I saw this really interesting video last week, and it made me think: am I relying too much on AI?
In my personal life, this probably isn’t an issue. I do occasionally ask ChatGPT to make me a recipe, or to advise me on a particular topic, but I always do a gut check and assume that it’s hallucinating if it doesn’t pass. If it gives me something that I can quickly and easily verify, I always do that… and half of the time, it turns out to be a hallucination to some degree. So yeah, I don’t rely on it nearly as much in my personal life as some of the characters in this video.
What about blogging? Don’t be too scandalized, but with my new blogging schedule, I have experimented a bit with using ChatGPT to write some of these blog posts. It’s not like I’ve been copy-pasting everything straight from the chatbot, but I have relied on it a little more heavily than I do in my own writing.
After trying that a couple of times, though, I decided to cut that out and write all of these blog posts by hand. Why? Because I felt like it was creating too much distance between myself and the people who read this blog, and the purpose for writing this blog is to foster a human connection. So it kind of defeats the purpose to rely on a chatbot to generate most of the content I post here. For that reason, I plan to keep writing all these blog posts entirely myself, with only minimal AI input.
So what about my fiction? This is where things get a little tricky. While I totally agree that simply copy-pasting from AI is a piss-poor way to write a book, I do think that AI can be a very useful tool in writing and crafting a novel, provided that you understand the limitations of the AI and don’t rely on it too much. But how much is too much? That is the question.
The biggest way that AI has helped to enhance my own writing is in giving me a birdseye view of the story as I generate a “crappy first draft.” This birdseye view allows me to see and fix major story issues before they metastatize and give me writer’s block, which is what tends to happen if I write these drafts out entirely by hand. When I’m focused on the page, I tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees, so I don’t notice that there’s a problem with the story until I’m several chapters in and find that I just can’t write.
This has happened with basically every project that I write on my own, and is the main reason why it took me anywhere from six to eighteen months (or longer) to write even a short novel, before I started using AI. However, since I began incorporating AI into my writing process, this problem has basically gone away, and I no longer experience this form of writer’s block at all.
However, while I do rely on AI to help me to craft my “crappy first draft,” that isn’t the draft that I publish. Once the AI draft is as good as I can make it, I will then go through scene-by-scene and rewrite the entire book in my own words. The purpose for this step is to make sure that I’m telling the story in my own words, and to make the story my own. I will still have the AI draft open on another screen, and refer to it as I write out the story, but I don’t do any copy-pasting. It’s all written out by hand.
Is this enough, though? Or do I need to add more steps to make sure that I’m not relying too much on AI, and thus losing my own voice? Recently, I’ve been spending a lot more time on the AI draft, generating multiple iterations and combining the best parts to (hopefully) boost the quality. I’ve also been doing a revision pass over the AI draft, tweaking it to smooth over some common AI-isms and (hopefully) adding a bit of my own voice before I move on to the human draft and rewrite the whole thing to make sure it’s all in my voice.
But while this might be enough to keep the book in my own words, is this enough to keep my own writing skills from atrophying? Or do I need to occasionally pick up a WIP that is 100% human writing, with no AI at all, just to make sure I don’t lose these writing skills? That is the question that I’m currently pondering. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that short stories could serve really well to help with. Perhaps I should go back to writing short stories again, just as a way to keep my writing skills sharp.
If I were starting out right now as a new writer, I would definitely avoid writing with AI until I’d written enough to find my own voice. And I would also make sure to write at least one novel 100% without AI-assistance, just for the experience, and to prove to myself that I could do it. Otherwise, I think there would be a very real danger in becoming over-reliant on AI to write my books, and thus risk losing my own unique voice, so that none of the books that I write ever truly become my own.
Anyhow, those are some of my current thoughts on the subject. What do you think of this problem?
