Matthew Scott Campbell

To continue my last post, I remember having the AI generate a chapter once. I wanted to see how it would do. It was a pretty easy chapter, I think. I needed some propaganda and to show the extent of corruption in an empire.

It generated a long, full-bodied chapter. It was at this moment that I thought my writing career may already be coming to an end (before it even began). After all, if I can provide world building details to an AI and then tell it to write me a story, what was the point of having writers?

Nervously, I read the chapter the AI generated. Actually, I read it out loud with my wife next to me. She had heard my despair and wanted to know what I was concerned about. As I’m reading it, I got to about a third of the way through the chapter and I just had to stop. I was exhausted. She was exhausted, too. The writing was, interesting. But it lacked soul. I can’t explain it beyond that.

But what is worse is the fatigue that was caused to me, the reader. In music, there are varying levels of volume and instrument combinations. You can’t have the entire orchestra play the entire song all playing the same notes or even harmonizing notes. Why? Because the listener gets fatigued. It’s a natural thing that happens. Rarely, if ever, will you have all of the horns blaring with the woodwinds hitting high notes and the string sections in full vigor for the duration of a song. It doesn’t sound good and, again, it’s exhausting. That was what it was like reading the result of the AI for this test.

Another way to look at it is if you asked someone to have an opinion on something and they spend several minutes piling on reasons for different answers, but never landing on a final answer.

So with that said, I don’t think AI will replace writers in the near future, if at all. But there are some other cool things AI can do. Anything in which rules and patterns can be applied to a process is ideal for an AI.

What does that mean for writers?

Well, for rules, punctuation and grammar become easily fixable by AI. It can identify issues in the way you write. An example would be punctuation for dialog.

For patterns, it can identify excitement and lull periods and tell you where your story may be slowing down or way too fast. It allows for some prose work, too, but I would again take its recommendations with a grain of salt.

Which is the crux of this entire mental exercise: NEVER TRUST AN AI.

Funny, right? In the IT industry, this is rule #1. I can ask an AI to generate code for me to do a simple task (like read a CSV file, for example). But under no circumstance am I to take that code at face value. I have to review it and test it. I have to ensure that it does what I want it to do. Because AI can be confused, hypnotized, high AF, you name it.

This same philosophy applies to being an author. Ask the AI for advice and such, but never trust it. Always confirm its results. Always read them, especially aloud. That will save you a lot of heart ache.