Tag Archives: creativity

AI-Assisted Fiction Writing for Research and Parody

One of the best use cases for AI in writing fiction is as an expert personal research assistant. A common writing tip is to “write what you know.” This doesn’t mean to only write about your personal life, but to write about things you personally know about. That could mean doing research about certain topics you haven’t experienced personally until you are familiar enough to convincingly write about that topic. The problem with research is that it can take a lot of time, which limits the amount of actual creative writing you can do. That’s where AI comes in.

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The Futile Attempt to Ban AI Writing

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If you want to submit a short story or novel to any publisher today, you will inevitably find a disclaimer on their submission guidelines page that forbids submitting a story that used AI. But what exactly does “using AI” entail? If you dictate a story with an app that uses AI to transcribe it, is that using AI? If you then use Grammarly to proofread and edit, is that using AI? If you upload your manuscript to use Perplexity as a fact-checker and research assistant, is that using AI? If you use ChatGPT to help generate ideas during the outline phase but then write the actual story yourself, is that using AI? If you generate the first draft of a story with an LLM, but then rewrite every single word, is that still considered using AI? What if you only change 95% of the words? 75%? 50%?

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Human Creativity Beats AI in the Future

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In the future, only creative people will survive. There will be no jobs. Even art could be better done by robots and AI. But humans can still be creative. And they can find purpose in creating art or music or businesses or hobbies. Anyone who is not creative will essentially be a human robot (but a less productive version of the actual robots).

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When AI Creates “Perfect” Art for You

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In the future, it may be possible for AI to create art (including books, movies, music, and videogames) that is so perfectly attuned to an individual’s preferences, perhaps even directly using brain scans to determine the precise ingredients that will give the person the ultimate entertainment experience (like from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest), whatever that may be for the particular individual. This AI would essentially create better art than humans—not that it would be objectively better than anything created by humans, but it would be subjectively better to that one particular human for whom the artwork is specifically created for. And AI could conceivably do this for every single human in the world: create unique works of art tailored to be the best work of art for that individual (whatever the criteria for “best” is for them). How could human artists compete with that?

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Incubate Stories Subconsciously Before Writing

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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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Algorithmic Fiction is Not For Me

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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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ChatGPT on Why ChatGPT Sucks at Writing Fiction

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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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ChatGPT Has No Voice and It Must Mimic: Writing Fiction With AI

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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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Is the Lone Genius a Myth?

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There is a growing consensus in the scientific community (and society at large) that the idea of a lone genius who makes great discoveries and innovations in isolation is a myth. That may be partially true—the accomplishments of famous individuals in the past were sometimes overstated while diminishing the efforts of others who helped them along the way. However, the pendulum has swung too far in this respect. The truth is that there were lone geniuses (in science and art), without whom certain discoveries and innovations would not have been made.

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Two Classes That Changed My Life

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Writing is my life’s calling, but I came to it relatively late in life. It wasn’t that late (my early 20s), but it was late compared to those who claim to have known for as long as they can remember that they wanted to be writers. They were writing short stories in grade school and submitting to magazines in high school. For me, it wasn’t until my final year of college—when two events coincided—that I realized I wanted to do with my life.

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