My Thoughts on AI in Writing – Why I Welcome It

Bring it on!

I’ve heard a few people recently address the idea of AI in writing. The general fear I hear from people is that AI can replace writers. What could be worse than typing in, “Write me a 20,000 word science-fiction story about a boy who discovers he can fly to Mars” and sit back and wait for the result with little-to-no effort?

Well… for one thing, if you did that, you would get a pretty terrible story. That’s why, when I hear people talk about this, I am not worried.

AI writing uses prompts it collects from sources. It amalgamates data and looks for trends, then pops it out. What that means is the AI doesn’t know why it’s doing something, just that others have done it before. What that leaves is a shell with no heart.

Themes. Foreshadow. Callbacks. Character arcs. These and more are absent when a computer writes a story. You’re not going to see that by typing in “Write me a story about xxx.” AI-written content is pretty bad, at least right now, and you’ll probably have trouble following the narrative for something longer than a page.

So if AI is not going to replace writing, does that make AI pointless? No. It just becomes a tool. Just like spell check became a tool for writers, AI is now just another common tool for writers. Let’s say I’m in a bit of a bind or having trouble writing a scene. I can prompt the AI with the specific details of the scene and see what comes out. What will come out is probably not going to fit at all, but taking some words or sentences from it as inspiration is certainly possible. In this case, the AI doesn’t do the work for you, but it helps get you moving or inspired when you ran into a bind over how to describe something.

Over the past week, I’ve used AI now about four or five times for about two or three sentences each time. Each time, it was just that. I had trouble thinking of a way to express a long paragraph. I gave it a prompt. I didn’t use most of what came out. The parts I did use, I ended up changing the vast majority of.

There you have it – a tool to help me come up with some words and phrasing, but nothing more. It is barely better than what I would have done before, which is Google “example in literature of xxx…” and see what I could find. Frankly, the results are close to the same.

Where AI is closer to replacing artists is in visual art. But even then, it takes someone time and effort to craft an AI image too. Artists working with AI to make images still have to put work in to tweek what the AI system makes. It’s not as easy as typing and clicking ENTER. Most of the AI images I’ve made have come out looking super weird.

So… do we have anything to worry about? Maybe in the future, sure. But right now? I don’t think so. Right now, I’m just excited to use a helpful tool.