More About AI

In late April, I wrote a post, "A Writer's Warning," which discussed the seductive dangers of AI as a surrogate for actual writing. My focus was largely on poetry, and I admit to using AI for the catch picture that accompanied the piece (I do this without reservation - my written words are my own since this is about writing. Art, however, is not my thing). Today's piece, however, will discuss the upside of AI in writing, particularly as a tool to help you improve your game.

An AI monster created by the monster that is AI

The scary thing about AI is that it can now write a novel, pretty much with minimal prompting. There have been cases where authors have been caught using AI to produce their works, and in some cases, more formulaic writing genres are quickly becoming infested with artificial works. Some technical algorithms and software packages can currently sniff out computer-generated verse, but it's just a matter of time before those are defeated. In short, AI is rapidly  becoming a part of the writing environment whether we want it to or not. However, instead of fighting it on every front, I recommend using it where it can serve you best as a writer.

I will use ChatGPT as my example AI, but many different packages can do this task. I am wrapping up the workshopping process for my latest novel with the working title, "Easier Than the Truth," and in a few months I plan on taking all those workshop points and working them into the copy. However, as an experiment, I decided to call in my AI frenemy and asked it to provide a grammatical review of my work. I dumped all 104,000 words into it, made sure to ask for a grammatical critique and scoring (ChatGPT can be a real kiss-up if you don't ask for objectivity), and hit enter. Boom! Seconds later, it gave me a full write-up of my work, including strengths, weaknesses, problems, and an actual scoring:

Category Score
Grammar            8.5/10
Punctuation 8/10
Sentence Structure 9/10
Dialogue Mechanics 9/10
Professional Readiness 8.5/10

It then explained, and offered examples from my text, weak spots, including the usual gallery of dangling participles, split infinitives, hyphen issues, etc. It didn't do the correcting, of course, but it gave me some good notes on whether there were structural problem versus basic editing issues, pacing problems, and so forth. In short... it offered a lot of advice within seconds without actually writing (or changing) a word. It served the role of the fastest beta reader I had ever worked with.

Admittedly, my experiment with giving me an outline and synopsis of the novel was less satisfying, as it mostly regurgitated the points I had typed up in narrative form. Its review of the work as a whole was also very complimentary, as ChatGPT is prone to do, which didn't help anything save for my ego. 

My point through all this is that, yes, AI can be a writer's friend if you let it. If you learn how to talk with it, how to interpret its responses, and bring more than a grain of salt with you for its reviews, it can help you. It should not, however, be anything more than one of your constructive critics. It's not a writer, you are. That boundary is very important, and will become more so as AI evolves.