AI in creative writing

I’m generally against using AI to creative ends, as I’ve mentioned several times, for me it kind of defeats the point. The creativity you are engaging in is the thing. However, I’ve been writing a psychological horror novel over the past few months though, and I though I’d experiment with it. I was at around 60,000 words, so there was a big chunk of content to play with. I like writing so the intention here was more to understand uses of AI than to ease any writing. My conclusions are therefore more about general lessons we can learn about AI than writing.

I tried Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with various pieces – I bought a Chromebook recently and that came with a year’s free Gemini, so I ended up using that one most as it had fewer restrictions. I’m swerving around issues of whether it is wise to give your content to these tools (almost certainly not) and the other not inconsiderable issues around AI. Here are some thoughts.

Expanding text – I tried to see if it could expand an existing chapter by 500 words. The results were okay, but very Creative Writing 101 – add in some description, what is the room like, throw in some adjectives. Technically it is still pretty impressive to be able to this, but from a creative output point of view, the results were decidedly “mid”.

Suggest areas for expansion – by contrast I asked it to suggest ways in which I could expand the chapter. This was much better, and was the equivalent of having a friend or an editor give these suggestions. I tried a couple of them and then once I was writing, they led to some digressions and parts that I might not have done otherwise. This is like having some good writing prompts.

Synopsis – like a lot of writers, I’m not very good at writing a synopsis of my own work. The ones I got from Gemini were pretty good, and could be used as a shell for tweaking and refining.

Ego boost – as has been commented on AI is being too sycophantic. That’s not generally a good thing, but if you acknowledge it is doing that, who doesn’t want a bit of an ego boost? Particularly when you’re scratching away on your first novel and have no idea if it’s terrible or not. What’s that ChatGPT? Why, thank you, I think my use of dialogue is exceptional also. Oh Gemini you flatterer, tell me again how the writing seems to be of an exceptionally high standard. Say, Claude, want to have drinks sometime and we can discuss my effective tension building?

Overall, I’d say that from an AI perspective, its performance improves the more you have distinctive material for it to work with. That is, if you’re already doing quite well then it can do quite well too. If you don’t have much, or rely on it to do too much, then the results are bland. There’s a balance there, the more labour you require of it then the more generic it becomes. What this suggests is that as it trains more and more on its own content, the homogenisation of output will increase. AI is often touted as a democratising tool (I mean, aren’t they all?) but if over time it creates so much mid-quality content, and the only way it really helps differentiate material is for those who are already producing distinctive content then it becomes another tool that privileges a few.

Anyway, I’m back to discussing my distinctive use of metaphor and simile with my pal Gemini…