I get a fair number of newsletters and marketing emails. I will admit that I don’t open most, skim some, and only read one if it suddenly seems especially relevant. Yesterday, I read an email from a person whose business is helping people figure out how to move overseas from the US. It was immediately apparent from the first few lines that it had been written by ChatGPT. I thought I would give this person the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just naturally sound like that. Then, about three quarters down on the page, I hit the infamous “That’s not X. It’s Y.”
Yeah. Don’t do that. ChatGPT isn’t just obvious, it’s also annoying. (See what I did there? Get it? Get it?)
I don’t actually have a problem with people using AI for organizing their thoughts or even for a first draft. It’s only a problem when you don’t go back and make the writing your own. Edit ruthlessly. Expand ideas. Eliminate that annoying AI style in favor of your style. You’re almost certainly a better writer than ChatGPT, which is a 10th grade essayist on its best day.
And if you’re using ChatGPT because you don’t have 5 minutes to go back and humanize the writing, at the very least give it a hefty sample of your own writing and tell it, “Write in my voice and style based on these documents. Don’t use em-dashes or comparative constructions.” That’s not foolproof and you’ll still need to give it a swift edit, but it’s infinitely better than “write a marketing email that says (Your Message Goes Here).”
The Mia Experiment 