ChatGPT's Narrative Revolution: Transforming Book Writing

0:00ChatGPT is incredibly good at writing things. It has strengths and weaknesses. And so today on the podcast, I want to talk about how ChatGPT is going to disrupt book writing and creation. So as we know, ChatGPT uses a language learning algorithm to write things. And that's going to actually have some pros and cons when it comes to writing books. I've personally seen people test this out. I've tested this out as well. And it has some mixed results. So on the podcast today, we're going to dive into all of that. and we're going to explain exactly what some of the implications are and are all books in the future going to be taken over by AI text.

0:39Let's jump into it. So one of the primary things that ChatGPT can automate is content creation, right? That's just right off the get-go. That's what everyone's using it for. So it's really good at creating content and some people are using it for different types of books. I've personally seen people use this for children's books. That was the first example I ever saw someone used mid journey to generate the images and then they use chai chibi tea to write the text for a kid's book about a robot and a kid anyways it was interesting though because and this is another reason why this is a topic is interesting they originally published it on Amazon it got some good traction some people bought it downloaded it it was getting reviews and then Amazon found out and actually banned them and deleted the book citing copyright concerns you know mid journey right now and I think that that was actually primarily due to the images in the children's book more so than the text so that is a definitely an interesting nuance to this whole thing but regardless it is something that people have to think about and so the way that the reason that people I think can get away with using the text and perhaps not the images is like when writing books is because the way that min journey or the The way that OpenAI explains that the ChatGPT model works is that this thing is trained off of, you know, billions and billions of words, books, articles.

2:02And when you're writing about a specific topic, it's consolidating like a hundred sources, putting them together and using those to kind of autocomplete and write about the topic you're interested in. so if you were writing about something super super niche that only one astrophysicist for example had ever written about and they were pulling a lot of ideas from that guy I think you'd be in more trouble but if you're talking about something that's more general or more widely known and you know you're pulling from 200 sources I think you have a pretty strong case that everything chat GPT is writing is fair use public domain and essentially and you're good on the copyright because essentially what you're doing is learning about a topic and consolidating the ideas in your own manner.

2:51And in addition to that, you can write it in your own tone. You can write it in your own style. You can put three or four ideas together that no one has put together before. And so in my opinion, I think that this thing is going to get a pass for writing books. And so it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this goes. But, you know, so obviously there's the content creation side but beyond just the content creation side which does have some controversy in and of itself there's another area for book writing that this is going to be absolutely massive that I think has a much less uh you know controversy that's going to be just kind of a no-brainer and that is the editing process because editing is a super critical task in book writing and it is so so time consuming and you know often challenging if you're not a pro at that so with chat GPT an author can literally automate the whole editing process to a pretty great extent because as we know the model can pretty much identify any grammatical errors typos and it can even suggest better phrasing for sentences so that means that an author could save a ton of time and focus on refining your content and improving and use this to pretty much just improve the overall quality of your book you write you throw a page on there you ask it to correct it and this thing can can spit out a corrected version and maybe it even rewrites a couple things that weren't super clear so in my opinion that is going to be incredibly powerful that's a no-brainer people will make tools for this but it's also honestly right out of the box you can use that for so another area that if you ask chat gpt like hey um i like to do this on a lot of episodes i'll ask it you know like i'll try to get a list of some bullet points of ideas for how ChatGPT is going to respond to a certain topic.

4:35And if you ask it, like how it's going to, you know, be useful for book writing and whatnot, it says that it's really great for research and fact checking that I'm going to put a massive asterisk next to just for my own experience. So ChatGPT, while it says it can fact check information to ensure it's accurate and reliable quote unquote i do not believe that chad gpt perhaps it'll get better too so i'll throw that out there but right at the moment chad gpt has some pretty big issues just with the way that um it is a auto complete model pretty much and you could essentially say write me a paragraph about why ford motor company is going to fail in uh this year because of x y and z and it's going to write that and so obviously that's not factually correct it's just coming up with it's just telling you what you asked it to tell you so you really do need to fact check everything that comes out of it I've specifically had it right content before where this is so this is actually this is the most interesting part this is very valuable info I figured out it can you can say write me like here's my thesis on something and write me a story using like some some story from history that like validates my thesis on this topic and it will write it for you.

5:48What I found when doing this was that it got the dates wrong in the story. It got the financial numbers wrong in the story. But I went and fact-checked the story that it had wrote me. And the story was actually true. It was slightly different than how they said, but it was true. The dates were different. The money amount was different. So the numbers, it's just not grayed out for some reason. But the story was true. And so I was actually able to go and fact-check, correct all the dates and amounts on the thing. And it wrote me a really good story based off of my thesis and gave me a great idea for something.

6:21So I do think that it's good for creating that type of content, not very accurate and reliable on the nitty gritty facts. The overall ideas, yes. The overall stories, yes. But when it gets really granular, you want to make sure you're really careful with that. So I think this thing's going to actually make a really big impact on the publishing industry specifically because traditional publishing is known for, it's got these gatekeeping practices which can make it pretty challenging for a new and upcoming author to get published so i'm thinking that with the help of chat gpt authors are going to be able to self-publish their books right because they're going to be able to get it to help them do a lot of different things like editing and now with the self-publishing abilities you see on tools on amazon i think this is actually going to be really uh really big and um this is actually going to change a lot in that specific area one issue i do see with chat gpt and writing in general is that um you know if you go and get it to write you a specific like if you were like hey write me a chapter about a book uh in a book titled x y and z with like these different pieces it's super it does have an issue where it's super repetitive and so maybe you can create some prompts to fix that but oftentimes it's going to repeat itself a lot um and so i i don't really view this as like Like Chachipity can go and write a book, right?

7:39It doesn't have creativity. That's not something or direction or it doesn't come up with the theories or theses that you'd want. But what I do see it being useful for is to help enhance what writers are doing. So you got writer's block, you're stuck on a paragraph in your chapter, you can get it to spit something out that you can go and edit and clean up and change based off your own ideas. Or you have a theory or an idea for a book and you can get it to write you an outline on what are some good ideas for different chapters. and different topics to cover within that. And that gives you an idea of what you need to go research and write about and look up.

8:13So I do think it's really powerful. I will say there are some drawbacks and there are some, you know, things I guess you could be worried about. And that is, you know, ChatGPT has the potential to make book writing and creation more accessible to a broad range of people. So that's good. However, I think that it could have the issue of creating what some people refer to as a homogenization of writing styles. So as a lot of authors rely on the same tools and models to generate their content, this could lead to like a big lack in diversity and writing styles and a potential loss of the unique voices and perspectives that human authors bring to their writing, right?

8:53Like if everyone was using ChatGPT, books would start to sound very, very similar. So I think that's one thing that, you know, piece some people are worried about but in conclusion overall i think that chat gpt has some massive potential to disrupt book writing and the creation industry and it's going to bring a lot of positive changes in that it can automate a lot of tasks in writing it can make the publishing process more accessible it's going to make it a lot easier to review your content it has some drawbacks with you know the homogenization of writing styles but overall i think it's pretty critical to carefully consider the role of ai based technology in book writing and the creation industry to ensure that it is used responsibly and it produces good content.