04/25/2023
Is Using ChatGPT to Write a Book Cheating?
Is using a dishwasher cheating?
Labor saving devices only bring value if they replace low-value work people didn’t want to do or could not accomplish.
Writing a book used to take months. It need not anymore. Nothing wrong with that.
People resist writing their books because they are afraid: wary of the demands of writing, mindful of the time commitment and, most critically, because they fear, deep down, they aren’t smart enough to write a book. They deny themselves permission.
ChatGPT will embolden people to write their great, irreplaceable stories and conclusions that sit at the heart of what their service so special.
Let’s see how ChatGPT would help with this week’s made-up book: Screw You! How to Use Estate Planning To Destroy The Family You Leave Behind: Or Not.
This book is written by an American estate planner for an American audience. That's important.
If you ask ChatGPT a nuanced question (do Americans and Canadians hold a different view of paying taxes?) it will point to the fact that Canadians consider social programs in a way Americans often do not.
Americans are apt to view taxation as a hindrance to economic growth and more likely to question the efficacy and usefulness of how tax dollars are spent. Canadians, conditioned to consider government and the social safety net as good things, take a more benign view. Chat GPT gets that and explains it nicely.
But ChatGPT can't provide a detail that is critical to our made-up book, a conclusion hard won through experience.
The experienced American tax planner knows what almost no one else understands: the IRS reports that less than one percent of American deaths result in an inheritance tax.
As you read this, lots of nice people south of the border are giving gifts that result in capital gains, choosing ill-prepared executors and bequeathing property to distant relatives at the expense of people they love most. They are destroying their families to avoid a tax they would never have had to pay. Happens every day.
ChatGPT can’t manufacture the insight that sits at the centre of this made-up book. Nor can it speak to the experience and qualities that make the author the perfect person to help the reader with estate planning.
It can make the writing process way, way easier and nudge the writer toward writing a book that will change their life and their business.
At Catapult Book Writing we set writers up with a comprehensive blueprint, extensive coaching and help, a perfect cover and interior design with our Book Blueprint offer $5,995 (US).
