ChatGPT vs Writers: Who Will Win the Battle for Content Creation?

You can not fail to see all the articles about ChatGPT and what a fantastic tool it is. Writers sit in two camps those that worship at the feet of the AI and state that it is the best thing ever, and those that are genuinely scared that it will take their income away.

With this in mind, I decided to experiment on the platform to see what all the hype was about and whether it could be a tool I used. I decided to give it the task of writing three true crime articles I knew well. I stipulated the word count, the tone of voice I wanted it to use and the cases it needed to write on.

The surprising results made me doubtless about how helpful ChatGPT will be to a true crime writer. The three cases I asked it to write about were Irina Viktorovna Gaidamachuk, a relatively unknown serial killer, Ronnie Kray's time in Broadmoor and Jack the Ripper.

Irina Viktorovna Gaidamachuk

This may have been an unfair test as this case is not well known in the UK; however, it was important news in Russia. Presuming the AI had access to all countries' information, I was not that worried. I asked ChatGPT to write me a thousand-word article on this serial killer.

The first noticeable thing was that ChatGPT could not count; at best, the article was five hundred words long. However, it was just as well the article was short because it was complete garbage. Out of the information it provided, I would estimate only 10% of it was accurate.

Simple things, such as where she was born and how she murdered her victims, were wrong. The article finished by saying that she was released from prison in 2020, and she will not be eligible for parole until 2034.

Thinking this task might have been unfair to the program, I decided to try a more straightforward case.

Reggie Kray and Broadmoor

For this article, I stipulated that I wanted a thousand-word post centred on Ronnie Kray's time in Broadmoor, nothing else.

As I read the article, it started well. It covered much of the time Ronnie had spent at Broadmoor and dealt well with the controversies surrounding his hospital stay. But then we hit a problem.

The article discussed how Ronnie had been moved as it was unsafe for him at Broadmoor to Maidstone Prison, where he was released five weeks before dying of bladder cancer.

Without experience, this all sounded very feasible; however, Ronnie was never released from Broadmoor; he collapsed there and was taken to hospital, where he died of a heart attack. It was Reggie Kray who was released from Maidstone prison to die of bladder cancer.

It appears that AI does not know its gangsters well.

Jack the Ripper

I felt pretty confident that despite the first two attempts, ChatGPT would succeed with this case; after all, it was Jack the Ripper, probably one of the most famous serial killers ever.

This article did better, although it was still short of the word count by 400 words. When I read the article though it had just regurgitated all the other information, nothing was new.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at the results until we reached the end of the article, which finished exactly like this, 'The murders were particularly…..' So that was it; maybe it forgot what it was doing or just couldn't be bothered.

Is AI Going to Take Your Writing Revenue?

My next move was to set shorter word challenges, such as writing Twitter statuses to advertise my writing. These were good, I have to say, although ChatGPT has a thing about hashtags which are no longer needed on Twitter.

Overall, I was thrilled with the results from ChatGPT; it proved that I would have a place on the internet writing True Crime articles for quite a while. Although, I think there is a use for it in research and other tasks.

So if you are concerned about a loss of revenue when AI starts writing blog posts, I would rest assured that you have nothing to worry about. It appears it does not know it's Ronnie from Reggie.