I smell ChatGPT
How to use AI the right way when pitching
This week’s pitch left me feeling cheated.
The premise is intriguing. The author is a laid-off tech worker who wants to help other laid-off workers make the best of their situation. A timely topic offering practical advice is exactly what editors want.
I wanted the pitch to preview an emotionally charged account of what happened and what they learned. But it read more like a generic guide to self-improvement. It almost seemed like a robot produced it.
Which then led me to wonder: Was it written by ChatGPT?
I’ll try to answer that question, as well as dissect why this pitch felt so lifeless, in today’s newsletter.
If you have any decency, you’ll subscribe to Pitches Get Stitches.
The Pitch
As we embark on the new year, I am eager to present an op-ed on how to make the best of your layoff.
Drawing from my personal journey, including my own layoff in tech at the end of 2022 and my transition away from full-time employment in 2023, I offer a blend of practical advice, personal reflections, and perspective on the evolving relationship between work and personal identity.
My piece initially focuses on effective strategies for navigating life post-layoff. This includes establishing new routines, reevaluating professional ambitions, and embracing previously sidelined opportunities that full-time work may have hindered. I share how stepping away from full-time employment has opened doors to some practical freelance opportunities such as consulting and coaching.
Equally important, and less talked about, the piece will offer my perspective on managing risk suitable for you, seeking support such as therapy, and crafting a redefined vision for integrating work into life, rather than vice versa.
I look forward to sharing these insights with your audience.
The Stitches
Eat Pray Pitch
Judging by this pitch, losing your job sounds fun. “Make the best of your layoff”? Where do I sign up?!
Everything they did after they got laid off sounds a little too perfect to be believable. It’s like the Eat Pray Love of pitches.
We all know that when presented with a challenge like being laid off, there are always difficulties to face. Sure, it’s possible that the author didn’t face as many as others. But they must have faced some.
Their pitch makes it sound like they found out their job was terminated and immediately decided to reconfigure their life. They realized full-time employment wasn’t for them and embarked on a journey of self-discovery.
This just doesn’t feel relatable. When reading it, I felt more like I was receiving advice from a life coach than hearing the thoughts of a real person who struggled.
I don’t doubt that the author did struggle after their layoff, and it’s likely that those struggles led them to certain realizations that improved their life in the long run. But I want to see that progression, not just in the article, but in the pitch itself.
Showing vulnerability establishes credibility and connection with your audience. Don’t be afraid of it.
Say something real
It’s great if your article tries to convey some kind of universal truth. But universal truths don’t emerge in a vacuum. They are realized through specific experiences that influence how we view the world.
The pitch contains no specifics about the aftermath—how they felt, who they talked to, what they did. I wanted it to offer me a window into what took place during and following the layoff. From that standpoint, they could reflect on what happened and piece together some deeper meaning from it.
That’s how life actually works. We often don’t plan out big shifts in our behavior or outlook. Rather, they’re the result of a series of actions that only look cohesive when viewed retrospectively.
It’s likely that the author didn’t understand the massive shift taking place in them at the time it was happening. That’s real, and way more interesting!
I’d be much more interested in reading a pitch that said: I got laid off, and here’s some strange or unexpected thing I did in response. And by doing that thing, here’s what I realized about myself.
Personal essays don’t work well when they’re presented as blueprints. No one could ever replicate the author’s experience exactly. But the reader can still learn a lesson from what happened to the author, without having to go through it themselves.
Readers can find career advice in a million different places. In a personal essay like this one, they don’t want another career advice article. They want to read something written by a fellow human who feels and hurts and aspires like they do.
If you write in a way that a reader can emotionally relate to, they’ll trust you more, and your advice will resonate more deeply.
Some of the best commentary pieces I’ve read were deeply personal. Because I felt an emotional connection to the author, they stuck in my memory.
Did they use ChatGPT?
Speaking of personal … was this pitch written by ChatGPT?
I had this suspicion from the first sentence. It didn’t go away.
Let me clarify that I’m no anti-ChatGPT purist. I’ve used it in my work and find it helpful with certain tasks. (And I’m definitely not afraid of it.)
I have no problem with using AI to brainstorm op-ed topics or even write a skeleton of a pitch draft. But if you’re going to do that, you need to make sure that the final version doesn’t look AI-generated. I’d recommend using the AI-written version as an outline, and then referencing it as you write the draft on your own.
Why am I suspicious? Let’s start with the second paragraph:
Drawing from my personal journey, including my own layoff in tech at the end of 2022 and my transition away from full-time employment in 2023, I offer a blend of practical advice, personal reflections, and perspective on the evolving relationship between work and personal identity.
There are two red flags here. First, writing that the journey is “including” their layoff and transition from full-time employment doesn’t make sense. Isn’t the whole point of this pitch to focus on their layoff and its aftermath? Are they planning to talk about more aspects of their personal journey? If not, then why say “including”?
Second, the list of three things at the end feels hollow. Of course an article pitched as “laid-off tech worker offering advice” is going to offer practical advice and personal reflections.
I read “the evolving relationship between work and personal identity” about ten times, and still couldn’t understand what it means. It sounds like what you write when you want to add a third item to a list, because you know lists should always have three items, but don’t actually have anything else to put there.
Strange phrasing continues in the next paragraph:
Equally important, and less talked about, the piece will offer my perspective on managing risk suitable for you, seeking support such as therapy, and crafting a redefined vision for integrating work into life, rather than vice versa.
Why “equally important”? Does that apply to all three items they wrote in this paragraph’s list, or only some of them? Because the last item of the list, “crafting a refined vision for integrating work into life,” sounds a lot like “the evolving relationship between work and personal identity” in the previous paragraph. Why do you need to say these are equally important?
Is work-life integration “less talked about” than personal reflections or practical advice? Why would those concepts even be compared?
Maybe this sounds like nitpicking. But editors are trained to spot logical lapses a mile away.
To me, the fundamental illogic of the pitch makes me highly suspicious that it’s AI-generated. That’s because AI is really good at regurgitating phrases it’s seen millions of times. It’s not capable, however, of forming novel logical points. So when it’s tasked to do that, it ends up just spitting out writing that appears logical, but actually makes little sense once you scratch away the surface.
I decided to run the text through the AI detection tool GPTZero to see if I was paranoid. I wasn’t. It found with 56% confidence that the text was a mix of human and AI writing. (To test how accurate it was, I also pasted in the opening essay of this newsletter, which confirmed for me that I am indeed a human.)
Most editors are not going to run your pitch through an AI detector; they don’t have time. But they might notice that the text looks a little too generic or doesn’t follow common logic. They’re aware of how eagerly PR has been to jump on the AI train lately, and they may just assume you used ChatGPT to write your pitch. That’s not going to help your chances.
Don’t overpack
After reading the first two lines of this pitch, I’m already dreading the full essay.
This pitch sounds like it’s trying to do way too much in the limited space usually afforded to an opinion piece. The author promises to take us on a “personal journey” that addresses things like ambition, work and personal identity, therapy, risk management, and career planning. This sounds more like the introduction to a self-help book than an 800-word commentary.
An an editor, I’m not looking for extremely ambitious pieces. These may sound interesting, but I know they’re a trap.
With a pitch like this, one of two things is going to happen.
One is that the author writes a piece that’s 5,000 words long. If I want to actually run an op-ed like that, I’ll need to cut down about 80% of it, and have to deal with an author angry about losing all of their precious words along the way.
The other is that they try to pack all of the big concepts in, and the article ends up either a mess of half-baked ideas and non-sequiturs, or a dull laundry list of to-dos with little depth.
The way to avoid this irritating scenario is to be less ambitious. Focus on what happened to you and tell us about it with detail and candor. Help us get immersed in your story as much as you can. And then, once you’ve hooked us, tell us what the bigger point is.
Think about all of the opinion pieces you’ve read. How many of them could give a proper explanation of? Probably 1-2%. Most of them you don’t remember at all.
If you can remember one, its author did an incredible job.
That’s because they focused on conveying one point, and wrote the piece in a way that ensured it was memorable. Strive to do the same with your own opinion writing.
I’m Jake Meth, founder of Opinioned, a consulting firm that helps thought leaders publish op-eds in top media. Previously, I built and edited Fortune’s opinion section. I’ve worked in journalism and communications for 15 years.
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