Say you want to write a cookbook. If you are going to write a cookbook, you would need to prepare yourself for an extensive amount of research. You would need to know what appliances to use and how to use them, what the best ingredients are, what ingredients work well with others, use every bit of prior knowledge that you have with cooking, and maybe even try some of these recipes yourself to see if they work. The same goes for non-fiction books: You would need to compile articles from a variety of different, often hard to find sources, past studies, and find the information that you need in each of these bits of data to use in your book. You may even want to try some observational research yourself. Even a fiction book will require research: What if you’re writing a fantasy book, and you need some ideas and inspiration for the setting? Plenty of established authors would often look towards nature or historical cultures in order to get inspiration for their new setting. The point I’m trying to make is that no matter what sort of book you are making, you should do some research into it beforehand.
AI can streamline that process.
One of the most common ways people use AI is to summarize long articles into quick, easy to read paragraphs so that they can get the facts quicker. This can be useful for getting a general idea of an article, but I personally wouldn’t recommend this method, especially if you are writing for a non-fiction book. It may miss some of the nuance of a situation, incorrectly give a number belonging to a different variable, or accredit a quote to the wrong person.
Instead, I like to use it as a more advanced search tool. Much of Google’s search engine has been polluted by sponsored content and sites taking advantage of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in a misleading way. If I need to find reliable links to articles and studies, I will usually ask ChatGPT instead. The useful thing about ChatGPT is that it can automatically organize the articles for you, and it gives you links that directly take you to the article. It can link to certain subsections of a website that are buried in menus and can’t be accessed by most search engines. This works for studies, too: ChatGPT can even provide you with a direct link to the PDF and highlight the main points of the article. It makes finding these articles a breeze, when previously you would often have to hunt down this information through a maze of drop-down menus on a website.
If you are particularly stuck and don’t even know what you need to research, you can even ask AI to help with that, too. Just ask it a rough, broad topic and it can narrow down and extrapolate ideas and topics that you can use as a suggestion to move forwards. From there, take one of these more defined topics and ask it the same question to get even more topics and ideas out. This can uncover a broad variety of ideas for you to look into further, and can even let you see your subject from an angle that you would have never thought of on your own.
There is one thing that you still have to keep in mind when using AI. Always, always check your citations! This is especially important if you are writing non-fiction books and informative books. AI programs have, in the past, made up fake links to websites and fake citations to material that does not actually exist. This is because they are designed to imitate human writing, and so they include those citations there, imitating what they look like, without realizing why they are there. To be fair, many AI programs have gotten better over time, and don’t do this nearly as often anymore, but you should still never take what an AI says wholesale. Some AI programs (such as ChatGPT) will include links to the articles that they have cited below whatever answer they give you. I would check out those links, see if they are real, and see what they say for yourself.
The best way to treat AI when it comes to research is to treat it like a research buddy. Give it some slack and it will take you to some unexpected places. Be open to input, but remember that you have final say.
Written by Connor Mayhorn.
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article.