AI writer for Google Sheets and Docs
GPT for Work is an AI writer and assistant for Google Sheets and Docs. It is ChatGPT directly in Google Sheets and Google Docs.
What is an AI writer?
An AI writer is a software tool that uses artificial intelligence to help a user write. It can help a user work with all writing tasks. It can dramatically accelerate working with text, taking care of all the mundane busywork, sparking creative ideas, fixing language mistakes, perfecting tone. It was popularized by ChatGPT, the chatbot interface made by OpenAI.
What tasks can an AI writer help with?
The set of writing tasks it can do is very broad:
- outlining a topic
- generating ideas
- writing short-form and long-form copy, from a simple headline to a full article
- editing, fixing grammar and spelling, rephrasing correctly, changing the tone and style
- extracting entities
- classifying into categories
- summarizing in different formats
- expanding
- explaining
- providing arguments and counter-arguments
Can an AI writer completely replace a human writer?
Well in theory it is possible, but content generated 100% by AI with no human in the loop will probably yield moderate to bad results, as it cannot know everything about your context, your voice, and it can also easily make up incorrect facts or numbers.
Fully ai-written content is also typically very homogenous. While an AI writer like ChatGPT can write in very different ways, styles, tones, formats, etc. If you take a single piece of content generated, it will usually look very cohesive and consistent, in a sort of inhuman way. That’s because GPT models predict each word one after another, which produces a very consistent style throughout a piece of content.
As a result, we do not recommend relying only on AI if you really want to produce awesome content. We do however heavily recommend using AI to write content that needs only be good or average.
What technology are AI writer tools based on?
The most well known AI writer is ChatGPT, made by OpenAI. It is a chatbot interface. Most other modern tools, including GPT for Sheets and Docs, are based on OpenAI ChatGPT and GPT-3 models.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformers. It is a new kind of models, which can be trained on massive amounts of content and are therefore capable of human-level (or above human-level) writing tasks without restriction on the topic to a certain extent.
But there are other models currently being developed by Anthropic, Cohere and others.
How do GPT-based AI writers work?
The popularity of GPT-based AI writers comes from the fact that anybody can use them since they are instructed in natural language. Instructions given to AI writers are usually called “prompts”.
A prompt is like a brief that you would give to a person that you want to do something for you, except that in this case you give it to a computer model. It is written in natural language, and should be specific, like in real life.
There are two ways to prompt:
- by describing the task concretely. So in effect you can tell an AI writer to “write a tagline” or “extract email addresses from this text” or “create an outline of a topic” and it will provide you with a response within seconds.
- by providing a few examples, from which the AI writer will learn what to do automatically on new data. This is extremely useful when the task at hand is easier shown than described.
Why use an AI writer in Google Sheets?
First of all, an AI writer can write much faster than any human can. So if you need to write many pieces of content at once, dozens or even hundreds, then an AI writer will be of immense help.
However, if you try to write for instance 100 social media posts in a chatbot, you will be putting yourself in a world of pain having to prompt the chatbot 100 times and keeping track of the answers.
The structure of a spreadsheet is thus perfect for bulk ai writing. It allows you to easily construct prompts from cells, and keep track of them in the spreadsheet grid. It also makes it easy to chain different prompts together.
An AI writer for Google Sheets is also more than a simple writer. It is a very capable assistant that can help you transform and sanitize your lists, create new lists from entity extractions, classify columns of data, help with field mapping and fuzzy lookups.
Why use an AI writer in Google Docs?
If you want to write a long-form piece such as a blogpost, you need a good editor. A chatbot is not made for heavy editing or team collaboration. You should be able to work in your usual tools, not be displaced to where the AI works.
Using AI in Google Docs directly will bring all the power of AI into Google Docs directly, and let you write, rephrase, edit, summarize, translate directly into Google Docs. With GPT for Docs, you can apply prompts to a selection, and insert text wherever you want in your Google Doc.