One of the great upsides of AI art is the ability for artistically unskilled people to create their own artwork. Instead of spending years learning the craft of how to paint or draw, you can instantly generate a skilled painting or drawing. The most artistic part of the process in AI art becomes choosing which image to create. For that image to be artistically meaningful, prompters must learn how to think like an artist.
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There are essentially two types of writers: plotters and pantsers. Those who outline their plot beforehand, and those who write from the seat of their pants (AKA go in blind and make everything up as they go along). I said in the past that I was an outliner, but I now outline less than I used to.
Outlines make it easier to know where you have to go in the plot. But one benefit of writing from the seat of your pants is that you are motivated to write more often and faster because you want to know what happens next. If the full story is thoroughly outlined, writing can become more of a tedious transcription-like process with little surprise for the writer. Less planning can create more fun, though I don’t know if I would recommend that approach to someone who doesn’t have sufficient writing experience.
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I have yet to read Infinite Jest (it is on my bucket list), but I enjoyed this collection of DFW’s long nonfiction essays, maybe even more than his short fiction. They are absolutely genius—not just in their content but in the craftsmanship of the prose on a sentence level. I read a couple of these essays several years ago but struggled with Wallace’s complicated syntax. Between the page-long sentences, invented words and acronyms, and multi-paged footnotes, you practically need a map to read a David Foster Wallace book. With my reading comprehension having expanded since then, I can now better understand and appreciate the complexity of his prose. Few writers could string words together better than DFW (RIP). The essays in this collection include:
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When I get a new idea for a fiction story I become obsessed. I am flooded with inspiration, developing the story in my mind while researching online, and rapidly taking notes for a potential plot and characters. I can see a flash of the entire story in my mind like a movie, and I feel the urge to follow this burst of obsessive inspiration to write the story ASAP. Sometimes I do write it right away, while other times I set the notes aside to finish whatever else I was working on at the time (because I am always working on something else). I have found the latter to be more productive for my creative process. It is better to wait and incubate the story for some time rather than rush in prematurely.
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Welcome to the age of algorithmic fiction. Thanks to tools like GPT-4, a human writer with a library of previously written books can simply write a one-page outline for a new novel, and AI can write an entire novel in their style. In many cases the book will be good enough to pass as if it was written by the human authors themselves, allowing writers to publish more frequently. However, GPT fiction will only work with formulaic writers whose books are all similar. In other words, those writers who were already writing algorithmic fiction before the aid of AI.
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One of the most difficult parts of writing is “killing your darlings.” That might mean cutting out a part you liked to make the story as a whole better. Or, more generally, it can simply mean deleting the boring parts of your story. (As Elmore Leonard said, there should be no boring parts.) Perhaps one of the greatest upsides of writing with AI is that it can help eliminate the “sunk cost fallacy” that authors often face with the words they have already written.
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In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” David Foster Wallace’s brilliant 1990 essay1, he hypothesized that fiction writers (like himself and myself) are natural oglers or people-watchers. Writers used to have to observe people in the real world, in public, to get the material for their fiction. But fiction writers (like him and me) are often self-conscious types with social anxiety, which was why television was such a godsend for people like him. With TV, self-conscious writers could ogle and people-watch from the comfort of their own homes without the other people seeing them. In this sense, DFW argued, television is a form of voyeurism.
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There is growing concern that the proliferation of generative AI will remove humans from the equation of creativity because eventually most art will be AI-generated images based on previous AI-generated images until all art is simulacra with no connection to reality. But in a way, this has already happened—before the invention of AI art.
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In this post I wrote about my experiences using ChatGPT to write fiction, ultimately concluding that AI is better at non-creative writing than creative writing. I will now use ChatGPT to further prove my point. AI was much better at generating the following nonfiction blog post than generating any fiction stories. I’ll let ChatGPT explain why:
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There was much hype on the internet upon the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s free-to-use text-generating artificial intelligence program based on a Large Language Model (LLM). You can write any prompt, and ChatGPT will instantly produce grammatically correct text—of just about any type (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.). Some worry this could spell the end of human writers. It is admittedly impressive what GPTs can produce—though it is still limited. As an experiment, I tried writing several fiction stories with ChatGPT. I have literally thousands of story ideas, more than I could ever write myself. So I figured I’d take some of the lesser ideas at the bottom of my queue, those I’d probably never get around to, and let the AI write it for me—if it could.
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T.Z. Barry 