Should Writers Use AI?

No. Not if you’re writing fiction, anyway.

What, you want more? All right, let me tell you a story.

Recently, a friend we’ll call Liz received a letter from her ex-husband. It was, well, gushing in tone. Not at all like her dour former spouse. A long paragraph of apology, credible sincerity and came just one daffodil short of nausea.

‘As soon as I read it,’ she told me, ‘I knew he’d written it with AI.’ Liz uses AI in a professional capacity, so she knows what to look for. After some discussion about how she should respond, she eventually sent him a reply… written in AI. ‘I added some Liz,’ she said, laughing, ‘so he wouldn’t be sure that I’d used his own trick.’

That’s the problem with AI: we can tell. Don’t believe me? Watch YouTube and listen to the AI narration. When the robotic voice speaks the year as, ‘One thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-five,’ it’s a dead give-away that this is not a human. Then there are paintings that will turn your photos in a ‘Van Gogh’. Vincent would cut your ears off for making such a claim.

Now don’t get me wrong. AI has its uses. I’m just too old and too curmudgeonly to use it. If I were writing a piece of nonfiction, I might consider using it for a first draft. But for a short story or a novel?

Definitely not.

I should put my hand up and say I have given Grammarly and some other tools an indifferent go, but I just don’t trust them. There’s one whose name I’ve forgotten that has you enter the characters’ names and description and a bunch of stuff about the story, and then it generates a chapter. I tried the free version but gave up after a couple of tries. It seemed like I, the writer, was doing all the scut work and the programme got the fun of the actual writing. That seems a bit back to front to me. The writing is the fun part.

Before I go on, let me say that there are ‘AI’ tools that do not play any part in the creative side of things. There are spellchecks and grammar checkers and thesauruses (thesauri?), and so forth. I use these on occasion, but I never rely on them. Think of it this way: most computer geeks… uh, people are great at doing the techy stuff. You want letters to dance a rumba or a sentence to twinkle like a wand, they are your guys (and girls). But, in the main, grammar and spelling are not their forte.

As a result, you’ll see all sorts of weirdness show up. So as far as those tools are concerned, I would say use them if you wish, but don’t rely on them.

The biggest concern regarding AI tools is using them to write a scene. You can, I am told, tell the programme what the scene should contain, let AI do its thing, and then you can edit it afterwards. However, as my friend Liz demonstrated, people who are familiar with AI will recognise it. In fact, Reddit automatically prohibits the use of AI and will delete it when it shows up. I’m told that editors and publishers do the same thing. In my opinion, that’s not sour grapes or bias, it’s because fiction writing is about far more than simply putting a story down on a page or a screen. For instance:

Voice

We all have our own unique way of writing. We may emulate our favourite authors, but we soon learn that there has already been one Thomas Hardy or a Carson McCullers. We, you and I, are the only ones who can sound like us. That’s something to be cherished. There are subtle identifiers in how we write that breathe through our word usage, in our style choices, and in how we apply the rules of grammar. I’m a pedant so I never misapply the word ‘literally’, unless the character using it doesn’t understand its usage, and I’m still drawn to ‘whom’, though even my most pedantic friends have moved on. Tsk tsk. I like semi-colons, even if they are out of favour, and I use accents in words like naïve and café. See?

Character

At time of writing, no computer can create a brand new individual character. It can come up with a Rhett Butler type, or a sort-of Bridget Jones, but those already exist. Writers are drawn to create our own heroes and villains. Without our creativity, where would we find our next Dracula or Sherlock Holmes?

Fun

I enjoy writing. Admittedly, some times it’s more fun than others, but I do enjoy it nonetheless. Even when it’s tricky, when my characters do something I hadn’t planned, or when the chapter ends with a cliffhanger and I’ve no idea how to get out of it, it’s still fun. I may not be William Shakespeare, but I can be the best me possible. All the errors are mine, but so, too, are the good bits. Not only that, but I develop as I go.

Integrity

If I put my name to a story or a novel, the reader deserves to know that this is my work. Yes, I may have input from a Beta Reader (BFF Jane or Una), but the choices remain mine. Sometimes I take their advice, other times, I decide not to. In the end, it’s up to me, the writer, to decide.

What do you think?

Are you a yay or a nay? Or perhaps you’re one of those who uses some AI tools some of the time. If so, you’re not alone. According to Author Media, around 45% of writers use AI in some capacity or other:

The first story that we have is how many authors are actually using generative AI. Bookbub did a survey of over 1200 authors and trying to figure out what the numbers are of authors who actually use AI and trying to separate it from the noise and the yelling that’s going on on social media right now. And it has found that about 45% of authors who were surveyed are actually using some form of generative AI, whether it’s in their writing, whether it’s in their marketing, whether it’s in their illustrations or what have you. About just under 50% are saying, hard no, don’t plan to, it’s the devil, know, burn the witch. And then just about six or 7% is like, no, but I might in the future. I just don’t really know enough about it yet, I don’t know what to say.

[image error]Pexels.com" data-medium-file="https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con..." data-large-file="https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con..." loading="lazy" width="1880" height="1254" src="https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con..." alt="" class="wp-image-18679" srcset="https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 1880w, https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 150w, https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 300w, https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 768w, https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 1024w, https://rycardus.wordpress.com/wp-con... 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 1880px) 100vw, 1880px" />Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com