I have been playing around with ChatGPT and other AI assistants.
So far my quick take on ChatGPT and its usefulness in this blog in particular:
- That it’s fantastic for helping to organise posts quickly – instead of tediously writing out ingredients and method for my recipes, I chuck an outline of both and a name into Chat GPT and out comes a pretty decent post. I then add a picture, tweak the wording and recipe instructions as need and boom. I’ve got eight recipes done and lined up in an hour or so.
- That it’s not been great, or at least to my liking with fiction writing. I fed it some of my writing and then a few prompts and I got the below. Maybe my writing i fed it is the problem? Perhaps my prompt was no good. Either way, I didn’t love what came out.
I’ll give an example with the recipes. Here is what I asked ChatGPT:
Can you help me craft engaging content similar to my other recipe posts if I give you a name of the recipe and the ingredients?
This is what I got back:
So far so good. I then fed (pun intended) in two of my recipes – Homemade Ketchup and Meatballs with Chimmichuri – which I posted here a while back. Perhaps I could have fed it a few more recipes or perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in my instructions? In any event, it started coming up with a recipe on its own which was not what I was after.
If I review my prompt, I’m pretty sure my instruction was just a bit lazy. I haven’t gone back and changed anything though as I simply stopped it and have a new set of instructions as follows:
Sorry, I had some ingredients in mind. The recipe is called a Miso Stir Fry sauce and here are the ingredients:
Miso paste 1 tbsp
Soy sauce 3 tbsp
Juice 1 lime
Brown rice vinegar
Water 3 tbsp
Pepper
The result was pretty decent in my view (see gallery), but I’m not convinced it was really in my style. I spent a little time tweaking and then we arrived at the final product which I posted here.
I’m generally a bit stretched for time so I’ve been noting down ingredients and brief methods in my notes and built up a backlog of posts I wanted to do. Now with ChatGPT I’ve queued up more than half a dozen and scheduled them to post in less than an afternoon.
A side effect which I wasn’t necessarily expecting was that it spurred me to want to write more and actually do so. This post is one example (promise, no AI was involved in writing this one). I’ll write separately about my experience with it and short story writing. I didn’t find it work as well, I can say that for sure.