Writing with a Nemesis: Using ChatGPT to Strengthen Your Arguments

ChatGPT can be "a highly capable writing partner that never sleeps ... [if you] treat it like an editor, a proofreader, and a disgruntled reader... make it an enemy of my text and let it attack it as vigorously as possible."

• personal devil's advocate: ask it "to list the top three arguments that someone opposed to my thinking would disagree with and why", providing examples
• feeling your article is unfinished? ask “what is missing from this to make it a cohesive argument”
• ask "Which emotional arcs exist in the article", and do they clash?
• ask “find and explain any confusing examples for an audience of X” within the text. Ask for better examples if it finds some

Obviously, watch out for hallucinations: "I once asked it to find studies on mental health topics, and the AI gave me ten scientific paper titles, of which only three actually existed... [but] ChatGPT can be used for fact-checking". Ask it to

• "be extremely skeptical and surface the five parts of the article that seem to need to be fact-checked... look for anything that sounds particularly unbelievable... misleading phrases.”
• "point out any logical fallacies ... It has so far found a lot of confirmation bias, a few No True Scotsmen, and a surprisingly high amount of loaded questions."

Get a perspective shift - ask:

• “From a beginner’s perspective, what is confusing and complicated?
• from an expert’s perspective, what is over-simplified or misleading?”