ChatGPT has now become beneficial to all of us, especially for writers. Did you know? Most businesses need writers in this digital era. 

Businesses hire several types of writers for marketing: content writers, copywriters, technical writers, and ghostwriters.

AI tools are very helpful for all of these writers. 

But you might have a question in mind: 

Will AI replace writers? 

This is everyone’s biggest concern.

Let’s talk about it in detail now. 

The answer to this is definitely “no”.

As far as I’m aware, AI is merely a useful assistant tool and doesn’t completely replace writers. There are several reasons for this.

The very first reason is that it lacks creativity. AI certainly doesn’t possess its own creativity. If you notice, AI doesn’t have its own new experiences, ideas, or solutions to problems. It simply regurgitates the information it has. So, as a human, if you have creativity, you won’t be replaced by AI.

Furthermore, AI-generated content isn’t always high quality. It also often provides incorrect information, so it needs to be edited. 

In reality, you should only use AI as an assistant. It’s very useful for outlining your content, generating new ideas, or speeding up your work. It shouldn’t be used to completely replace you.

Now let’s get to the main point, which is ghostwriting. First, let’s learn everything about ghostwriting.

A ghostwriter simply means an “invisible writer”. Don’t assume they’re literally a ghost just because the word “ghost” is in the title; as funny as it sounds, “ghostwriter” simply means you’re an unseen writer.

Suppose you write content on behalf of someone, but you never appear publicly. When people see the content, they assume it was written by the person in question. You are simply the one pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

The main reason ghostwriters are hired is that many business owners, founders and CEOs simply don’t have the time. In reality, they all need to be active on social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. 

They need to build a network by sharing their experiences, but they simply don’t have the time. Therefore, they hire a ghostwriter. These writers write in ways that reflect their personalities and experiences. In return, they get paid a fee.

This is what is known as ghostwriting.

Prompting

The prompt is very important here. We need to know how to give the right prompt to ChatGPT. If you ask a question without giving a perfect prompt, it will answer in a robotic style or use too many unnecessary filler words. That’s why the prompt is so crucial.

First, let’s understand what a prompt is. A prompt is like an instruction you give to the AI. The more perfect your prompt, the more accurate the information you will get.

Now, let’s look at how to give a prompt to ChatGPT:

1. Setting the Persona

Set a persona for the AI. This mainly involves setting the role and tone.

Role Play: Assign your client’s profession and experience to the AI. For example, let’s say your client is a 50-year-old finance advisor. Then you should ask ChatGPT: “Think and speak like a senior finance advisor with 20 years of experience.”

2. Tone & Voice

Every person has a unique tone. You must clearly identify your client’s tone. There are mainly three types:

Conversational

Authoritative

Empathetic

3. Negative Constraints

You should identify some words or filler words that AI often uses and explicitly instruct it not to use them.

After ChatGPT gives you information, you need to convert it into human-written text. There are a few methods to do this, and I’ll tell you about them.

First, you need to understand how AI actually writes. The first thing is sentence variation. Generally, ChatGPT writes everything with the same sentence structure. That means all the sentences are roughly the same size and follow the same pattern. So, when you write content, make sure your sentences are all different lengths. Some should be short, some medium, and some longer. If they’re all the same, it will look like it was written by an AI, because that’s not how humans write.

Next, Active Voice. AI-generated content is mostly in the passive voice. So you need to make sure it’s directly in the active voice.

Along with that, there’s burstiness. Burstiness means natural fluctuations. In reality, people don’t write in a single, uniform flow. They might write emotionally in one place, logically in another, and very quickly in a third. This is called burstiness. When reading the content, you should ensure that these natural variations are present.

4. Adding the Client’s Unique Voice

Readers already know who your client is in ghost writing.

Right?

So, when they read an article or post, you need to make them feel that they really wrote this. So, using ChatGPT to inject your client’s personality into the content is your responsibility. To do that, try the following three methods I have mentioned below:

Personal Stories

You should write about incidents from your client’s life and the challenges they have faced, and also add small stories from the client’s life throughout your content with ChatGPT. It helps to remove the robotic tone completely from your content.

You can do it by simply providing ChatGPT with a small incident from your client’s life as input.

Opinions & Stance

In ghostwriting, your client’s strong opinions are very important too. Your client may disagree with something that everyone else agrees with or have a different perspective. So you need to ask them to highlight the uniqueness of your clients’ thoughts in your content.

You can do it by clearly writing your client’s opinion on topics on which you are writing and also presenting it boldly. So it gives more power to your content.

Local Slang/Jargon

Every person has a certain favourite word or a particular speaking style. Likewise, every industry also has its own unique terminology. So when you use these properly in your content, it shifts the tone from robotic to human.

You can do it by observing your client’s old emails or LinkedIn posts. Identify the words they frequently use, such as boss, game changer, or solid plan, and teach those to ChatGPT.

You should note this point that 

When editing content written by ChatGPT, first make sure the way of thinking belongs to your client, not to the AI. Give the AI the data; your client provides the soul. Your job is to combine the two.

5. Editing Process

One of the biggest mistakes ghostwriters make when using ChatGPT for ghostwriting is simply copying and pasting the ChatGPT output as it is. Whatever AI gives you, you should edit it carefully afterwards. Otherwise, it will look very robotic. Simply put, you need to polish it.

ChatGPT can make your work 70% easier, but the remaining 30% will depend on how you edit your content.

Let me explain how to edit your content 

First, you need to change your mindset. What ChatGPT gives you is only a First Draft; it is not the final product.

In AI-written drafts, you will often hear many cliché words such as “Introduction,” “In conclusion,” “Furthermore,” “Moreover,” and “In today’s digital landscape.” During editing, the first step is to remove these artificial-sounding words from your content. Sentences should be made shorter and easier to read instead of being unnecessarily long.

You should do fact-checking also. One of the biggest weaknesses of AI tools is Hallucination, which means making up information that does not actually exist. If you notice, sometimes ChatGPT can confidently provide incorrect statistics or outdated data. As a ghostwriter, if you publish false information under your client’s name, it can seriously damage their brand image.

You can do this by, If AI includes any years, percentages, research reports, or market statistics in its content, you should never trust them blindly.

Go to Google and check whether the report actually exists and whether those numbers are correct or not. If the client is talking about a technical or legal topic, it is very important to re-verify whether those rules and regulations are still applicable in the current year.

To find out whether your content sounds robotic or not, there is a secret trick used by some of the world’s best writers, which is “Read Aloud.” Read the script or article you wrote out loud using your own voice.

While reading, if you struggle to take a breath somewhere, stumble over certain words, or feel that a sentence drags on too long, it means AI has left its robotic mark there.

You should  fix it by 

When humans speak, one sentence may be short, another may be medium-length, and another may be very short. But AI tends to write all sentences at a similar length. Reading aloud helps you identify where the content feels boring. At those points, break up the sentences and rewrite them in the same style as your client.