Can ChatGPT Replace Antidote?

In short, no. ChatGPT and Antidote complement each other. While both tools use generative artificial intelligence, they do so differently and for distinct purposes. Read on to discover why Antidote is an invaluable tool for improving your writing, even if you use ChatGPT for drafting your texts.

Differences Between ChatGPT and Antidote

ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses generative AI to reply to you and create content. To do so, it relies on a large language model (LLM). It sorts data from publicly available sources—websites, articles, forums, Wikipedia and so on—to answer your prompts. You can ask ChatGPT to compose, translate and summarize a text, generate computer code and images, create a work plan and much more.

Antidote is an English and French writing assistance software application. It is a complete arsenal of language tools and references, and it includes a powerful corrector, rich dictionaries and detailed language guides. It uses generative AI that relies on an LLM to help you boost the quality of your writing. It corrects the text you submit in depth and suggests ways to rephrase your writing and improve your style while remaining true to your ideas. It even lets you customize various language settings, which it will apply when correcting your text.

ChatGPT and Antidote each have unique strengths you can leverage by using them wisely.

Why Should You Use Antidote Alongside ChatGPT?

Ask ChatGPT to improve the style of your text or correct mistakes, and it will… to some extent. But it is not a specialized grammar checker, spell checker or text analysis tool. It does not detect all types of errors, and it may even introduce new ones or hallucinations (i.e. false or misleading information). Antidote, on the other hand, provides clear and accurate answers, backed up by verified sources and built on linguists’ expertise, and it always lets you stay in control of your writing.

Here are the three main ways Antidote excels as a loyal and trusted writing companion.

1. Texts That Reflect You

Imagine your dream job is available. You want to apply, but the deadline is fast approaching, and you are suffering from writer’s block. ChatGPT will draft your cover letter in a few seconds. Want a more formal or creative tone? Ask it to rewrite it, and it will, again and again.

To get the professional results you’re looking for, you will probably need to submit multiple prompts. Crafting clear, optimal prompts is not as easy as it sounds. It is a skill called prompt engineering, and if you are not an expert, you may need to copy-paste passages from different answers to piece together a suitable letter.

This is where you can turn to Antidote. Your trusted writing companion helps you spruce up your text exactly to your liking—it is designed for that. It corrects mistakes and suggests reformulations that stay true to your ideas, fine-tuning your writing without superfluous changes. Antidote even provides various options, from the most faithful to the source to the most modified. Choose the one you prefer, editing the entire sentence or only a segment. Ensure your letter reflects you by always staying in control of your writing.

Let’s see how ChatGPT rewords a short bio written for a CV. The text is rewritten as a new paragraph in which the changes are difficult to spot.

Now let’s look at the options provided by Antidote. Here, you get to decide which fragments to change, always keeping track of your modifications.

2. Clear, User-Friendly Interface

When you ask ChatGPT to improve or correct your text, it will immediately generate a new version. Ask for explanations, either in the initial prompt or after, and it will provide them. However, even with a list of explanations, it may be tricky to spot the changes it made. And the longer your text, the more difficult it is to keep track of them.

Let’s see an example.

While ChatGPT’s explanations are clear and concise, they are not always reliable. It explains that September 31 should be corrected, as it is a non-existent date, but it did not correct it in the text and required a second prompt to flag it. It also explains that “Their saying” should be corrected to “They’re saying”, but it originally corrected it to “They say”. It then explains two unnecessary stylistic improvements, only one of which it applied to the corrected text.

What’s more, you will need to perform a separate search if you want to verify that ChatGPT’s answers are accurate and not a hallucination or if you want to learn more about your errors so that you don’t make them again. You will also need to copy-paste the corrected text back to where you were writing, which takes time and may interfere with your formatting.

Unlike ChatGPT, Antidote visually emphasizes errors and provides the explanation in a tooltip, as well as a link to the relevant guide so you can know more about the reason behind it. The corrector’s different views analyze the text from different angles. Red and orange underline detections, and various types of lines underscore their nature. Navigate from one detection to the next in the panel on the right, and see each one clearly and in context.

Antidote lets you go through each detection and decide whether to accept it. It also integrates with over 90 applications. When using them, simply click Correct and Antidote will apply the corrections directly to the source text. No copy-paste involved!

Antidote helps you be more productive and learn from your mistakes. With its easy-to-use interface, you can rest assured that all necessary corrections have been applied and that your text says exactly what you want it to say.

3. Data Privacy

ChatGPT generates content using texts from all over the Internet. This includes everything you submit. It stores your writing to train and perfect its AI models and to generate content for others, too. Even a paid plan does not ensure data privacy.

Antidote, on the other hand, does not store your writing, and it ensures your data remains private. If you use the Reformulation Mode or Antidote Web, your texts are submitted to Druide’s servers, located in Canada. The information is transmitted securely via HTTPS protocol. The transmitted texts are not used to train the LLM that Antidote’s Reformulation feature relies on. Antidote’s artificial intelligence is trained by its expert linguists’ human intelligence, not by your texts.

If you need to comply with your organization’s specific internal policies, you have the option to use Antidote only locally, without reformulation.

Generative AI tools have rapidly transformed how we write. ChatGPT makes it easy to draft a text in a few seconds; Antidote takes you a step further. It acts as a complementary tool, ensuring the quality of your writing and the privacy of your data. With its comprehensive resources, faithful reformulations and user-friendly interface, it helps you polish your style easily and worry free. So, why not implement both solutions into your writing process to dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s! ✌🏻✨