What are the benefits to an editor vs. using Chat GPT?

There is a new workplace craze going around and it is called ChatGPT. An AI Bot that can help you write or summarize a piece of written work. It will build sentences word by word to sound like human speech in a conversational situation. It is very good at answering questions and gives quite straightforward answers that over time get better as it understands your general speech. It is generally used to draft language and there are benefits to using it to write reports, poems, music, even to help draft an essay. It can be beneficial to help brainstorm ideas as well as creating clear and concise sentences. And while it is intelligent, it does lack the emotions that a human would have and this is where it becomes beneficial to have someone edit your work.

For example, the process of writing a college essay needs to include thoughtful research, a strong thesis and a defendable argument. You might use ChatGPT to draft your essay, and its intelligence to gather facts for you. But when it comes time to publish your paper, you have to know if the argument was well written, if it conveys emotion that moves the reader – something this robot cannot do.

Real copy-editors can be given additional information to help understand your thesis. They can proffer questions that might give the writer more creative ideas to further their paper. Chat GPT has also been known to provide incorrect facts – which could be detrimental to the thesis of a paper. After studies, it has been noted that ChatGPT can provide answers that can be especially convincing which would be easy for the writer to overlook and not double-check. An editor can fact-check and make sure that things are cited correctly.

Technology is expanding across all fronts, making it difficult to retain a job as a human being, as these bots get smarter. But the benefits of a human editor far outweigh those of the convenience of a bot, making it important to continue to proof, copy-edit and use a second pair of eyes once your piece has been written – even if it was initially written by a bot!