AI Robot writer AI

I recently submitted a new story to Romance for All Seasons, a publication I’ve been very happy to have stories appear in lately. Today I want to talk a little about the story I submitted (no spoilers, of course) and how I used AI for this story.

For those not in the writing community, AI is a rather hot topic in terms of how it is used, what the moral implications are, and what it is useful for. As you can imagine, there are a wide range of reactions to AI in this realm, just like in every other one. This is quite understandable, and in thinking about how I used AI for this story, I’ve figured out a way to frame it that works for me.

But first off, let me be clear, AI did not write one single word of this story (or any of my stories). Not one. I will go into the whys of that shortly.

What AI did was serve as a research assistant. This story is a historical western/romance that takes place in 1899 near Bisbee in the Arizona Territory, and as such needed plenty of research. By using AI, I was able to do a lot more and a lot better research than I would have otherwise, grounding the story in a very satisfying way.

In short, AI contributed to the quality of this story without writing any of it.

Why not let AI write for me?

The first answer to that is a question: why would I? The first draft is the fun part for me, why would I let a computer have all the fun, let it do what I love most when it comes to writing?

A deeper answer is: because it would remove what is most important about my stories, and that is me and my voice. If a reader likes my stories, what they like is what is unique about what I bring to my stories. My perspective. My way of assembling words. My worldview.

And, maybe, I could train an AI using millions of words of fiction that I have written and ask it to spit out a story that matches the rest of my body of work using some of my characters, but that would shift the focus of this adventure, and leave me putting out stories that aren’t mine.

I want to emphasis this: If the AI wrote the story, even after consuming my full backlog, it would not be mine. I would be a reader of the story but not the writer.

I write because I love it, because I have to, outsourcing that makes zero sense to me.

Writing is art, and I think the human component is crucial (this certainly could be debated, but I’ll leave it at that for now).

Am I saying there won’t be a market for AI written fiction, that people aren’t already reading AI written fiction they think a human wrote? No, of course not. There may even be an audience for AI fiction branded as AI fiction. What I’m saying is it’s not for me. What I am saying is that the human component means something here, and that human component is valuable.

Research and AI

Research is one of the sweet spots of AI today. It is very good at assembling data from various sources, compiling it, and answering questions. It is much faster and much better at this than I am.

But, you might be thinking, AI makes mistakes. To that I have two things to say:

·        Of course it does, humans make mistakes too. AIs tend to be more confident in their mistakes than humans, which can be so annoying, but it’s not fundamentally different. AI can use bad sources of information for their research just like a human.

·        I’m writing fiction, so I have the luxury of not having everything be 100% factual (even with a historical story like this one). This tolerance for mistakes makes AI even better suited for this use.

How I Frame AI Usage

For me, I’ve come up with a way to understand if AI might make sense for a particular task and it is this:

Would I pay someone to do this task?

It’s that simple (and let’s ignore affordability for this exercise). If AI can do it and I would pay someone else to do the task, it just might make sense.

Would I pay someone to write my stories (i.e. a ghostwriter)? Hell no!

Would I pay someone to do research for me on a story? Oh yeah!

With the currently generous free tiers of the AI chatbots (don’t expect that to last forever), I didn’t have to pay for all this research, which is nice, but the essential fact is that it is a part of the process that I’m okay with outsourcing, so I’m okay with outsourcing it to AI.

There are some areas where this question might get you into trouble. I’m thinking of creating cover art for books, which might seem like it’s an easy “yes,” but there are some copyright issues there which I won’t go into today.

Overall, I think this question is a good place to start. When it comes to creative endeavors, if you wouldn’t outsource to a human, than you certainly shouldn’t outsource to an AI.

But… But… What About the Moral Implications?

In terms of morality, AI is a sticky wicket, to be sure. The AI bots scraped the entirety of the internet, took everything they could find without permission of the creators, stole material in certain cases, and used that to train their models. There is an argument to be made that using AIs at all is morally questionable if not downright egregious, not to mention the environmental issues around AI data centers.

On the other side of that, AI is pretty much unavoidable at this time, and for me personally, as a life-long geek, I can’t not use something this technology advanced, at least a little.

(As an aside, when I was in my first software development job in my twenties, I ended up attending a conference on neural networks with a colleague. This was very, very early and the math was a bit much for me, but since LLMs (Large Language Models) are really neural networks, I was on the sidelines at the beginning of this which just adds to my curiosity).

I don’t have any good answers to the moral question. AI is new, and like most new technologies it feels very unbalanced right now, certainly overhyped.  Maybe AI should be in the same category as alcohol and social media: use it deliberately and sparingly.

This question, obviously, deserves more time, and maybe I’ll dive into it in the future.

Bottom Line

The bottom line for today is to ask this question before using AI for something it is capable of: Would I pay someone to do this task?

If you would, maybe AI is worth considering. If you wouldn’t, keep that task for yourself, the human component will continue to be important.

The above image was created by AI with all the complicated moral questions that surround it. This was done with Gemini with a single prompt, looks amazing, and took almost no time. This of course, makes not taking advantage of AI for this very, very hard.