LLMs can help you a great deal with all kinds of writing tasks, whether creative or informative. They can help your writing in ways we’ve discussed in other sections, such as:
brainstorming ideas (see Brainstorming),
aiding research (see Researching a Topic),
checking your arguments and reasoning (see Reasoning),
naming things like characters or locations (see Naming Things),
and editing (see Corrections / Editing).
and to draft a variety of types of writing, including books, research papers, pop articles, and more. In this section, we cover a few additional ways you might use LLMs to help your writing.
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Before we do, however, it’s important to be careful about plagiarism.
On Plagiarism
The mere fact that an LLM has written something for you does not mean it is plagiarism-free (and, indeed, there are widespread moral concerns about how much theft of people’s work goes into the training of LLMs). To illustrate, consider the following example, starting with a ChatGPT conversation:
We can’t know for sure which sources in ChatGPT’s training data it is drawing on for this explanation, but the text it has given us here (specifically, the highlighted part) is close enough to the text below (from Wikipedia) that it would probably raise concerns about plagiarism, in an academic setting:
For this reason, we advise that, if you are going to use LLMs to help with your writing, you should not merely copy and paste the text they give you into your writing. Instead, consider using it as a springboard, a starting point, or inspiration.
With that said, here are some ways that LLMs can help you with your writing.
Drafting text
You can use LLMs to help draft any kind of text you can think of. Whether it be fiction prose, poetry, a screenplay, an academic article, or anything else! Of course, we advise you to check whether there are any relevant prohibitions on using LLMs this way (for example, it’s probably not permitted for help with your college essays), and to take heed of our above warning about plagiarism.
With that in mind, here’s an example in action (note: the data in this example are made up - they are not the results of a real survey):
Feedback and suggestions
An LLM can provide preliminary feedback on your drafts, pointing out areas that may require more development or suggesting improvements, much like a beta reader might.
Tone checking
You can use LLMs to adjust the tone of your work, making it more professional, conversational, formal, informal, etc. Just give the LLM your text and some details about the context and tone you want. For example:
Writing prompts / writer’s block
When you hit a roadblock, an LLM can offer suggestions for moving forward, whether it’s through dialogue, action, or shifts in focus, helping to spark creativity and maintain momentum.
✉️ Send us your prompts! ✉️
If you have suggestions for additional uses of LLMs, we'd love you to send them to us (including an example prompt) at info@clearerthinking.org. If we like them, we may add them to our library and credit you where they appear.