffed sites with conflicting answers, ChatGPT will actually return something consistent.

That said, we know that LLMs have a tendency to “hallucinate” and present inaccurate information. So you should always check what ChatGPT is telling you with a second source to make sure you’re not wrong.

Choose character and place names

Getting fictional character and place names can be a challenge, especially when they’re important to the plot. A name should have the right vibe and connotations, and if you get it wrong, it really pops on the page.

ChatGPT can come up with an unlimited number of people and place names in your next work of fiction, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with that too. The more detail you give about a person or place, the better – perhaps you want a name that truly reflects a character trait, for example, or a geographic feature.