^This^ I have experimented with AI, purely for fun and to try and understand the excitement BUT … after the initial buzz… no way . My books will be written by me… blood, sweat and yes, tears!
There is a good analogy for AI. It's a bit like baking. Baklava is a famous dessert here in Greece. It's layers of paper-thin dough (Phylo), with syrup and nuts in between them. That dough is difficult as balls to make, and takes great baking skill. It's also 90% of the labor when it comes to the dish. These days you can buy it ready-made in the supermarket and whip up a Baklava fairly quickly. But are you really the baker when 90% of the work has already been put for you?
I think it depends on what you let the AI do. I wouldn't let it write the story, but I would definitely consider using something like Sudowrite to help develop the ideas (haven't even tried it yet). We often work with something to bounce ideas off of, whether that's by talking it over with other people (maybe in here), or taking something you've read somewhere or seen in a movie and coming up with a very different take on it. Thought doesn't work well in a complete vacuum, it requires a back-and-forth process that's like a conversation or an argument or a development session. I see absolutely no reason why you shouldn't let part of that process be an AI, as long as you're selecting the good parts, modifying them to work in your story, etc. Just don't use them unchanged. I use bits and piece of dreams, memories, things I've heard people say, maybe in movies, and etc. All of it goes into the mental blender and gets processed down into the story. What difference does it make what the sources are? The mind wants to dialogue, and it can do that really well with an Ai—it's sort of what they're designed for. Just be sure you're the one in charge of what gets written down in the end. Visual artists do the same sort of thing by looking at clouds, rust stains, splotches and scuffs etc, and let imagery form in your mind. Should they be required to share credit with the cloud or the stain? The mind requires stimulation. Without any it becomes rather sluggish and static. edit—Sudowrite is a paid subscription service. Pffft! Forget that!
When it comes to art and AI, what we are witnessing is a growing division between the purists and the pragmatists. The purists are passionate about art being a fully human expression, something originating and formed in the deepest part of the artist. The pragmatists, on the other hand, are guided more by practical concerns rather than ideals. Outside applications are deemed acceptable to produce something that is serviceable. I tend to the purist end of the spectrum. This gets to the heart of my definition of art. IMO, for it to be art, it has to come from a human mind, heart and soul, entirely.
But it doesn't. Your ideas don't come strictly from you. As I said, they're the result of an ongoing dialogue between your conscious mind and other sources. Soemtimes that other source is your unconscious, sometimes it's external sources, like other people, TV shows, songs, etc. Or just things you see happen at the mall or whatever. Ideas must come in from somewhere, you don't spontaneously generate all your own ideas. And even when they come from the unconscious, it originally got many of them from seeing or hearing things in the external world. It's sort of a romantic fallacy that we generate all our own ideas from nothing. I mean, even if you think "Ok. a story about a guy named John who's a teller at a bank." None of that is completely original to you. People have existed for a long time, and we know what they are, from the inside and from the outside (because each of us is a person and also knows many). We also know what banks and tellers are. None of these things are your original ideas. You're repurposing them into your story. That's just at the most basic level. It goes on at every level. Ideas are mostly re-purposed rather than spontaneously generated.
To say it without resorting to the conscious/unconscious paradigm—ideas are the result of you interacting with the world and the many things in it (including other people). We know what racoons are and what possums are and what trash cans are because we've had many experiences with these things as well as seen them on TV and in movies etc. Because we're familiar with these things we can use them in a story if we want, and know that most other people will also know what they are and how they operate. If we tried to write about something completely original, that no-one was familiar with, nobody would understand it (unless we fully explained it in the story, and the way to do that is to relate it to more familiar ideas through metaphor or allusion). In the same way, we also use familair things at other levels of story, such as tropes, themes, plots etc. These work best if they're at least somewhat familiar to people. The trick is to try to find some new angle or accent on an idea. So what you end up with is something composed mostly of familair things, with a little bit of fresh creativity thrown in the mix.
These two statements tend to contradict one another. If ideas are the result of internal dialogue, that implies something created inside me - what interpretation I make of all the stimuli I encounter. This is all about ideas, and I don't define art as having ideas. Art is the expression of those ideas. The artist creates his/her take on an idea.
Lol, we meet again. Yes, I understand that we gather ideas from many different sources. I never disputed that. But I want to make clear the distinction between ideas and expression. An idea is a mental image. The expression is the work of art produced – whether it is a piece of writing or a painting. Ideas are a dime a dozen. When we’re talking art, it’s the execution that counts. That’s all I was trying to say (and I think you agree?). For instance, as a purist, I believe every word in a piece of writing must come from the writer for it to be considered art, and more than that, woven into it is some deeply held feeling of the artist. The artist’s truth, if you will.
Ok, I get what you're saying, and yeah, of course I agree. But it sounds like you're talking about using some of the AI's words directly without changing them. I was talking about using it strictly as input, maybe to help create an outline or a synopsis, or to describe something, but then you re-do it in your own words. Same way you might read an article and then re-word it your own way so it isn't plagiarism.
But in the case of rewording an article that's still plagiarism even if you reword someone else's work and pass it off as your own. People can get kicked out of universities for doing that, and that's been true long before AI came along. I can't really believe writers, of all people, are okay using AI in any part of the writing process. So what if you feed it some prompt. That's like saying a creative writing teacher could create a prompt for their students and then take one of student's stories, rewrite it, and pass it off as their own. After all, it was the teacher's prompt and they reworded everything. Just because it's not a students work you are passing off as your own, anyone who uses AI is still passing work off as their own creation when in fact they just can't hack it when it comes to actually doing the work. Come on, if you want to be a writer, be a writer. I just see this as wrong and unethical on so many levels.
I'm getting so tired of being misunderstood. So, you're saying you can never do any research and then use the results in a story because it's plagiarism? Balderdash.
Nowadays, a “writer” can plug a few prompts into a generative AI, and within a day have a fully structured world, fleshed-out characters, a novel synopsis and scenes written. How is this writing?
Obviously we're agreed on that, and that's got nothing to do with anything I've said. I said let it help you with the process, not let it do the entire thing. Do you remember when Iain Aschendale asked an AI to describe a pastor's office, and it gave him a lot of details he said he never would have thought of on his own? Of course you wouldn't use the AI's exact description or its words, you would weave the information into your own description. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. As I' ve been saying, nothing you write is completley original to you—the words you use have been in the English language, most of them since long before you were born. The concepts ideas, things, etc all exist already and at some point you learned about them. What does it matter if you learned about something thirty years ago or right before you wrote the story through research? We take knowledge in our minds, that comes from the external world in most cases, and use it in our writing. This is what writing is. If I check Wikipedia for example and learn that General Fortissimo had 30,000 troops in the siege of Bannanaville, and I then write "30,000 troops were massed under Fortissimo's banners," is that plagiarism? Or is it just information? In the same way, I don't see what's wrong with making creative and very selective use of some things you prompted from an AI. Of course, as I've said already, you wouldn't cut and paste its own words, but you might use some of the things it said when you come up with your own writing, just as spurs to the imagination. Just as we might gather information and pictures of a city before we write a scene set in it, or we use our own experiences and memories for the same reason. You can use anything that can stimulate the imagination, it's all fair game as long as you're dragging it all through your own mind and transforming it into your own work.
Let me be more specific about what I mean by using AI writing only as a prompt to the imagination. Let's say I prompt an AI to write me a little story about Johnny Greenapple, and it gives me something like this: Johnny Greenapple is a nice boy who lives on a nice street in a nice city. His father is an attack helicopter test pilot who unfortunately died on the job one day, forcing Johnny to go out and find a job to support his dear old mom. And maybe I say "Wow, it never occurred to me for his dad to be an attack helicopter test pilot who died on the job. That's pretty good." But maybe I decide to make him a stunt driver for Hollywood movies instead, who died while doing a complicated motorcycle jump. That's an example of what I'm talking about. You can take the bare kernel of an idea, say the idea that his dad had a dangerous job and was supporting the family with it but was killed, and you change the particulars. Or you could even let him be an attack helicopter test pilot, I don't see why not? Though the way I work, everything becomes transformed, often several times. Is it so different from say seeing a documentary about attack helicopter test pilots and thinking "Hey, that's pretty cool, I could have the kid's dad do that for a living!" Our ideas all come from somewhere. Attack helicopters are already a thing, and so are test pilots and dads and kids etc. None of those things are original to any writer anywhere. But using them in a story isn't plagiarism.
If a writer does use ChatGPT as a research or fact-checking tool, be advised that ChatGPT is often inaccurate. The best place to check for accuracy is Google, so I'll just go there in the first place. And when fact-checking, you are advised to ask the same questions in several different ways and look for consistency. Again, I'll just Google it. Ten Ways For Writers To Use ChatGPT
Of course, any source needs to be checked for accuracy, if you're using it as a source of data. An AI is the last place I'd ever look for accurate info. But as a spur to the imagination accuracy isn't even an issue. How accurate is it that Johnny's dad was a test pilot? Hmmm... This is highly doubtful.
Sure, that's an innocuous application of ChatGPT. I don't think I would argue against that. But I don't think that's how most "writers" are using it. And that really doesn't have much to do with my original point about purists and pragmatists.
That's what the article suggested. And of course, what you get with Google is a list of websites. Any critical reader can pick out which are the good ones.
Straight up, flat out no. Look at how many people spent their time forging Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. (1796 - 1875) He is credited with some 3,000 works. Worldwide there are about 100,000 'authentic' Corots. No matter how well written an AI algorithm is, it will never possess the organic spontaneity of true human thinking. The improbable leaps between incongruent and disparate ideas that are at the root of creativity.
I have been reading a few articles calling them "plagiarism machines." Here's one of them. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-sge-break-internet
I'm all in on the AI writing tools train. I'm no pro writer either, more of a dabbler, but these tools have been a game-changer. I agree with you – previous vibes seemed a bit negative, but I see them as enhancers. Just like Word or Spell checker, they're tools in our creative arsenal. ChatGPT is handy for whipping up report conclusions and turning bullet points into prose. Recently, I tried applying these AI musings to creative writing (bet I'm not alone). After some editing, the outcome surprised me – a decent story with relatively little effort!
