I recently mentioned in a post here on Black Hat World that
I use ChatGPT to write articles for the websites I build for my clients.
I know many of you are still adjusting to using machine learning programs (henceforth colloquially referred to as "AI") in your daily life, so I figured writing a guide on the strategy I use would help.
I'll be focusing on ChatGPT in this guide, but feel free to substitute it with any other AI chat programs that you use.
Before I begin, there are couple of things I want to note:
- I'm by no means an expert with using ChatGPT. What I can tell you is that the articles I've created using my method have not been identified as "AI-generated" by other people or companies, so they're at least good enough to fly under the radar for now.
- I use ChatGPT in a conversational way. It's not the most optimised way to use it, but I find that it personally works for me to write to it the way I'd write to a person. Feel free to adjust the example prompts I provide to ones that suit your style or ones that are more efficient.
- It's important to be able to identify what makes your writing style unique. That's ultimately what will make the difference in how your articles sound. If you're not particularly proficient in English, use a writing style analyser (yeah, that's a thing) or ask ChatGPT to analyse an article you think sounds good, take the points from that, and use them for step 1. I've not had to do this, but I'll provide a prompt that seems to work for this purpose below:
Code:
Can you analyse the writing style of an article I'm going to share with you? I need to know whether it uses American, British, or international English; if there are any writing quirks in the article, and any other details you can provide me.
ChatGPT will tell you to go ahead and share it, which is when you'll copy/paste the content. You should receive a response like the one below:
Five Steps To Enhance Your Written Content Using ChatGPT
Step 1: Establish Your Initial Prompt & Rules
Your initial prompt should act as a request to let ChatGPT know that you need help writing articles. I often just say something along the following lines:
Code:
I need help writing an article for a client's website. Are you able to do this for me?
ChatGPT will obviously tell you it can help you, and it might even ask you for more information about writing tone and your target audience.
Now, you want the content to sound as if you wrote it, so it's important to "humanise" the content as much as possible.
Your next response to ChatGPT should be to establish rules. For example, these are the rules I have in one of my chats to help me write longer articles faster:
- Avoid using bullet points in summaries. - ChatGPT is notorious for using bullet-points in basic prompts. So much so that people beginning to associate bullet-points with AI-generated articles. Whilst bullet-points have their time and place, I just choose to do away with them by default.
- Use British English spelling and grammar conventions - I normally write using British English conventions. However, if I'm writing content for one of my clients in the US, I'll ask ChatGPT to change the rule to American English conventions.
- Use "whilst" instead of "while." - I just use "whilst" instead of "while" when I write.
- Follow the adjusted tone and style I've used in past examples - This one is important and I'll cover it more in step 6.
- Use British Pounds for currency. - If you're writing for a US client, change this to US dollars
- Use the Oxford comma - ChatGPT does not use the Oxford comma by default, but I use the Oxford comma when I wrote. It's a small adjustment to make it sound more like me.
- Don't start sentences with "And". - Pet peeve of mine, I don't start sentences with "And".
- Maintain a professional, yet casual tone
Of course, don't limit yourself to the rules above. As I mentioned in the introduction, identify any writing quirks you have and add those into the rules, even if they aren't grammatically correct. For instance, I'm very much aware that I write with a blended style of British English conventions and American English conventions. Like, I'll use double quotations like an American, but I'll spell things in the way the British. This is not technically correct, but it's how I learnt to write and I like it, so I stick with it.
Tip: If you find that ChatGPT doesn't follow the rules you provided it, just type in "Please follow the rules I sent you for summarising content."
Step 2: Provide Reference Material
If your articles require specific knowledge that you can gather from other articles, copy and paste the written content from those articles into your chat with ChatGPT.
Even if your articles don't require any specialised knowledge, I would still provide reference material anyway. ChatGPT will scour the internet on its own, but that doesn't mean it's going to pull up the most accurate results to use as a reference. As we're all aware, there's a lot of misinformation and other garbage out there, and you really don't want your articles written based off of any of that.
Step 3: Ask ChatGPT to summarise the reference material
Once you've sent in enough reference material, you'll want to simply ask ChatGPT to
summarise the reference material.
Alternatively, you can ask ChatGPT to write an article based on the reference material you sent in, but I find that the summarisations ChatGPT sends you can be pretty long.
Step 4: Refine The Article Yourself
This next step is the trickiest part, because you'll have to go through the article ChatGPT generated and make your own adjustments.
Personally, I do the following with the articles when I make my refinements:
- Add colloquialisms: instead of "Hello" write "What's up", or whatever your target audience would prefer.
- Add references: cultural references work very well in particular.
- I remove any words that sound too "stiff". "Hinges" and "Bundled"
- I take out corporate lingo entirely. For some reason, ChatGPT adds this in every now and then. It's really annoying.
Basically, manually spin the article.
This should go without saying, but don't ask ChatGPT to refine the article; for some reason, at least in my experience, it messes the article up. Remember, you're trying to give it a human touch.
Step 5: Provide the Refined Article To ChatGPT
The reason you're providing the refined article to ChatGPT is because you want to train ChatGPT to write more like you do.
Once you provide the refined article, be sure to state what changes you made. If you need to establish any more rules, mention that in your own change summary. ChatGPT will store this information and use it with any future articles that it writes for you.
I often structure my message like this:
Code:
I made adjustments to the article you provided me. I'm going to list the adjustments below:
1. Insert adjustment 1 here
2. Insert adjustment 2 here
3. Insert adjustment 3 here
I'm going to provide my version of the article to you. Please keep these adjustments in mind for any future articles you send me.
Conclusion
The real question you should be asking yourself now is if I used my method above to help me write this guide. I'm not referring to the obvious quote from ChatGPT, either. Given the topic of this guide, it's perfectly reasonable to think that.
If you think I did, vote in the poll and comment below to tell me how you think I used it. Let's see how good the community is at detecting AI-generated content.
