Have you ever used AI to write?

Usage of AI is becoming more and more common in the arts. Illustrations, music, videos, and writing generated by AI is becoming increasingly common. But can AI really mimic human creativity? Will we one day have no need for human artists and solely rely on AI to generate content? Let’s see.

While working on my current book, Love, Death, and Other Things I’m Bad At, I had trouble getting going on a scene between the main character Winnie, and her love interest, the shy and awkward D, who just took over the mantle of Grim Reaper, a job much too big for his meek personality. After a bit of struggling, I decided to take a shot at letting ChatGPT help me. Here’s the prompt I used:

And here is the result:

What do you think?

I have to admit, I laughed a little.

At a quick scan, this seems to be a competent scene. However, once you dig into it, it’s not hard to see the problems.

1) The bot used the word intense/intensity no less than five times in a handful of paragraphs. Probably because it was in the prompt

2) What exactly is this scene about? It’s about as generic as it can get. And sure, I fed it a fairly generic prompt, but this goes to show that the bot has no imagination of its own. It slapped together a bunch of nice-sounding words and made it almost sound like a story. Except it’s not, is it? 

3) There is no style or cadence to the language. Every paragraph is uniform, and every sentence with has a similar beat. This is BORING. It’s boring to read, even boring to look at.

Now I’m not knocking AI. Far from it, I think it can be a very useful tool. But it must be recognized for what it is – a database, at best a jumping off point for people doing the real creative work. It can and will not produce original stories, only compile what people have written and present it in a different way. I ended up picking up a few choice sentences from this prompt and using them to fill out my scene. It did, after all, use some pretty words I wouldn’t have thought of.

But AI-generated books? I think we are a very long way off.