A Nod to The Use of AI

Part of what I do as a writer is considered digital art. When it can be fed into a program, there's a good chance it could be used, copied, or generated by AI. So by natural convention, I should consider AI my enemy, just as many artists have done. I should ban it from my home, calling shame on those who use it to generate writing or to answer questions. I should be wholly anti-AI.

But I'm not.

Not totally. A couple years ago, I wrote an article for a company that wanted to make an AI tutor, one that would be in the classroom and aid both teacher and students. My article is on their website, TailoredTutor. I wrote it after doing a large amount of research and coming to the conclusion that using an AI tool for aid is not dangerous as far as inviting laziness; but completely relying on AI without scrutiny is what makes for incompetence. After all, an AI's mission will always be about improving itself, not about improving the students.

I say this carefully. I've been silent for about a week, working on a book idea I have. These ideas come and go, and sometimes I'm able to catch one, plant it, nourish it and watch it grow. This one was inspired by reading Fourth Wing and realizing that I'm no longer in the target audience of young adult fiction. I no longer relate to the angst, the relationship drama, or so much the balancing of homework, school, and danger that Harry Potter was busy with.

A caveat to that is that I still face anxiety, and I still face relationship drama, but now that I've grown and my brain isn't producing hormones like nobody's business, things are a bit more stable. I still have danger in the form of living life and surviving this economy with my sanity intact, but I have enough smarts and wisdom to solve my problems better.

Military academy that Violet is in aside, I loved reading about her and her peers as those above the age of twenty, using adult language, doing adult things, and feeling adult things that I could relate to. And I want to write a book that I'd read. Something not young adult fiction.

This is not the first time I've worked on a novel. When I was a young teenager, I wrote a book that I ended up self-publishing on Amazon, and then later down the road un-publishing because I believed it was bad. Or rather, my idea wasn't bad, but the execution of it. I was a young teenager; I believed my skill at wordcraft was subpar. When I was in high school, I wrote a novella and self-published that one on Amazon as well. I have it on my website, but it's not science writing. Don't read it expecting that you'll be hearing this voice from those words. I wrote it with passion, with greater skill than my young young teenage self, and I finished it with pride.

Now that I've got a master's degree in science writing, I think I can confidently state that my writing has much improved since those times. I've written short stories and articles in college, doing tons of research for each of my pieces. And what I can say is that writing a novel is hard. It's much harder than writing an essay, or writing an article based on research. Heck, it's still harder than writing a timely news article. That's because it's not just the writing; it's the act of creation.

Whether the world be based on familiar magic like wizards or fairies, or techy like cyborgs or adventurous like pirates, it's a world that you create, with all its little nooks and crannies. Characters and their backstories, plans and plot twists and dialogue and making it all believable - it takes a lot of time and energy. It takes a lot of skill, practice, discussion, and confidence and self-esteem. It's a world that from start to finish you reign over, and sometimes even if you've got everything planned out in your head the moment you put fingers to keyboard or pencil to paper your mind can go blank.

Because when you have so much in your head, the question becomes where to start? When to start? How?

This has happened to me countless times. My usual solution is to ruminate on it, thinking about it in the background of working or doing something else. Letting the creative water rise up, condense into a storm cloud, and start its torrential downpour.

And when that happens, I better hope I'm near a keyboard to capitalize on it.

But that usual solution isn't strict; it doesn't really follow a schedule. And when I have the time to write and I want to use that time, I need to find another way to kick start the creative gears in my head.

Well, I happen to be another thing: extremely competitive. I like improving on something, which has made me very good on things to do with my hands, like crocheting, pool, needle felting, etc., and when it comes to the question of who is better at writing, me or AI? I want to prove it's me; that my skill ain't redundant.

I can use any AI-model to generate writing. I can use ChatGPT. But I also want something that will help me build my story and be my online poster board. So I've chosen Sudowrite.

You can use it to write or brainstorm or store notes on the novel and you can easily override its suggestions. So I use it to kick my creative mind into action by writing out the first scene, and then have my competitive spirit say 'nah, I can do better than that'. It's also got a plugin that allows you to choose from and edit multiple options the details for some aspect of the novel, so when I'm forgetting or can't seem to think about how to write a character's backstory and what they do, I can use this plugin to help.

It's actually got a lot of plugins and can ask you questions about your plot for further fleshing of the story, so brainstorming and worldbuilding has actually been pretty productive. I'm really enjoying the process.

So when I haven't been writing on here, which has been all of last week, I've been writing on there, creating the scene sentence by sentence and using AI as a kind of companion pet, running with me, but ultimately heeling to my commands.

Today I gave it some plot thoughts I had, and it asked me questions about these plot points, challenging things I haven't considered yet, or making me flesh out the why of them. I liked the challenge, the figuring things out so that when I get to writing these points they'll be all the better for it. What I assumed would only take an hour of my day extended to three hours, and so while I felt like I missed my block to write out on here, I'd also made a good leeway into the story on there. So, I still accomplished something.

But that something isn't going on here, so I must write on here anyways.

Mind you, I also use ChatGPT instead of Google for some things, and I make sure the answers it gives me are based on evidence - I tell it to cite its sources, and then I go through the citations myself, making sure the sources were real and accurate. I've heard Google's search quality has decreased lately, and while I cannot attest to that I think the fact that I use ChatGPT more than Google these days does answer how I think it's going.

So, while I'm naturally against AI using copyrighted art and stealing art from actual artists and writers, I do think AI could be a useful tool. It just depends on how you use and work with it.