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Write Bites Episode #18: What Freelancers Should Know About GPT-3
Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.
Audio Recording
In Episode #18, we discuss what freelance writers need to know about GPT-3, a revolutionary new machine learning algorithm that’s coming for your job here to help?
Watch The Video
Read The Transcript: What Freelancers Need To Know About GPT-3
Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.
Today I am not walking around the neighborhood because it is raining ash here in Redding, California due to the surrounding, fires. This is not the first time and I imagine it will not be the last, but we are, ashed and smoked out, forced indoors for the foreseeable future.
I’m going to make the best of it by recording a video and audio segment here in my office. If you are listening to the audio now and want to catch the video, you can find that on my YouTube channel.
In this episode, we are going to talk about, GPT-3. It’s a new AI program, a machine learning program that is generating text and writing that some say, the research shows, is indistinguishable from a human author. By that, I mean they sat down a bunch of people, showed them 200-word articles generated by a GPT-3 mixed in with articles written by humans, and the readers were only able to guess which was which correctly 52% of the time—50/50, AKA—virtually indistinguishable.
As you might imagine, that has a lot of freelance writers scared that the dreaded harbinger—AI that can replace freelance writers—might finally be here.
So, in this episode, I want to dive into what GPT-3 is, explain why it’s not coming for your job probably, and also give you some ideas about how it can actually help you as a writer and help you deliver work for your clients.
So, diving in: GPT-3 is, as I mentioned before, an AI program, a machine learning program that’s all about language generation. It’s gone through a huge chunk of the internet, a huge chunk of available written resources.
It is way ahead of the previous competition in terms of generating language that feels like it’s written by a real person. This step from “maybe, sorta, coulda” been a bad human writer, to “that actually seems like it was written by a decent human writer” is a huge step.
It’s way further than anything that’s come before it. But it is not going to replace your job, because at the end of the day, good writing is not about language. It’s not about prose. Most of the writing you read—particularly within the context of content marketing and copywriting, which is what is fueling most freelance jobs—you don’t read it based on how it sounds. You read it for the core content. You read it for the narrative. You read it for the insights. You read it for how it can make an argument and then support that argument with evidence.
What we can see in looking at GPT-3 is that it is devoid of all those critical pieces that make up worthwhile writing.
I’m pulling a little bit here from a deep dive that the Animals blog did in testing this out. I was already thinking about what I wanted to say on this tool, and then they released a very in-depth piece where they spent some time trying to create good writing using the GPT-3 API and the insights that came with that.
I would highly recommend reading that. I’ve included a link on my website and on the YouTube channel. But summarizing from that, one of the pieces that they mentioned, which I had not thought of previously, was the “arguments with evidence” bit. This is an area that I think, down the road, AI will be able to handle. Ultimately, what do we do when we want to support our arguments as writers? We go out and we find evidence that supports what ...
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By Jacob McMillenWelcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.
Audio Recording
In Episode #18, we discuss what freelance writers need to know about GPT-3, a revolutionary new machine learning algorithm that’s coming for your job here to help?
Watch The Video
Read The Transcript: What Freelancers Need To Know About GPT-3
Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.
Today I am not walking around the neighborhood because it is raining ash here in Redding, California due to the surrounding, fires. This is not the first time and I imagine it will not be the last, but we are, ashed and smoked out, forced indoors for the foreseeable future.
I’m going to make the best of it by recording a video and audio segment here in my office. If you are listening to the audio now and want to catch the video, you can find that on my YouTube channel.
In this episode, we are going to talk about, GPT-3. It’s a new AI program, a machine learning program that is generating text and writing that some say, the research shows, is indistinguishable from a human author. By that, I mean they sat down a bunch of people, showed them 200-word articles generated by a GPT-3 mixed in with articles written by humans, and the readers were only able to guess which was which correctly 52% of the time—50/50, AKA—virtually indistinguishable.
As you might imagine, that has a lot of freelance writers scared that the dreaded harbinger—AI that can replace freelance writers—might finally be here.
So, in this episode, I want to dive into what GPT-3 is, explain why it’s not coming for your job probably, and also give you some ideas about how it can actually help you as a writer and help you deliver work for your clients.
So, diving in: GPT-3 is, as I mentioned before, an AI program, a machine learning program that’s all about language generation. It’s gone through a huge chunk of the internet, a huge chunk of available written resources.
It is way ahead of the previous competition in terms of generating language that feels like it’s written by a real person. This step from “maybe, sorta, coulda” been a bad human writer, to “that actually seems like it was written by a decent human writer” is a huge step.
It’s way further than anything that’s come before it. But it is not going to replace your job, because at the end of the day, good writing is not about language. It’s not about prose. Most of the writing you read—particularly within the context of content marketing and copywriting, which is what is fueling most freelance jobs—you don’t read it based on how it sounds. You read it for the core content. You read it for the narrative. You read it for the insights. You read it for how it can make an argument and then support that argument with evidence.
What we can see in looking at GPT-3 is that it is devoid of all those critical pieces that make up worthwhile writing.
I’m pulling a little bit here from a deep dive that the Animals blog did in testing this out. I was already thinking about what I wanted to say on this tool, and then they released a very in-depth piece where they spent some time trying to create good writing using the GPT-3 API and the insights that came with that.
I would highly recommend reading that. I’ve included a link on my website and on the YouTube channel. But summarizing from that, one of the pieces that they mentioned, which I had not thought of previously, was the “arguments with evidence” bit. This is an area that I think, down the road, AI will be able to handle. Ultimately, what do we do when we want to support our arguments as writers? We go out and we find evidence that supports what ...