A year ago, ChatGPT emerged from OpenAI’s labs to become an instant success.

Unless you're in denial, it's hard to ignore the impact this AI chatbot is having on content creation.

I've used ChatGPT to help me write, but not in the way you might expect.

I still believe that using it or other AI tools to generate entire pieces of content is a bad idea that will lead to poor results.

You only have to look at the recent debacle of Sports Illustrated trying to hide poor-quality AI content behind fake journalists to understand how quickly this can backfire.

So should ChatGPT be a no-go for science writing?

Not if you use it properly.

I don’t have anything against professional editors, but not every writer has the opportunity to have a dedicated staff to improve their writing.

When it comes to editing, AI chatbots excel.

When even The New York Times columnists give it a try, you shouldn’t feel guilty.

And if you have the chance to work with a human editor, it's even better, because your copy will likely need less editing, which means you'll end up with more output.

To work well as an editor, ChatGPT needs to understand your writing style.

If you just ask ChatGPT to review your text, you’ll end up with unnatural results that don’t reflect your own style.

Writing style consists of four elements:

First, let's identify these four parameters in your writing.

To do this, you'll follow these steps:

For ChatGPT Plus users (paid version), simply paste the article link instead of copying the entire content.

You should end up with a few adjectives for each of the four elements described above.

Note them, as they will be used to train ChatGPT to keep a consistent style.

In the early days of ChatGPT, maintaining consistency in the output was tedious because you had to copy the instructions in each prompt.

Not anymore, since OpenAI released the custom instructions feature.

This feature is a handy tool to set up instructions once and use them in every prompt.

To use it, click on your profile name and select the option:

When you click on it, you will be presented with two options:

In this section, write a brief description of what kind of writing you do.

For example, “I write articles for a science magazine.”, or “I write technical documentation for a life sciences company.”

In this section, you will enter the writing style you created earlier.

Your prompt should look something like this:

Don't forget to tick the "Enable for new chats" option at the bottom and then save.

Now any text you generate with ChatGPT should use your own style.

So you can just feed it some text and ask it to edit it.

It does a pretty good job, but when it comes to playing more of a coaching role, you'll want to use a more customized approach that requires prompts.

💡

ChatGPT can also

help you with SEO

. Check how in my

no-brainer SEO guide for science writers

.

If you prefer a step-by-step editing process that gives you more control over the output, I recommend using specific prompts that cover the different aspects of editing.

In my opinion, this is also the process that most closely resembles a real human editor, since you get an explanation for the edits, not just a correction.

First, you'll need to open a new chat and write an initial prompt to set up how ChatGPT will behave.

A good initial prompt includes the following details:

For example, here is the initial prompt I used for this article:

Once your initial prompt is set, you can feed your article draft to ChatGPT.

Here is the output ChatGPT gave me for this article:

The initial prompt will give you some recommendations, but it is best to continue editing with even more specific prompts.

Let's dive in.

A common thread in all science writing is that you need to match the knowledge level of your writing to your audience.

The way you describe relativity to a particle physics professor is very different from the way you'd describe it to a 10-year-old.

Sometimes a quick external check can be a boon for your articles, and ChatGPT is actually very good for this task.

So first, let’s analyze your text with this prompt:

ChatGPT will give you a reasonable estimate of the reading difficulty of your article and also suggest revisions:

Depending on the result and your audience, you may need help adjusting the knowledge level.

In this case, you can copy the paragraph you want to address and use a prompt to help you adjust the knowledge level.

For example:

Now that you've adjusted the knowledge level, it's time to make sure the article is as clear and concise as possible.

Let’s start with a general check:

If you want to get more specific, you could also copy specific paragraphs that you feel are a bit clunky and try to rewrite them using a simple prompt such as:

Now that your article better reflects your tone and style, it's time for the final step of proofreading.

To start, make sure you haven’t used the wrong tense with this prompt:

Once this is done, you can move on to grammar and punctuation:

If you write in a particular stylebook, don’t forget to input it as well:

Now compare the result to your draft and start editing!

💡

DeepL

is another good AI tool to edit your writing (and a great translation tool). Check it in my list of

18 tools I use every day

.

As you have seen, ChatGPT can be quite useful as an editor for scientific writing.

But there are areas where I really suggest you do not go.

The first is fact-checking.

While ChatGPT has gotten better at fact-checking, it still faces challenges, occasionally 'hallucinating' and creating facts.

So keep doing your own scientific fact-checking, or rely on a colleague whose job it is to do it.

Another thing I recommend is to avoid relying too much on ChatGPT.

The whole point of this article was to show you that ChatGPT is a good tool, but it can't replace a good writer.

If you think that you can just ask ChatGPT to write whole articles for you and be rewarded for it, you are wrong.

When it comes to generating whole articles, ChatGPT and other LLMs have a very recognizable style, even if you use more specific prompts like the ones I showed you.

And very often, AI-generated articles are quite shallow because they lack real-life experience.

When editing with ChatGPT, I use less than 50% of its suggestions for the final article.

Why?

Because ChatGPT wants to write like ChatGPT, which is a kind of general default style accumulated from scraping the whole web.

Even if you ask to imitate specific authors, the results you get are often clichéd or overdone.

Avoid that.

You want to preserve the uniqueness of your writing.

So be careful and don’t insert blindly 100% of the edits the AI gives you.

Keep a critical mind, just as you'd do with a human editor.

And don’t stop experimenting.

AI is here to stay.

You can either ignore it or use it to improve your writing and share your unique ideas.