So You Want to Make Some Money with ChatGPT? These Things Won’t Work
Over the last week on Medium, I’ve seen several articles about making money using ChatGPT to help you. Granted, some of the ideas are interesting. Some of them I hadn’t considered before, like building an itinerary or a website with it (which I actually did, and I’ll cover that in another article in the future, I guess). Yet many of these “make money quick” schemes with ChatGPT are very, very misleading.
Sure, you CAN make money relatively quickly with ChatGPT. If you know what you’re doing. You can make something smooth and polished that’s got the look of a professional product in record time. But here’s the thing. ChatGPT isn’t a perfect tool. It’s an imperfect tool that requires a lot of cleanup to make it do what you want it to. I covered what ChatGPT and AI writers lack when they write content (from a professional’s standpoint), but here I’ll look at some of the things you should avoid when trying to “make fast cash with ChatGPT.”
1. Copywriting
Anyone who tells you copywriting is easy (or writing on the whole) has never done it professionally. They’re also the LEAST qualified people to tell you if ChatGPT is doing what it purports to do. As someone who uses ChatGPT to do things (primarily programming tasks, but occasionally to point me in a direction for articles for this blog), I have used it for some of its writing ability. However, using ChatGPT for a prompt differs from telling it to spit out a 1500-word article about a topic or a 400-word landing page.
Writing, especially copywriting, is nuanced and requires emotional skills. It’s as much an art as writing fiction or painting on a canvas. So far, AI has emulated one of those things well and still needs to improve at the other. Copywriting is somewhere in the middle. And unless you’re a copywriter, you won’t know if what it’s writing will work or not. If you plan to do this professionally, you will have a hard time.
2. Creating EBooks
ChatGPT has a lot of knowledge, but again, that knowledge isn’t always 100% correct. Because of ChatGPT’s learning model, it collects data about a topic and can easily recall anything about such a topic. Now, in most cases, this is a good thing. For example, if you want to know the Python script for making a button change color when you hover, that knowledge is open-source, and it can give you several ways to make it happen. When it comes to factual ebooks, though…it’s a toss-up.
If you ask ChatGPT to write you an ebook, it’ll do it. You’ll get the information it thinks is factual about a topic and will even deliver it in a neutral tone. But if you don’t know anything about the case you’re “writing” about, how can you tell when ChatGPT is wrong? And when you publish that book, and you have erroneous information on it, you’ll torpedo your chances of ever being considered an expert in the field. Again, this isn’t a “simple way to make money with ChatGPT,” as some have sold it to be.
3. Translation Services
Oh boy, where do I start? Professional translators usually spend a long time learning the nuances of a language. If you’ve ever looked at someone who’s a student translating something into your native language and an expert, you can immediately see the differences in how these things work. Can ChatGPT translate stuff into a different language? Sure, it can and can do it better than Google Translate. Can you do it professionally and make some money on the side? Probably not.
ChatGPT lacks nuance when it comes to language. Nuance, in case you don’t know, refers to the idiosyncrasies of a language. An excellent example of this is in Spanish. Castilian Spanish can differ from South American Spanish in some regards. And each place has its own slang versions and phrases they use that are particular to that geographic location. Translating something professionally might not require you to use slang. But you always risk the chance that what you produce isn’t going to read naturally to someone who uses the language.
What CAN You Do To Make Money with ChatGPT, Then?
Let’s be honest here, folks, ChatGPT is not a get-rich-quick engine. If anything, it’s a perfect example of why you need experts. ChatGPT can tell you many things. It can even spell things out to you in ways you didn’t consider before. But if you’re not an expert or don’t have a background in something, you have no clue if what you’re getting is what you need. One of the best examples of this is my current coding project, where I use ChatGPT to help me finish and release a free top-down space shooter (I’ll cover this in a future article, so stay tuned). The code it gives me works sometimes. But it doesn’t exactly do what I want all the time. And this exemplifies the limitations of the engine.
If you’re interested in discussions about AI, Machine Learning, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, or any new and weird tech stuff that’s out there, consider subscribing to my Medium. I also cover the intersection of tech and tabletop gaming (TTRPGs), as well as other aspects of TTRPGs. Until next time, if something seems way too good to be true, it probably is.
