I have wanted to experiment with artificial intelligence for some time. This is more because of my professional (non-writing) interest than any real desire to profit from it in my writing. My most recent experiments have been with Chat GPT, a language model that is designed to understand and generate human-like text. As the chat part implies, it uses a conversational interface, i.e. it generates replies to questions and prompts and remembers the context.
Chat GPT is supposed to help generate ideas, drafts, and brainstorming, among other uses. Therefore I tried it to generate ideas for characters. The results have been mixed. My attempt to create a minor character is a case in point. Giving ChatGPT prompts detailing what kind of character I wanted, did provide something close to what I was looking for.
My first impression is the output it generates is extremely verbose. This is, in fact, one of ChatGPT’s known weaknesses, though not one that is often mentioned. For my experiment, finding the usable bits among the verbiage is a challenge. Another limitation is, that ChatGPT is known to write plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. This is of course a problem for fiction writers, too.
Of course, my main objection to using AI to write is that it is not me. I don’t know where all the stuff comes, and it doesn’t sound like me. And I shouldn’t forget AI generated text is not copyrightable.
But there is a different type of AI-based writing too I have been using for some time: Autocrit. It is more directly useful, as it is designed for novelists. I have used it to edit my stories and found it useful for identifying repetition, redundancies, or bland writing. I feel it has improved my writing both by pointing out some of my bad habits, but also by enabling me to focus on the bits in need of improvement.
I have learned though that I must scrutinize most recommendations from Autocrit. I need to use my judgment to decide if I can find a better way of saying what I intend. Sometimes what I wrote is for a reason, for example in dialogue as part of the character’s voice.
