AI for writers
how to use AI to boost creativity
Fellow pioneers in Sequel Country, welcome back to the higher slopes of the AI trail which we started climbing last week in part 36 on AI basics. Last week I covered all the essentials on how we can get access to the latest Large Language Model (LLM) AI tools for free via the web or an app, what they can and can’t do, and why the IT industry is making so much fuss about them recently.
The essential point from last week is that generative AIs are getting good at generating new text from their sources, and we can direct this generation by talking to them through chat bots. So how can this be a useful tool for creative writers? (As opposed to people who want to not be writers, by getting the AI to do the writing instead of them – that’s not what I’m talking about here.) There are lots of ways in which this kind of tool can help us to generate new ideas, speeding up the kind of serendipity which arises from letting your mind wander, daydreaming, or however else you describe the kind of “thinking around” you do while coming up with new writing (for me it’s usually while looking out of windows, on long dog walks or in long baths, but methods vary).
One use for AI chat is to stimulate ideas about characters, which I discussed in part 28 on character. The same technique, question-and-answer to see what the AI comes up with, can be used to come up with ideas about places. While writing part 35 on psychogeography I chatted to BookBot09 on the Poe app about the psychogeography of post-industrial landscapes (the kind of place in which my sequel is set). This probing came up with abstract ideas such as abandonment, decay, relics, emptiness, nature creeping back in, graffiti and street art, and so on, and was actually much more interesting than when I tried to get it to suggest opening paragraphs of stories set in a post-industrial landscape, which were uninspiring, predictable and clichéd. This isn’t surprising, since they can only regurgitate versions of what’s in their training data. (Which, by the way, could be used without consent – as I mentioned last week – and is also likely to contain stereotypes, racism, homophobia, ageism and other biases. There are ethical as well as quality problems with directly using text generated out of a LLM.)
One useful technique for developing both characters and places, is to ask the bot to come up with a list of details. Getting down to specifics is the hard work of imagination. Get it to list 10 details of a post-industrial landscape, and the list might just include one that’s good enough for your first draft. But also I find that it’s often not anything the bot says (or for that matter, any person you might discuss any subject with) that provides what you need, but what they say sparks something in you. One word connects in your mind with another word you heard yesterday and the two together set off an original thought of your very own! That’s true creativity. All AI is helping with, is keeping that spark plug sparking for as long as it takes for you to have your idea. It’s just an alternative to the time-honoured way of simply reading lots of other people’s books. (Which I do not suggest it should completely replace, for lots of reasons.)
As well as ideas about psychogeography, you can ask about psychology. You could ask about psychological traits or flaws, ask it what a psychologist would say about a character, or ask it to come up with unusual quirks. You can ask it to suggest how characters would talk, or how they would tackle a particular kind of conversation. You could ask it to write jokes to put into the mouths of characters – I’ve tried this, and it won’t produce anything even faintly funny or original, but might spark off an idea of your own. Or even ask it to come up with metaphors, though metaphors are so personal and so crucial to defining a writer’s style that I wouldn’t use anything it came up with – once again, the value is mainly as a idea-generator that helps inspire you to come up with something of your own.
You can do research for fiction with AI, but keep in mind that it has no sense of truth and could present things as fact which are completely wrong. Generative AI is good at coming up with things that sound plausible (which may be good enough for fiction) but bad at accuracy, and simply hopeless at evaluating its own accuracy. Again, the real usefulness here is in the constant stream of sparks for your ideas, not the ideas the AI actually presents. This is what computers were invented for: repetitive tasks that would quickly bore a person, but a computer can go on helping you with them all day.
You can ask the AI to suggest plots, but I have not had anything useful out of this so far. Still, when stuck for an ending (of a plot or just a chapter) it might, with trial and error, be able to suggest something to get you unstuck. I’d approach this by asking specific questions about how to get from one situation to the outcome you want. Or maybe there’s a better technique I haven’t thought of yet.
So far I’ve been talking about first-draft writing. AI is also getting very good at copyediting (spotting spelling and grammatical problems, or just badly structured sentences), and there are tools that can do this without using a full generative AI and chat bot. Grammarly is heavily advertised, but I haven’t tried it, because even the trial version won’t work unless you grant it total control over your whole computer; it’s too scary. I did try one called ProWritingAid, but it kept trying to change my style to sound more like a business document. So does MS Word, but its suggestions are also often wildly wrong, both grammatically and contextually (even if you are writing about India, it will suggest changing “Indian” to “Native American”).
More interesting is AI’s potential for developmental editing: to improve passages by removing digressions, cutting excess prepositions, and other kinds of waffle. Current AIs are supposed to be quite good at doing things like summarising and condensing, but are probably much less good at rewriting while preserving the original intent – unless you spell out the intent for them, by which time you’re no longer saving effort compared to doing it by hand. I haven’t experimented with editing-by-AI yet, because for this you would want to upload large chunks of your work to the AI. One of the caveats of using AIs for free is that the providers are often using material you upload to improve their models. To get privacy, you need a paid-for account.
This time (2023) is probably a good moment for writers to experiment with LLM AI as an idea-generating tool. It uses fairly heavy computing resources, but at the moment, the cost of that is mostly being borne by investors as their companies try to improve the tools. Once they get good enough, the price of AI access will rise steeply as they attempt to monetise their investment. Eventually, if computing and storage prices continue to come down as they always have, it will get cheaper again.
AI is still some way off being able to produce fiction as good as a competent writer’s. It is improving fast at the moment, but AI has had brief moments of improving fast quite regularly over the last 40 years. History shows you can’t assume it will go on at the same pace, and my instinct is that it will ultimately get most of the way, but never quite get there; that’s what almost always happens with hyped new technologies, most recently with VR (remember “the metaverse”?). What actually happens is far more boring: some parts of the promised technology quietly die, and others become routine, useful, everyday tools. That’s what I think will happen with AI chatbots for writers. They can do the boring, repetitive work of churning out ideas, and a creative human will use their discernment, and the serendipitous connections that arise out of that stream of ideas, to create art according to their unique human vision.
Well, we’ve come to the trailhead at the top of the AI slopes. I hope it was an interesting path to explore, and as ever, if you know a writer who might be interested, please share Sequel Country with them. It’s completely free, as ever.