These new GPT-3 AI writing tools are amazing. They're fun to use and boost your writing speed and writing quality. But as easy as they are to use, they're not perfect. They need a little help from you to make sure the content is 100% yours.
The best part about using an AI writer like Shortly is that it's able create near human-sounding text for nearly any niche you can imagine. One problem with GPT-3 AI writers is they might misuse facts in your article, or even "accidentally" plagiarize someone else's work.
It doesn't happen all that often, but I want you to be aware so you're prepared.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is when a person reuses someone else's work and claims it as their own.
What is AI Plagiarism?
AI Plagiarism is when a machine uses real-world words from source texts to write its own text. Machines cannot invent their own words, so they use words from other sources — but an issue can arise when the source text is plagiarized.
How to Prevent it?
You can't. AI writers don't invent their own words, so when they are being trained, they must be provided with a large enough database of real-world text so that they can identify patterns in that text. The larger the database, the better off the AI writer will be. But this is on the GPT-3 side — there's nothing you can do besides double-check its work.
Today, many of the tools are based on GPT-3, with an extensive real-world text database. That allows the AI writer to generate longer and more coherent sentences. GPT-3 has been trained on thousands of books and millions of web pages — so while it's not enough for a human who can think of an infinite number of possible ways to write a sentence and phrase, it's certainly enough for machines to do so.
AI like GPT-3, trained on sources worldwide, can accidentally reuse parts of those sources when writing new texts. This could lead to accidental plagiarism.
Fact Check Any Statements of Fact the AI Claims in Your Article
Fact-checking is when you check the accuracy of an article — especially statements of fact and statistics. When AI makes these claims you should verify them to be sure they are accurate.
For instance, in my writing, GPT-3 had claimed Tokyo Tower was the tallest structure in Japan, and the third tallest in the world. Wrong, but sounds like it could be correct. Luckily I know the niche very well and caught it.
The AI is smart, but not smart enough to know how smart it is. It doesn't necessarily connect two thoughts very well and sometimes uses facts from adjacent topics.
Be careful, make sure you fact-check the AI generated content — save yourself from some potentially major blunders.
Here's a funny one the AI tried to slip past me. "For example, almost all of the GPT-3 training data comes from books written for children in China — and many Chinese people even today still believe in ghosts."
No, no it isn't. 😉
Make it Your Own
One way to combat potential AI plagiarism would be to edit and change the "voice" of the article to your own. Don't just accept the text completely as-is. Spend some time in editing to change the tone, clarity, and voice of the article — something Grammarly Premium can help you out with to save time.
Don't forget, this is your article. Be the boss. OpenAI doesn't approve of the scalable generation of synthetic articles for SEO purposes… so don't go into these AI writing tools with the expectation they will generate everything for you — and you'll do great.