[dools]

The Weeping Willows of Winnipeg is a shit story, but if you were working on a short story, and you got 5 suggested rewrites for a given paragraph, or you were looking for ideas for a plot point or something similar, then you could use ChatGPT to help you out.

In exactly the same way, sometimes I give ChatGPT a complete coding task and it can't do the job. But while I'm working on code I can get it to do certain things and it saves me a lot of time and sometimes comes up with very useful insights and things I was unaware of.

I'm sure authors (or anyone else whose job maps to "language processing") can use it similarly.

[tkgally]

My current job maps in that direction--translation and writing. Lately I have been using GPT-4 to produce first drafts. It saves me time and effort and gives me ideas for expressions that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. It's also good for writing in genres that are not my strongest. I wrote a PR brochure recently, and GPT-4's drafts had more advertising punch than what I usually produce.

I still spend a lot of time polishing the final version, so the time savings are only about twenty percent.

[passion__desire]

There is a story of a author who used to cutout words from newspaper and randomly arrange them in bogosort manner and find good combination of words.

At one time he found, "son sues father" which came true as a headline few years later.

[inciampati]

It's most powerful as a tool for transforming and projecting text with text. It also excels at lateral exploration, enumeration, comparative critique. But yeah, don't ask it to write you a story and expect a gem.