Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

An extensive review of top competitors to ChatGPT reveals that while most give the tool a good run-for-its money, none are quite as deft as ChatGPT overall.

The reason: Many of these tools home-in on enhancing a specific function of ChatGPT, but cannot be used as a Swiss-Army-Knife for other writing and research tasks.

Also, most of these alternatives do not offer access to GPT-4 — currently the most powerful writing engine option that’s available with ChatGPT.

Even so, the rundown of tools in this piece will be of interest to users who are willing to sacrifice ChatGPT’s general-use superiority when looking to perform a highly specific task — or take a slightly different approach to AI writing.

Bottom line: This overview is the most thorough and valuable guide to ChatGPT alternatives you’ll likely find on the Web right now.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*In-Depth Guide: GrammarlyGO: MakeUseOff offers a handy look in this piece at GrammarlyGO — the AI writer recently added to the popular AI editor/proofreader.

The take-away: GrammarlyGO is essentially another AI writer that can automatically produce writing for you.

Its major distinction: The tool also offers the finely-honed AI editing and proofing tools of Grammarly — one of the most widely used of its kind.

*Headlines by Hal: Survey: 49% of Newsrooms Already Using AI: A new report from the World Association of News Publishers finds that nearly half of newsrooms are already using AI writing tools like ChatGPT.

So far, journalist reaction to the new tools has been positive, according to the survey.

Specifically, 70% of survey respondents saw AI writers and similar as helpful.

The most common use for the tools: ‘Limited’ text creation.

*Master of Multiplicity: New AI Tool Automates Endless New Versions of Your Social Media Posts: Clearview Social has rolled-out a new tool that will auto-rework your social media posts so you can post multiple versions of the same post on myriad social networks.

Dubbed ‘Social Shuffle,’ the tool uses ChatGPT as its writing engine.

Social Shuffle also has a setting that enables users to double-check the post variations generated before those posts go live.

*Columnist Demo: Hey Look — A Writing Can Do My Job: A tongue-in-cheek piece auto-written for a local paper used an AI writer to auto-produce a column for the paper after the human writer behind it got stuck for ideas.

The result: ‘Instant column,’ according to the human writer.

Or for the rest of the flesh-and-blood scribes at the paper: Perhaps a bit too uncomfortably instant.

*ChatGPT Fall-Out: The Re-Emergence of the Oral Exam: Some college professors fed-up with students using ChatGPT and similar AI tools to cheat on exams are turning to an ancient testing alternative: The oral exam.

Huihui Qi, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, is one of many instructors who have made the switch, according to Douglas Belkin, a writer for the Wall Street Journal.

Observes Belkin: “Qi believes the exams can push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet — and reveal a student’s conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams.”

*Rise of the Prompt Engineer: Flash-in-the-Pan?: Writers especially adept at coming up with Prompts for ChatGPT — or highly detailed conversational commands that trigger the AI writer to produce exactly what the user is looking for — are currently making serious bucks.

Mashable reports such word-wizards are making as much as 175K to 300K-a-year.

Adds writer Mike Pearl: “If you’re coming down with a case of prompt engineering fever, take a sip of water, breathe — and know that most prompt engineer jobs aren’t really that lucrative.

“And the ones that are might not exist for very long.”

*Google Ads Creation Get AI Upgrade: A new interface in Google Ads uses AI writing to help users auto-produce ads — and ad keywords — optimized for the search engine.

Observes writer Greg Finn: “In the demos, the Google Ads AI shows that it generated a specific number of keywords/headlines/descriptions or other assets for review — and cues up alongside chat for easy editing.

“Advertisers across-the-board should be celebrating this news — due to the intrinsically cooperative experience it brings to the campaign-creation process.”

*ChatGPT’s Big Brother: Souped-Up GPT-4 Enables Users to Work With 50 Pages-at-a-Time: Rueiter reports that an advanced version of the OpenAI software that runs ChatGPT enables users to work with about 50 pages-at-a-time while using the tool.

That’s much more than what’s available for use with ChatGPT, for example.

This advanced capability enables a user, for example, to input extremely detailed instructions for revising a text document — and then include a text document for revision of about 49 pages.

The ChatGPT-on-steroids is also able to hold those 49 pages of text in memory — should the user want to further revise the text with additional Prompts.

Dubbed GPT-4 32K, the turbo-charged AI writer is available directly from OpenAI.

*C-3PO After Your Job?: How to Beat AI in the Job Market: Workers looking to beat AI at its own game should start cultivating skills that AI lacks — i.e., the unique ability to be human.

So says Po-She Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is on a countrywide speaking tour informing America’s youth on how to survive the ChatGPT ‘invasion.’

Advises Loh: “Think about what makes humans human — and lean into that as hard as possible.”

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.