A “thought partner” is actually the only time I’ve found ChatGPT to be legitimately useful. I neither want nor need it to write anything for me (writing something myself is part of my process), and when I’ve asked it for things in the past, the answers have been very “meh”. But a couple weeks ago I asked it to generate a writing prompt for me, because I’d been looking for prompts online and just constantly going “no, no, no, not that one either, nope, these all suck, I want something with X, Y, and Z”. So I asked ChatGPT to create a writing prompt with X, Y, and Z, and while the responses I got were still pretty derivative… a couple days later I suddenly went “oh, but if I changed it like this, it would actually be interesting”. So I ended up with an idea I actually liked.

This isn’t asking ChatGPT to write a story for me. I’m not going to use any of the actual words it generated (you know, except in the vaguest sense that obviously we both used a lot of common words without which it’s impossible to write, like “the”). But as a “thought partner” who basically echoed my own ideas back to me in a way that sparked a thought process that eventually gave me something useful? Yeah, it kind of works.