Thoughts on AI

As IT PERTAINS TO FICTION WRITING

AI writing

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I find AI to be a spectacular solution when your marketing team (yourself, in most cases) suffers from laziness. I run several companies that rely on drip campaigns, marketing emails, and scheduled social media posts as part of generating new business. I find ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc. to be wonderful at helping me quickly and easily generate a series of draft emails, messages, and posts that I can schedule on various platforms. It does nothing creatively for me to have to draft these using my own creative brainpower. In fact the opposite is true: I find doing it sans AI to be a colossal drain in numerous ways.

So . . . I cheat.

Would I lean on AI for my fiction endeavors? No. Not yet at least.

I wouldn’t use it to generate ideas (I have plenty of my own), and I wouldn’t trust it with editing (I’d live in fear of my voice being lost).

I despise those who are using it to generate fiction content en masse, to publish low quality books solely for the sake of monetary gain. I don’t knock anyone for endeavoring to improve their financial situation. But . . .

I don’t believe in over saturating the market with inhuman content, especially at the expense of actual human being being able to get their material out there and having the chance to find an audience. Over saturation eventually leads to numbness. It makes a novel less a needle in a haystack, and more a single needle in an infinite number of haystacks. Or would it be a needle in an endless sea of other needles?

Does the cream rise to the top? How much wonderful fiction is out there that has gone undiscovered or overlooked?

I won’t use AI to help me come up with concepts or plot, and I won’t allow it to write for me. I guess I’m anti-cheat at heart.

Is there a scenario where I would use AI in my fiction writing?

The answer is maybe.

Under what circumstances?

I think it could come in useful when it as pertains to consistency, continuity, and fact checking. What if I could feed a manuscript into ChatGPT and then query it for basic info?

“What color is so-and-so’s hair?” “Where was so-and-so born?”

If it could spit out not only the answer, but provide multiple answers if more than one exists. (E.g. I contradicted myself throughout the course of the novel. It would tell me that on such and such a page I said one thing, and then points out where I said something different on another page.) Then I could determine what the correct answer is and ask it to consolidate these opposing instances into a single consistent answer.

On a more general level, perhaps I could ask it to find inconsistencies, return a list, and ask me if I would like them to be corrected.

This would make for a marvelous tool, especially for a series. And then have it store all that information so that you could later ask it to provide you all the details of a specific character based on a compilation of multiple books in the series. The ability to do these things would remove some of the drudgery of editing, of rewrites and revisions.

What if I had these tools at my disposal? Would I use them?

I can’t say for sure. But the temptation would be there.

How do you feel about it?

— JWB