How I use GPT-3 to save five minutes or less a day

I create a lot of content. Way too much. I blast it out, forget about it, and then make some more. I’m used to it and I’ve been doing it for decades.

Like most content slingers, I find ChatGPT to be simultaneously exciting and repellent. It’s exciting because it produces content that is eminently readable. Repellent because it blasts out so much junk yet that we will soon be inundated with absolute garbage.

To that end, I thought I’d share how I currently use it to (slightly) improve my writing process. I see ChatGPT and GPT-3 as a great, if outdated, search engine. It can create paragraphs of text for me in seconds and helps the way a human research intern could help: by giving me a few paragraphs on a particular topic in a few seconds.

I wrote my own ChatGPT interface (let me know if you want access) and I can ask it fairly simple questions and use it to summarize articles for me for blog posts. For example, say I wanted to write about the Byzantine Generals Problem. I could do a Google Search which results in a top-line description that I could easily repurpose:

Or I could use ChatGPT: