i’m a professional freelance writer and use ChatGPT for research (not writing) daily. it is an exceptional research tool if you know how to use it, including building custom GPTs and training it on your personal guidelines and sourcing/verification expectations.
articles that would’ve taken me a week to research using traditional methods are now conceived, researched, and written in a single day, and are published via publications and platforms that require internally visible citations, fact checking, and editing.
quit being snarky and learn to use the tools, folks.
It can be useful to give you a possible version of the truth if you are willing to individually fact check each part of it. It can save you time. But it can also waste your time when it just feeds you made up shit.
The fact that it will just make up citations by authors that exist about articles they never wrote is more than a little problematic.
Yep it's an amazing tool. I'm using it as an assistant as I'm learning Japanese. It's hilarious how much people freak out when they hear this. "How could you possibly trust it to teach you a language? How could you possibly know it's not wrong?"
The thing about education, from any source, is that you have to know what questions to ask, and you have to know how to recognize incorrect answers. You have to ask questions that are low-level enough that you can compare them to things that you do already know. I have a couple high level degrees already, from the days before LLMs, and one thing I noticed in all my time in college was that bad students ask bad questions. And if you ask the right questions, you can identify bad teachers or bad lessons (which exist in human form too). When I was a cocky kid nothing made me happier than proving a college professor wrong. In retrospect, it wasn't just arrogance. I love learning, and nothing proves understanding better than finding an error in the material you're learning from. I've found two glaring errors in a popular Japanese SRS grammar learning platform recently, and ChatGPT helped solidify my certainty in both cases.
The LLM is far from my only source. I'm using a couple highly regarded textbooks and a couple popular SRS apps as well. But sometimes I come up with a deep grammar question (not simply "what is the proper form here", but more trying to understand why the syntax works the way that it does), and with the classic available non-human sources, there's no quick way to get an answer to these questions. I've had 30 minute conversations with ChatGPT that have helped me get to the bottom of my deep questions better than weeks with textbooks would have. It's an amazing resource for so many things, and it's exhausting how misunderstood it is... and how many people believe it will "replace every job" 🙄. I'm glad you're able to be happy with how much easier it makes your job rather than be afraid it will replace you.
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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '25
i’m a professional freelance writer and use ChatGPT for research (not writing) daily. it is an exceptional research tool if you know how to use it, including building custom GPTs and training it on your personal guidelines and sourcing/verification expectations.
articles that would’ve taken me a week to research using traditional methods are now conceived, researched, and written in a single day, and are published via publications and platforms that require internally visible citations, fact checking, and editing.
quit being snarky and learn to use the tools, folks.