Exploring the Blog Capabilities of ChatGPT: First in a series

I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT to help me write headlines and social media posts to promote my blog posts. I originally thought I’d write up one big post to show everything I’ve done and found, but it’s quickly getting very awkward. Instead, I’m going to turn this into a series of posts. I’m not sure how much actual analysis I’m going to do right away. These first few posts will document the prompts I used and the results I received.

This week, I’ll talk about what I did for my February 12th post, titled “From Rain to Flutes to Psychopaths: A Week in the Life Of A Writer.”

Headlines

Here are the headlines it generated, sorted from high to low. Ten of the 12 measured 54 or better at Coschedule’s Headline analyzer, which is better than I usually do for the weekly stuff. My average score over the last 47 posts is 38. I didn’t score the bottom three because they were essentially useless in my opinion.

65	From Rain to Flutes to Psychopaths: A Week in the Life of a Writer
64	From Rain to Native American Flutes: A Week of Changes and Challenges
64	From Rain to Flutes: A Week in the Life of a Writer
61	From Rainy Forecasts to Native American Flutes: A Week in the Life of a Writer
61	From Rain to Native American Flutes: A Journey Through the Week
59	Exploring the Healing Power of Lo-Fi Music and Unconventional Instruments
59	From Rain to Flutes to Psychopaths: A Week in the Life
56	From Weather Forecast to Native American Flutes: A Week in the Life of a Writer
54	From Rain to Flutes: A Week in Review
54	Writing a character like a psychopath: The emotional toll it takes on a writer
46	From Rainy Forecasts to Native American Flutes: A Writer’s Journey Through Music and Challenging Characters
45	From Rain to Flutes to Psychopaths
	Can Holding Your Breath Affect the Weather? Exploring Alternative Methods for Coping with Rainy Forecasts
	Can holding your breath affect the weather? A curious inquiry amidst changing forecasts and musical musings.
	Can Holding Your Breath Change the Weather? Exploring Alternative Methods to Weather Forecasting

Social Media

I also used it to generate some social media posts to go along with the headline.

Using the prompt “Write a twitter post summarizing the following text” then pasting in the post text, I got these results.

This week’s forecast changed to almost 2 inches of rain starting Monday night, continuing through Wednesday, with more rain next week. The author is considering buying a Native American flute and struggling to write emotionally taxing scenes in their book. They are also finding it difficult to read a book without arguing with the author’s statements.

That came in at 352 characters, which was too long for Twitter and too wordy in general. Next I tried “Write a social media post that summarizes the following text. It should be no longer than 280 characters”

A rainy week, some music recommendations, and updates on the books the author is reading and writing about. The author talks about the challenges of writing a disturbing character and mentions their emotional toll.

That came in at 214 characters, and is essentially what I used on social media.

And in the interests of full disclosure, I had some help from the bot on titling this post as well. Here are the ideas I had.

38	Blog Experiments with ChatGPT
48	A Blogger Reports Their Experiments with ChatGPT
49	See What This Blogger Does With ChatGPT
47	Follow Along As This Blogger Experiments With ChatGPT
47	See What I’m Doing With ChatGPT
64 *	My First Encounter with AI: Exploring the Capabilities of ChatGPT
68	Exploring the Capabilities of ChatGPT: First In A Series
71	Exploring the Blog Capabilities of ChatGPT: First in a series

I gave the bot “A blogger is writing a series of posts about their experiences with AI and ChatGPT on their blog. Write a headline for the first post” and got the asterisked text in the chart. I riffed from there and got the title I’m using.

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