Using AI in writing

[Claire]

No, I like opinions and discussions, but these are not discussions. These are statements made without understanding the true context.

The problem for me is that I still don't understand the context and it feels to me like you are maybe unintentionally obfuscating that context with your lengthy tangents on the general capabilities of AI.

The reason why I originally sent you a PM about your AI use was that you very much acted as if you just wrote your stories completely on your own. And I wanted to let you know that the AI influence was noticeable and that there was no need to pretend that it wasn't there. It was never meant to give you flak, only to encourage you to be a bit more honest.

You seem very adamant about the fact that you are the author of these stories and there certainly is a discussion to be had at what point the involvement of an AI becomes so strong that it should be considered the (primary) author of the story. To me that point is clearly crossed when the AI does the actual writing of the text. You can feed it the characters, the plot, the atmosphere you want to go for. You can have it write the story paragraph by paragraph with a unique prompt for each and then have it rework those paragraphs based on your feedback to its output. If at least 50% of the words that the reader ends up reading are gnerated by the AI, then I would consider the AI the primary author and the prompt giver a co-author maybe. If this share goes far beyond 50%, then I would consider the AI the sole author of the story. The only exception to this are AI translations which technically generate 100% of the words but are based on clear human authorship in another language.

After reading all you said, @trio, I still don't understand whether the words I read in your stories are primarily AI output based on your prompts or words written by you that the AI might have proof read for you and made some suggestions for you that you incorporated. And to give you a clear example of what I mean: I wrote the story "Die Unendliche Vergewaltigung" in German and then translated that story into "The Infinite Rape" myself. I did not use an AI translation because I wanted to take some liberties with the translation that an AI never would. Then I showed chatGPT an original German paragraph and my translated English paragraph and it made suggestions. It also pointed out typos that I fixed. But to give you a clear example of what the AI did, look at the following comparison of the original and the translation:

Natürlich war nur ein geringer Teil des klebrigen, milchigen und zähen Safts, der aus ihr austrat und schließlich ihre Vulvalippen, ihren Po und die Innenseite ihrer Oberschenkel verklebte, von ihm, so dass auch einige seiner Spermien eine geringe Chance hatten eine eventuell verfügbare Eizelle zu befruchten.

Naturally, only a small amount of the sticky, milky and viscous semen leaking out of her - now sticking to her labia, her ass and her thighs - was actually his. Consequently, there was a minuscule chance that some of his sperm would fertilize any available egg.

First you might notice that I decided to change that fairly long German sentence into two shorter English sentences. That was my decision and from my experience, an AI translation would have kept this as one long sentence. You can also see how I decided to translate "Saft" as "semen" and not as the more literal "juice". I thought that this was simply an improvement over the original because it was more in line with the dry, clinical tone I was going for. I'm sure an AI would not have made that choice. But let's get to the interesting part.

You can see highlighted in red how "ihren Po" was translated into "her ass". My original raw translation said "her butt" there. After talking a bit about this with the AI and refusing "her buttocks" as another alternative because it sounded too cute for me, I went with "her ass". Regardless of whether you think "her ass" is an improvement here over "her butt" or not, this was the level of involvement of the AI on that translated version. And I can clearly point that out and no reasonable person would now seriously suggest that the AI is the true author of the story because its influence made me change "butt" to "ass" (I think I might have also changed "ovum" to "egg" based on AI feedback, but I'm not 100% sure about that). I wrote the original German story completely on my own. I wrote the first draft of the English translation completely on my own. And the AI helped me polish that draft by pointing out typos that I fixed and suggesting a few changes for individual words here and there like the example I just showed you. Now you know how that text came to be and what the involvement of the AI was. There is no need for me to tell you about the AI's context awareness or any philosophical musings on whether its truly intelligent.

But your explanations still feel like you're keeping the amount of text actually generated by the AI deliberately vague and instead try to engage in some meta discussion about what AI is and what its limitations are. Those are interesting topics on their own but they are also kind of irrelevant for the topic at hand. The simple question is: How much of the text in your stories was actually written by you and how much is output from the AI based on prompts you fed into it? Is this your text that includes suggestions from the AI or is this primarily txt generated by the AI based on your prompts?

[KleineHexe]

I am just throwing my thoughts out there, just let me know what you think.

Also ich finde Texte, die mit KI erzeugt wurden, lesen sich furchtbar. Ich selbst nutze openai.com gern, um mir Möglichkeiten für den weiteren Verlauf meiner Geschichten aufzeigen zu lassen.

Ich nutze dann aber nur die neuen Ideen!

Mein Fazit daher - zur Inspiration nicht schlecht aber sonst nicht zu gebrauchen!

***

Personally, I find that texts generated by AI read terribly. I like to use openai.com to get ideas for how my stories could continue.

But I only use the new ideas it suggests.

So my conclusion – not bad for inspiration, but otherwise pretty much useless!

[LtBroccoli]

@trio I think the question comes down to how much of the original work is AI and how much is your original idea or original notes. I've loosened up on AI in the last year or so. I've gone from 'Burn it with fire' to 'beat it with a baseball bat and leave it for dead in a cornfield.' That's actually an improvement for me.

I love to write. If I didn't, I wouldn't be here. But what helped me on AI was cover letters. I hate writing those things, and I'm not spending 2 hours writing the perfect cover letter for a job application bot that's just going to reject my resume anyway. So I created a ChatGPT account, loaded up my resume for tips like grammar and spelling, loaded the job posting, and asked it to write a cover letter. It was good enough to get me hired.

I haven't used it for any of my writing here for one big reason. Almost everything I would violate terms, regulations, laws, or some combination of the above. @Vela Nanashi came up with a great idea recently about trying to use AI to make a graphic novel or short film based on my screenplay stories. There's about a hundred steps I have to get through to get there, first being installing an AI on my spare PC so I don't have to worry about "copyright violations" and such.

AI is like having a shitty intern. There's some stuff it's good at, but you need to watch it like a hawk. @HistBuff brought up the great example of the AI hallucinating imaginary cases. I've seen code examples of AI making scheduling apps where it added extra days to the week because it needed to handle multiple meetings that conflicted with each other. But it can be a valuable tool when used and watched properly.

As far as using it here, it depends on how the tool is used, and how much is original material. If AI generates more than 50% of the idea or work, then we should probably have a tag for that. If we're just using it for spell checking or basic grammar checking, no need to specify that. If AI is the editor and recommends changes to character or themes or story arcs, it depends on if the author makes those changes or lets AI do it.

[trio]

First, I should have used another subject on this post, more like “Using AI in MY writing”.

And second, I want to thank you all for your remarks, and I am not being sarcastic here. This has been a great experience, I learned a lot. The last month or so was great, I had fun rewriting my old stuff and posting it here. I again want to thank you for the feedback on the stories.

We are all derivatives of things that came before, just like our writing. Most of the combinations have been put out there by others, we are just rehashing things we have read or heard before. We do it consciously or unconsciously. There are still originals out there who create something new out of nothing. New words enter our vocabulary, but once they are there, they are just part of our person training model.

The technology of AI is not perfect but it is an evolution, it is build on a lot of technology that came before. I see it as a tool, not as a treat. And for the purist out there, you use it too my friend, the moment the spell checker underlines a word, you are using the result of machine learning and pattern matching, What about next word suggestions in modern word processors, don’t you think they influence your writing? Yeah, I know it is different.

We have to ask ourselves the question: Do we need to be careful when we use technology? Absolutely, we need to know how it works, before we can trusts its results. If we use a German spell checker on an English text, we are going to be in trouble.

Personally, I don’t like conservatism on any level, all systems evolve, nothing stays the same. I have been a technology strategist for the last twenty years and I have had these kind of discussions many times before. Adoption goes through a predictable curve and it depends heavily on the way new results, new outputs are created, not as such on the maturity of the technology. For example mobile phones became very popular, even when the mobile networks were still seriously lacking.

On the other side, do anti-lock, stability control, traction control and other systems make you less of a driver? As a purist, yes absolutely, as a person going from A to B, certainly not. I am in the result oriented camp, not the conservative, purist side of the discussion.

And to finish, some seem to be more concerned on how I use technology. I just have an example that I just finished today. I used dictation (another machine trained system) and some key pressing to write a little more than 8000 words. I already had an outline ready for quite some time, before the current form of GenAI even existed. I then cut away the fat and this time I used the ChatGPT 4o model to help me cleanup the sentences I really did not like, maybe like 10% or so. Some stuff in my story comes from the 1940s, so I asked the AI to help me with finding the right phrasing. Oh, almost forgot, I asked the model to create some names for me, I am bad at that. I just picked the ones I liked. The result is a story of a little over 4000 words.

I am happy with the results, I hope you like it. And if it is not for you because of the AI, then I understand.

And yes, I changed on how I write a lot this month, like with world, I tend to evolve over time. But this will be my last story here. I know I am tainted.

No ChatGPT was used in writing this text. Some spell check and next word suggestion were. Just to be transparent. And yes, that last statement was sarcastic.

[chloevee]

I think that part of the contention here is a matter of terminology. Not all of it, but the part I am speaking about here.

In the discussions about this, the word "author" or questions of who "wrote" the story is often used to mean who produced the text that ends up in the story.

I am in the same boat as @Claire, in that even after reading several of @trio's posts, I am still unclear on how much of the text that ends up in the story is generated or rewritten by AI, versus text written in his own words. But what I have come away with is that @trio is intimately involved in every step of the creation process.

He is not just feeding in a prompt, or even a series of prompts, then posting the results wholesale. He starts with text he wrote himself (which I would argue is more than a prompt, though others may disagree), and that is the initial basis for the AI's output. Then he takes the generated content and modifies and reshapes it. And I get the impression that it is a several stage process of generation and revisions. Even if the majority of the actual text that is in the resulting story was produced by AI, he still shaped the work, and not just in broad strokes.

I suspect that when @trio says that he "wrote" the stories or is the "author", this is what he is referring to. (Though, @trio, please correct me if I am wrong.)

If we dispense with those terms, since it seems people are using them to mean different things, I think it is true to say that @trio is the creative force behind his stories.

Think if it like a movie director. They are not the ones who write the script, nor are they (usually) the ones you see on the screen. But directors are still seen as the primary creative force behind a movie. I have favorite directors, but no favorite script writers--in fact, I couldn't even name one.

I'm not saying this applies to everyone who uses AI to create. I wouldn't think the same way about someone who enters a prompt and then uses the text as-is, even if they tweak the prompt to create a few revisions. What @trio does goes well beyond that, and presumably that is true of others.

I am not speaking here about if AI is good or bad, the quality of the output it generates, or the desirability of his process. I mean that literally--it's not a veiled statement of opinion. Those are valid but separate concerns. I'm also not trying to draw a line as to what makes someone the "author" of a story--what is important to me is understanding the distinct concepts, not labeling them.

It is entirely reasonable to draw a distinction between stories where the majority of the final product is written by a human in their own words, versus one in which a substantial portion is produced by AI. But for my part, I don't want that to downplay or trivialize the role that @trio plays in the creation of his stories, and potentially others like him.

[trio]

He is not just feeding in a prompt, or even a series of prompts, then posting the results wholesale. He starts with text he wrote himself (which I would argue is more than a prompt, though others may disagree), and that is the initial basis for the AI's output. Then he takes the generated content and modifies and reshapes it. And I get the impression that it is a several stage process of generation and revisions. Even if the majority of the actual text that is in the resulting story was produced by AI, he still shaped the work, and not just in broad strokes.

I understand the difference. But I can say it again and again until I turn blue. When I write a text and AI helps me to refine the text. Is it still written by me? If you say no, because a machine touched it, then I will push it to the limit. If you write a text and a spell checker helps you get the mistakes out, is it then still yours? I know it is different, but it is all about where you draw the line. I know it is all about semantics.

I agree, when I give one sentence to an AI and have it write me 20 pages, then it is AI generated. But now, imagine I take that text and rewrite it in my own language, not using the words of the AI, who is the writer now? How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

To conclude with this: there are thousands of "authors" out there, whose books are written by someone else. Even if a ghost writer does it, they are still the author of the their book. It may not adhere to your definition of an author, but the industry thinks different about it.

[LtBroccoli]

He is not just feeding in a prompt, or even a series of prompts, then posting the results wholesale. He starts with text he wrote himself (which I would argue is more than a prompt, though others may disagree), and that is the initial basis for the AI's output. Then he takes the generated content and modifies and reshapes it. And I get the impression that it is a several stage process of generation and revisions. Even if the majority of the actual text that is in the resulting story was produced by AI, he still shaped the work, and not just in broad strokes.

I understand the difference. But I can say it again and again until I turn blue. When I write a text and AI helps me to refine the text. Is it still written by me? If you say no, because a machine touched it, then I will push it to the limit. If you write a text and a spell checker helps you get the mistakes out, is it then still yours? I know it is different, but it is all about where you draw the line. I know it is all about semantics.

I agree, when I give one sentence to an AI and have it write me 20 pages, then it is AI generated. But now, imagine I take that text and rewrite it in my own language, not using the words of the AI, who is the writer now? How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?

To conclude with this: there are thousands of "authors" out there, whose books are written by someone else. Even if a ghost writer does it, they are still the author of the their book. It may not adhere to your definition of an author, but the industry thinks different about it.

Let's talk about power tools for a second. I like to do carpentry, and I will get caught up in the arguments about whether or not using a power tool makes you a "real" carpenter. I'm not fucking Amish. I'm going to use every tool at my disposal to make the best thing I can. Anyone who bitches about power tools never spent 3 hours sanding a table by hand because their power sander broke. Can I make a table with just hand tools? Yes. Do I want to? Absolutely not.

I'm okay with using AI like a power tool. Looking for grammar or spelling issues in a story? Asking AI to make sure you used the same name for the character each time? Checking to see if you changed tenses? That's like using a power drill.

I think where a lot of us don't like AI is when it's used as a ghost writer or something along those lines. I have friends that lost work in the arts because of AI. The models stole their work, trained on them, and started pumping out Boomer Art based loosely on the works they spent tens of thousands of hours to hone their craft. The companies decided that they could just use ChatGPT or whatever the image equivalent is instead of paying a department of graphic designers. Of course it blew up in their face, but not before my friends lost their jobs. And as a writer, I hate the idea of AI ghostwriting stories. I've spent my 10,000 hours mastering my craft. I've written more than a million words of porn over the last 5ish years. But the biggest kick in the teeth I ever had writing was watching someone churn out a story from an AI prompt and praise that more than the work I busted my ass over. At least with a real life ghost writer, someone got paid.

Now, as far as giving AI a prompt, it spits something out, and you do a complete rewrite on it, that's sort of like either IKEA furniture or in the movie world where a screenplay is given to another writer for a rewrite. I've done this with some scripts before. One writer works on a first or second draft, you take it from them and piece together something. It might be a little polish or a complete rewrite, but usually somewhere in between. Like, let's say I was given a script that had great action but the dialogue was weak and I was asked to punch it up. I'd leave the action alone for the most part and focus on what needed fixed.

By the way, even the Amish use power tools.

[Vela Nanashi]

@trio please don't leave, from how you describe how you work I think you are the author of your stories, putting in 8000 words and getting out 4000 eventually is not the AI writing it for you, I think it a miracle you can get out a satisfactory result. I do not consider you tainted for this. I am happy you shared your insight into your process.

As for me I have to turn off predictive text, I type each letter, as AI has failed every single time for that, but I do use spell check, thesaurus and search, so some of those are AI or machine learning based tools, but I write all stories in plain text and I do not have a grammar or tempus etc checker as those just annoy me, I will never fit in their narrow 'proper' grammar

I do not at all hate people who write with your level of AI tool help. Or actually even more, I don't even mind AI slop from prompts from time to time, when I just want something in background that I happily can ignore unlike when I listen to an author's book or read what a human wrote. I do sometimes get annoyed at AI isms, that you quickly learn to hear/read "it was not love, not yet, but..." the not yet, but thing is one also those infernal em dashes lol, but I know humans use those too, I just have a bad wetware parser for those

So I say please stay and continue.being an author here. Even if some of the ancients here (I am one) are less happy with AI tool assisted writing, I for one want to allow it, though I would prefer to know what tools and for what so that maybe I can learn a new tool for my own use:) I am techno positive I guess even if I have luddite tendencies (writing plaintext).

[RapeU]

@trio First off, constantly saying "I shouldn't have written this" or "I should stop writing" gets really old really fast. What you should stop doing is depending on AI.

Your Blossom stories were right on target. They had multiple layers of depth that AI is incapable of doing on it's own. It's clear that your Blossom trilogy was written primarily by you. Maybe you used AI during those stories, or maybe you didn't. Either way the story trilogy is well crafted. You are a talented writer who, for some reason, just decided to go crazy with AI.

I've played around with AI, I'll freely admit that. There's times when I don't have ideas and I carefully tell chatGPT what I want then ask for ideas. The problem comes when you have the AI write the story with minimal revisions. I've experimented with that too, and the longer your story is the poorer the results are. AI can't keep a storyline consistent over a long period of time. I wrote in a continuity error in one of my longer stories on purpose just to see if AI would catch it. It didn't. That's how I knew the last story of yours I commented on was primarily generated by AI. The small continuity errors and slight irregularities in logic build up over time.

While I would love to finish my time travel story where a man abducts women from the past to rape them in the future, using AI to do it cheapens the quality of the story. I used AI to experiment writing a few ideas and it spit out a garbled mess.

Emboldened by his success, Arnold embarks on a spree of historical abductions. He targets Cleopatra hours before her suicide, bringing the Egyptian queen to his modern-day lair. Next, he snatches Joan of Arc from the stake, reveling in her fierce spirit. Arnold's confidence grows with each successful mission, pushing him to take greater risks. He begins to see himself as a master of time and desire, unstoppable in his quest for sexual domination across history.

Emboldened by his previous successes, Arnold sets his sights on even more challenging targets. He abducts Anne Boleyn just hours before her execution, relishing in her regal demeanor and fiery spirit. Finally, Arnold pushes his limits by snatching Helen of Troy from the midst of the Trojan War, narrowly calculating the time before her supposed death. Each abduction further inflates Arnold's ego, convincing him of his mastery over time and history.

Arnold set his sights on one of the most iconic women in history, Marilyn Monroe. However, he miscalculates the time Marilyn spends in the future, causing all the women he has taken to return to the past. Frustration gnaws at him as he contemplates the consequences of messing with time.

Let's start with the obvious repetition. AI tends to repeat common phrases and sayings because that's what it thinks you want. The first two paragraphs start the exact same way. There's also "set his sights" that's repeats. The AI didn't understand that after Arnold played with each woman from the past, she either returned or vanished back into the past. It also failed to recognize the rule that Arnold could set the time in the present however he wanted, so the idea that he would miscalculate the time Marilyn spends in the future is a massive continuity error and completely illogical with the rules of time set beforehand. The AI also has trouble with anything other than present tense. You could try telling it to write in past tense, but the longer you have it write, the less it will truly follow what you originally want. The final problem with the AI blurb up there in the quote? Marilyn Monroe was abducted in Chapter 1 of the story and played with already.

I'll spare you the rest of what AI spit out in regards to that story and summarize it as Arnold got himself into trouble and had to get the leader of The Society to bail him out (Arnold is the leader, another continuity error.) They then get stuck in the past and have to find their way home. So essentially, the AI crafted an entirely different plot in the middle of the story and decided to start the beginnings of a story arc for no logical reason.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because you need to understand that you are indeed a good writer. In your Blossom stories, you created a world and a situation that had multiple layers of rape involved. The story kept to the same plot throughout and didn't try to pull in a different direction. Now, there's nothing wrong with stories whose plot changes in the middle and goes in a different direction but there must be a reason behind it and it must logically flow. AI does not have the capability of creative logical thought like humans do, not yet. Thus, when there's a change in the plot or when a story starts to turn in a different direction and it doesn't quite fit with the story, that's AI at work if it's not addressed properly within the story or later.

Depending on AI doesn't help you as an author. It cripples you. It makes your stories clunky and lack depth. Character development is essentially nonexistent. And the more you let it write, the more mistakes it will make.

[modela2]

I like to mess around with ChatGPT for this stuff, but the output isn’t something I’d ever read, without heavy editing, if it weren’t for the instant nature of it. Plus it’s kind of fun to figure out how to bypass all the filters even if OpenAI is probably forwarding all my prompts to the FBI.

My main concern with the technology is the sheer volume of obvious AI garbage someone can crank out every hour flooding the Internet and muscling out everything else, but I haven’t really noticed that in the writing space yet. Websites that revolve around visual stuff are virtually unusable because people will post 800 variants of the same image with zero editing.