At first I was concerned that AI was coming for my ghostwriting career.
After using ChatGPT, my fears subsided.
I asked ChatGPT — New! to provide sources for the answers that it produced, and it gave me fake ones, without letting me know they were fake. It felt like chatting with a kid — or adult — who didn’t want to say, “I don’t know.”
That kind of “writing,” based on fictitious sources, would put my clients in a thicket of legal trouble. (Without even getting into the legal issues of AI learning from others’ work — that is an extra thorny legal thicket.)
Even though I was still curious about the tech, I used Google Scholar for the bulk of my research, like I’ve done since my training in academia. However, a conversation with a random person who I was co-working with during a Focusmate session, gave me a new perspective. He suggested, based on my academic research needs for a current manuscript project, that I try Perplexity.
Searching with Perplexity feels like a search engine glow-up.
When I ask it a research question, it provides links to REAL sources in clickable bubbles above the text answer. I’ve only used it for two weeks, and it has already brought obscure research papers to my attention that help me add richness and complexity to the manuscript.
This isn’t an ad, just a heads up that perhaps this tool could be helpful for your work.
Perplexity’s AI is not writing the manuscript for me. Rather, it is helping me find the research I need in a more user friendly format. I don’t use any of Perplexity’s generated sentences in my work because that defeats the purpose of why I am a ghostwriter — writing helps me develop my own mind.
“I’m a writer because I want to write,” explains author Rebecca Solnit to Shirin Ghaffary for Bloomberg.
She continues: “I often feel that I don’t think hard enough about things until I have to write about them. Often my understanding changes in the process of writing. That’s exciting for me. That’s my own development, which, ideally, is somehow also something I can share with the readers.”
I agree with Solnit and I feel sheepish that I originally thought AI was here to write for me.
When I interview my clients to develop their non-fiction manuscripts, we create new ideas together, brainstorming in real time. Then I weave those conversations and extensive research into 120+ pages of human-created writing. Pages that other humans — and perhaps AI — will read.
Ghostwriting is a human process — now aided by AI search — that develops my mind, my clients’ minds, and helps us build relationships. Relationships are the bedrock of how humans thrive and evolve. Our relationships with each other allow ideas to move through our vast networks and help them take root.
Now I understand AI’s place in my work — it is a tool to help me research and spark my own human creativity.
I’m writing my memoir about hitchhiking across the Pacific Ocean and have already asked Perplexity for 50 ways to describe the sea. Briny…brooding…bubbling. I might not use any of those adjectives, but the list could help stir a memory that I can develop into an evocative description. Words that will create emotions in human readers.
What a treat to have a new collaborator in my creative toolbox.
Cheers to Patrick Tomasso for the photo via Unsplash.
Roxanne Darrow 