ChatGPT: My Favorite New Employee
“AI” tools have sucked for years. All sizzle, no steak—until recently.
As a full-time writer and technology cynic, I’ve had lots of friends ask me, “What do you think about ChatGPT? Is your livelihood at stake?” My answer has surprised several of them: I’ve already used ChatGPT to earn thousands of dollars and it’s my favorite new writing tool.
Actually, more than “a tool.” ChatGPT is my newest employee and it’s fantastic. It’s already earned me thousands of dollars in just a few short weeks of using it. Plus, I don’t have to pay its health insurance.
ChatGPT is a smart, junior-level employee
My previous roles involved running software and administration teams around the world for apps with millions of users. I’ve worked with teams in several countries, mentored newbies coming out of dev bootcamps and colleges, and managed senior-level devs making lawyer money. It’s exposed me to a huge range of technical capabilities. The problem-solving and code-writing capabilities of senior technologists are markedly better than those with less experience or coming from emerging markets.
Now I run Edify, a technical content marketing agency, and have seen work samples from every populated continent. The range of writing quality is even more extreme than what I saw as a tech leader. Not everyone can write code, but far more people think they can write prose.
ChatGPT is like having a entry-level employee on staff. I would never put entry-level code in production and I’d never hand over entry-level content to a client. Though it constructs grammatically-correct sentences and can write a decent paragraph, the writing itself is bland, basic, and lacking insight.
But man oh man is it good for research.
The other day, I was writing a competitive analysis of two data integration SaaS providers. I wanted high-level descriptions of both vendors, their capabilities, and the types of data sources to which they can connect. Here’s what I asked it:
Tell me what you know about Tool A.
Tell me what you know about Tool B.
What are common data sources in enterprise data ecosystems?
ChatGPT gave me fantastic summaries of each tool and a list of 18 (!!) different data source types with example apps (e.g. “Relational databases like mysql and SQL Server”). I got everything I needed in seconds.
No ads.
No SEO crap content to filter.
No stupid auto-generated aggregation websites built to target search queries like “Tool A vs. Tool B.”
Yes, my business partner and I write SEO content for clients that plays the search engine game, but our content is written for humans to read and perform well in search results. ChatGPT gives me results that are non-competitive, fairly objective, and no-nonsense. It’s far faster and more productive than asking someone to do some research for me.
ChatGPT is like having an incredibly powerful search engine that gets straight to the point, doesn’t make me decipher which links are “promoted,” and actually gives me the results I want. If the results aren’t quite right, I update my prompt and try again. The beauty is that it understands me well enough and I don’t have to get painfully specific to get what I need. 80% of the time, I get exactly what I’m looking for.
Making money with ChatGPT
I foolishly mentioned on Twitter that I’ve made thousands of dollars with ChatGPT and now I have people asking, “How are you monetizing it?”
I’m not. It’s a tool that saves me time, does hard work for me, and lets me make more money on an everyday basis. I don’t “monetize” my laptop, but I’ve already earned back $4,000 I spent on this top-of-the-line MacBook Pro.
Here’s how I’m making money using ChatGPT:
I spend way less time on research
I don’t have to think as much or spend as much time letting topics “percolate” in my brain
It gives me popular talking points and data on topics I write about
I turn my outlines into ChatGPT prompts
I rewrite and add to what it gives me
For example, let’s say I’ve been hired to write an article about QA test optimization. My business partner might have given me a keyword cluster to optimize around. She suggests a title like “Ten ways to optimize your QA tests.” So, I might ask ChatGPT the following questions:
What is QA test optimization?
What are its benefits?
What are its drawbacks?
What’s the difference between test optimization, automated testing, and manual testing?
Are there still use cases for manual and automated test suites?
What are popular tools for QA test optimization?
Do code coverage metrics matter for test optimization?
Yada yada. You get the point.
After getting thousands of words back (again, without ads or launching 20 new tabs), I am armed with enough information to write this article. This process might have taken me 5 minutes. And I might turn some of those questions into H2 and H3 headings in my article.
I can also ask it to write stuff for me that I dislike doing, like writing meta titles and description text. Sometimes it gives me something usable, or at the very least something I can run by my business partner. Because she’s a marketing expert, she can use her judgment to determine what’s good, what isn’t, and whether it fits the keyword strategy we’re following for a client.
I generally value my time at somewhere between $250 and $500 per hour. ChatGPT has enabled me to write more articles in a day, reduce my cognitive load, lower my context switching, and take more breaks. I’ve invoiced a few thousand bucks already for the work that ChatGPT has helped me write.
“But ChatGPT is stealing content from other people”
Tech companies have done a great job re-marketing “theft” as “training data” in the AI space. ChatGPT is “trained” on content across the web, likely including stuff I’ve written. Some people say this is totally unfair and unethical.
Okay, but the cat’s out of the bag. You can’t put milk back into the cow. You can’t fight the wind. What am I supposed to do? Give up as a writer?
As a musician, author, and YouTuber, I know plenty about the high-level concerns around copyright, technology, and automation. It takes Herculean effort to write an enjoyable melody that hasn’t been written (our Western music system only has 12 notes). It’s nearly impossible to come up with a new idea hasn’t already been explored. “There’s nothing new under the sun.” “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”
I’ve interviewed dozens of musicians about music streaming, the de-valuation of music, the constant reduction of artist pay, and people who pay $400 for headphones and can’t spare $15 to buy an album. Successful musicians embrace today’s systems. Other musicians resent it. It used to be a lot easier to make a living in the music industry. Today it’s difficult—but it’s not impossible.
AI is coming for our content. The tech is here, people are adopting it, and there’s no sense in being caught up in “the good ol’ days when people wanted content from humans.” Instead of complaining about how tech is ruining yet another thing about my life, I’m choosing to be grateful for a more level playing field. More competition means I have to try harder to sell my content writing services. Plus, I’m hoping that amazing tools like AI art generation and AI content writing make the web suck less.
I can’t wait to give ChatGPT a promotion
We’re in the very early days of AI content generation. Right now, I think of it as a low-cost junior-level employee. Over time, however, it’s going to get better and better. It might start writing better than I do.
Does that mean I’m going to give up on what I do and become a prompt engineer? Of course not.
I’d rather have a ditch-digging machine than dig ditches. Let me use my human brain to evaluate if the ditches are any good and whether they’re what the customer asked for. Getting upset about ChatGPT is like getting upset about automation. I’d rather have systems in place that make my life easier than resent the system for taking away something I enjoy doing.
There will always be people who pay for hand-shoveled, artisinal ditches. That’s cool. Maybe they’ll hire me.
But when the tools get good enough, I can lower the cost of my services, have more clients, and build a better company. Just like I would with an army of full-time writers.
