Being a Better Writer: How To Use AI Like ChatGPT To Write Your Story · 5:37pm Sep 18th, 2023
Hoo boy. This is going to be an unpopular post to say the least. It’s topical, it’s a hot-button issue, and there are people who already feel extremely passionate about it for varying reasons. But because of how topical it is, and the wave of questions about it I’ve personally seen sweeping writing forums, that’s the topic we’re tackling today on Being a Better Writer. And we’re diving right into it. Even as posters rev up their keyboards to shout at me in the comments about how wrong I am (some, undoubtedly loading up ChatGPT to write those very responses), before even getting this far in the article. So yeah, we’re just starting. We’re going headfirst right in. And I’m going to start by just handling that question in the title right up front. How can we use AI like ChapGPT to write our story?
The answer is simple and straightforward, and I cannot make this clear enough: We don’t.
Okay, post over. Everyone can go home. No, of course not. Because I can feel the nuclear indignation of those ChatGPT “writers” from here, glowing like an atomic furnace full of roasting Karens.
So yeah, let’s talk about this. With AI-generative programs being the new “hot stuff” affecting so many mediums, what’s the problem with using it to write a few sentences, or a few paragraphs, or a few chapters, or hey, why not just a whole book? Surely there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? It’s the silver bullet that’s so-long been wanted by many that takes the hardest part of writing out of writing! That being, you know, the writing.
So hit the jump, and let’s talk about ChatGPT and other AI-generative programs. Why they’re not a silver-bullet, how they can actually lead you into a wealth of trouble … but also what use they do have in the world of writing.
Here Lies Viking ZX
Mobbed by the Lazy
Here's a few more examples of how to use LLM's to assist in writing you might've missed. Like you said, don't copy/paste the direct output, as it's not gonna be great.
But as a writing buddy? LLM's are great for spitballing ideas.
For example: Naming things.
I'll tweak the wording a bunch, and run it through a few more times. But glancing at the kinds of lists this produces gives me a bunch of ideas for what this character might be named. 'Jester Jive' sounded good in this case.
Naming can include naming characters, buildings, places, concepts, magic systems, fictional companies.
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Another neat thing is writing inspiration (the thesaurus approach to LLMs). "The best writers read" —and all that jazz. But not every author has bookmarked the ten different places there was 'a cool fight scene' so they can go back and re-read for inspiration what those scenes were like. Or all the times they've read an 'establishing shot of a forest.'
Using LLM's, you can brush up on what a scene could even look like. You can add "in poetic, flowery language" or "written in the style of gothic horror" or "as Jesus might have described it" or "in the diction of a 1980's New York gang member."
For beginning writers, our language tends to reflect the way we speak on an everyday basis. We're not going to off-the-cuff think of all the possible words that could describe something. That's where reading over a few examples of how they AI describes something can be helpful.
I love using LLM's to get word ideas. I have ADHD and often forget how to describe things. I suppose this is using LLM's like a glorified thesaurus, but it's still helpful.
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And this is more for the administration side of writing, but I have to give a shout-out to GoblinTools as the best real-world usage for LLM's I've seen. It's very useful for breaking down tasks into their smallest units so it's not overwhelming. And the braindumper tool takes vague ideas and thoughts and turns them into action items.
This is, given the current state of AI, an objectively correct take.
(Source: basically everything posted by anyone who has an opinion informed by hands-on use. See: all your links, other recent posts like Lucky Dreams' and Chris', etc. Also, I've paid for a subscription to an AI service, and in the spirit of playing around with it I've co-written over 100,000 words with an LLM, long past the point where its flaws are predictable and I've had to figure out workarounds to keep the story on track.)
There's three kinds of people who will take umbrage with you: people who legitimately want to be authors but have Dunning-Kruegered themselves into believing that AI writes as well as people; the AI bros that have a personal (emotional or financial) investment in AI the same way that the early 20s saw a plague of NFT evangelists; and the people who aren't here to read your take because they only care about making Amazon.com into a more efficient "push button, receive money" machine. I hope you're able to reach the first category. The other two are a lost cause.
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Surprisingly no, not yet. Though in fairness, I think most of the lazy writers get blocked by the act of reading my posts in the first place because reading is too much effort.
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I'd caution on using it for names for one sole reason alone: AIs can't internalize your language rules unless you tell them, and a lot of what I've seen from AI shows people aren't recognizing that.
Okay, for a DnD session or something sure, that's fine. But what about a serious work of Fantasy or Science-Fiction that someone is attempting to publish? If you ask an AI to give you names, it can make up names based off of other fantasy names, sure. But it can't make them consistent internally. It can't ascribe a culture to them unless the one controlling the inputs does so. It leaves the resulting details of the story feeling incohesive, since the AI can't ascribe details or background to them unless dutifully prompted (at which point you're basically 90% of the way there anyway and might as well do it yourself).
Again, if you're just running a DnD campaign or doing online RP, not a huge deal. But if you're trying to build a cohesive world, part of the issue is that an AI cannot understand your world unless it's sampled it in its entirety, AKA you already wrote it. It'll never know to have a character use a magic power that it didn't already pull from another source. If I fed it Salitore Amazd, for example, and told it "He uses his magic to escape this scenario" the AI is going to have no idea what Sali's magic is and would just pull generic magic from other inputs, as opposed to Sali's actual abilities shown in the story.
Using one as a thesaurus is a good idea, but again should be within limits since the AI isn't that smart. Used as a vague example is the best way I'd describe it, in that scenario.
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That first group is, I've noticed, pretty darn large and insistent.
In my opinion, using ChatGPT to create creative content such as literature and art is inappropriate. Because the nature of literature is the expression of human emotions and thoughts through words. Meanwhile, AI can only synthesize and combine content mechanically. I encourage authors to write their own stories, instead of relying on AI. Because only humans can bring true creativity, emotion and meaning to work. This is the core value of literature and art.