An editorial dialog with GPT-4
Let's set the stage. A writer has drafted an essay for a publication that has specified a maximum word count of 5,000, and a preferred range of 1350 to 2700. The draft totaled 4,869 words, so it was within the limit, but not in the preferred range. Facing an imminent deadline, and knowing that I have a GPT-4 subscription, the writer asked me to try using ChatGPT to produce a (draft of a) shorter draft.
Last night I tried, with results that were both interesting and frustrating.
The goal was not to test GPT-4, but (perhaps) to speed up the creation of a shorter draft. And I'm not going to comment on the content of the edited version — which I gather was mostly good enough to be useful, but sometimes wrong, misleading, or meaningless.
The full dialog is below. Commenters will no doubt notice my poor-quality "prompt engineering", but still, the interaction suggests that counting words is not one of GPT-4's strengths…
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