Ground-up by GPT-4o
The world just changed right in front of me once again. I wasn’t expecting it.
For well over a year now, everything I write has been passed through GPT-3, 4, and now 4o for editing. I don’t want my voice changed, so I asked it for three things: correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Sometimes when I edit my own work, I’ll butcher a sentence to the point where it’s barely understandable, and running it through GPT helps clean that up. After GPT is done, I’ll read it again, and often I’ll find more corrections until I’m satisfied. I won’t let it write for me, and if I do, I always point out what’s been written by GPT.
Because it has everything I’ve written over the past year—easily over a million words—it has my voice down and knows my style inside and out. I decided to ask GPT-4o for its impressions of my writing so I could improve, figure out my blind spots, and enhance my work. The first response I received was about what I’d expect, with lots of syrupy false praise that read like someone’s horoscope on their birthday. I just wasn’t having it, so I asked GPT-4o to be critical.
Careful what you wish for.
I got blasted! It was so brutal that I wasn’t entirely sure it was accurate or overcompensating from my basic instructions. While it didn’t call me names, it did get personal, and it did hand me my ass on a platter. I had that moment when I didn’t know how to react. It was sort of like asking your angry ex to tell you what she really thinks of you after she’s had a few drinks. There was nothing left of me.
I had to put it down and think about it all afternoon. I found the courage to read it again, and this time, I couldn’t find it. I asked GPT-4o to replicate it, but I still couldn’t find the really brutal version anywhere. I went through all previous edits, line by line, and still nothing.
I then tried a different approach and asked GPT-4o if it could give me at least one thing to work on, and it did. I’m not going to say what it is because then you will be looking for it in my work. I later received notice from ChatGPT that a new Mac app was ready, so I downloaded the app, logged in, and there it was. The brutal beat-down was right there. I almost couldn’t look at it directly.
As I calmly read it line by line, it wasn’t as bad as I first thought. In some ways, it was 100% correct, and some of it was intentional, knowing I would be criticized. There were some genuinely useful suggestions, and overall, I think it’s going to make me a better writer. It was still a bloody beatdown.
As I tried to get to sleep, I realized that this was the first time in my life an AI didn’t just correct my work. It took me to task on my overall character and viewpoint as a writer. It was a major milestone in technology, and that made me smile. The world is terrified of what AI will mean for them, and yet for me, so far, I think it will make me a better human, and that’s a good thing.
(GPT-4o, you can let go now.)