The Winds of Time: The AI Experiment
This is a continuation of AI or not to AI
“Fantastic. Love that for us.” How I loathe generational stereotypical phrases. I’m probably one of the worst millennials out there because I want to cause physical harm to people that use these types of phrases. So, you could understand my frustration when, love that for us, popped up six different times when generating scenes in the story. This all happened in less than a hour on top of it. When I had the dumb brain wave to do this I knew it wouldn’t be seamless but there were some unexpected issues that rose.
The first thing I’ve noticed is the formatting. The scenes that the AI are creating have become very dialog heavy. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the chapters I have written without AI had more of an internal monolog since ot came from the protagonists POV. That leads to the other issue that popped up. My protagonists voice completely changed. This wasn’t an over time change either. Within a chapter her whole personality shifted. I don’t know if it was because the last chapter I wrote was more introspective then the others, or it couldn’t figure out a way to write her from what I originally had. Either way, it’s made the story feel different then what I had envisioned. It could have also stemmed from the choices I made with the AI or not giving it enough detail for the scenes it creates.
It’s funny, I had ignored the personality change throughout because one of my side characters stayed mostly the same. But as I got closer to the end, it started nagging at me more and more. Is this how she should be acting? A question I started asking more and more. On top of that I started to wonder if this was the direction I wanted things to go. The AI kept trying to insert more supernatural elements when I was trying to keep it more grounded. Of course it being a story about time travel through a sword does lend itself to otherworldly plot points.
Now I’m trying to decide if I should keep going. I had the majority of the book done but I just didn’t feel it. I might start over just to see if maybe I can get the characters voice back on track, maybe be more specific with what I want instead of just letting the AI free-form everything.
I will say it hasn’t been a complete waste. There was one scene that the AI wrote that did hit me hard, like it knew exactly what would get me emotional in that moment. Maybe there is something to it. But is one moment really enough to solidified hours of material that just doesn’t seem right, even if it’s not terrible? I guess the only way to find out is to charge back in and see what happens next.
