Freelance writer uses AI ChatGPT to write a 'convincing' $600 article in 30 seconds
A freelance writer has revealed his 'horror' after Open AI's ChatGPT bot managed to write a marketing article in 30 seconds.
Writing about the article in The Guardian this week, Henry Williams said that the impressive article was something he would usually have charged $615 (£500) for, once it had received a few minor edits.
In comparison, Williams explained he had spent hours writing a similar type of article himself.
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"Sure, the tone was inhuman and the structure as sophisticated as a college essay, but the key points, the grammar and the syntax were all spot on," he said.
"After a bit of a punch-up, it was perfectly passable as a sponsored content article designed to drum up business leads for a software provider – an article like the one that I, a professional copywriter, had just spent hours writing."
In case you're unfamiliar with the online tool, ChatGPT, is a chatbot developed by OpenAI, that can write songs, poems, and even college essays, with just a few simple prompts. It even passed a Wharton business school exam.
So if the bot can write just about anything, what does it mean for human writers?
According to Williams: "Writers and editors will still be needed, but fewer of them."
He believes that while a human would be needed to provide prompts, 'mountains of copy' could be produced by the technology.
It seems the bot is also pretty good at producing homework too. However, earlier this month we told you how a student has created a website tool that can reportedly detect whether essays are written by the AI bot.
Princeton University student Edward Tian has created GPTZero in a bid to curb concerns about cheating.
Taking to Twitter earlier this month, the 22-year-old said: "I spent New Years building GPTZero – an app that can quickly and efficiently detect whether an essay is ChatGPT or human written."
He went to offer up a couple of demos, showing just how easy it is to use. All you have to do is copy a paragraph of text and paste it into the GPTZero detector and it shows you its findings.
Speaking about his motivation behind the project, the computer science major and journalism minor said: "In short, there's so much chatGPT hype going around. Is this and that written by AI? We as humans deserve to know!"
You can read more about the tool here.
Topics: Technology
Lucy Devine