Beyond Goat Stories: ChatGPT’s Relevance to the Collabry Communications Team

Recently, the Collabry team had a little fun on our Slack workspace when one of our consultants posted five stories about goats written by the AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Four were written in the styles of well-known writers (Tolstoy, Stephen King, Christopher Moore, and Michael Crichton), while the fifth was written as a newspaper account.

While the stories were by no means masterpieces, it was a bit scary how well ChatGPT had come up with four original stories told in distinctly varied voices.

Indeed, ChatGPT has proven to be a lot of fun to play around with, in somewhat the same way that eliciting silly responses from Siri was once a fun party trick. But does AI have a true calling when it comes to doing the actual work that our writers do day in and day out? Will it help or hinder writers? Or put them out of a job?

“I’m sure at some point people thought the typewriter was going to ruin the writing process,” says Collabry CEO Rachel Formaro. “Instead, I could one day see AI becoming a new tool in the writer’s toolbox.”

But we’re not quite there yet. One issue, for now, is that AI writing is based on published works from undisclosed databases. As such, AI writing doesn’t adhere to the standards for the kind of writing Collabry does for our clients. Our writers only write original content, and we scrupulously fact-check our work via reputable sources we can document.

Rachel is also concerned about the moral and ethical implications of using AI to create content or other works. For example, who takes the credit for a written piece that was created by AI—the programmer, editor, or writer whose writing style was used? She feels there will be many issues regarding AI-assisted work, from how it’s done, who’s doing it, and what needs to be disclosed to how the work will be billed.

“As an industry, I think we’re still at the early stages of figuring that out, and we need to move forward in the most responsible ways,” Rachel says. “Certainly, we’ll continue to look into its future possibilities, but for now, perhaps the best way for writers to use AI is as a humor break when needed.”

Next week, we’ll talk to Rachel about how she sees AI’s role in project management—as well as how she thinks AI could be a boon to work culture, mental health, and the environment (spoiler: it has to do with the promise of a four-day work week!).