The elephant in the room
ChatGPT is everywhere these days. It seems like everyone's talking about it. We have the doom-callers screaming that these tools will mark the end of our hobbies and professions; that art, blogging, and writing is going to be put out to pasture with the advent of things like Midjourney and ChatGPT... and then you have folks eagerly trying to sell you on how you too can make ten thousand dollars a day using only AI with no effort!.
Both groups are wrong.
ChatGPT and Midjourney are great - don't get me wrong. They do an awe-inspiring job at what they are targeted toward... but these aren't thinking machines. They're data models, taking in an absurd amount of source data, and programmatically spitting out something 'new' from these component parts. It's not an AI like we see in the movies, and that becomes painfully obvious even for a layman when you look at the output these things create.
That actually may be an oversimplification. Midjourney/StableDiffusion does create - we've trained it to know more or less what a 'dragon' is expected to look like, and it starts with basically static/noise and just layers up colours until it gets something that it thinks probably relates to what your expectation of a 'dragon' is. So, while I say it's "spitting out something new from component parts", don't misread that as 'copy and paste'. In any case, what I'm getting at is that these are trained on data sets, and the model does it's best to create what it's data sets tell it is a 'dragon'.
Similarly, ChatGPT is built on a massive data set that helps it understand what you're asking when you feed it a prompt. It has been taught what a 'story' is, it understands what an essay format is, and it takes in your content and, using what it has on hand, spits out something that most likely fits what you're asking it about... but it's all based on model data. Information scraped off the internet that can - and has - been wrong.
And that's where AI is always going to lag behind humans.
I had a number of programmer coworkers of mine express concern when this first blew up, saying that it was going to replace us - but how could it? The AI is simply playing an extremely complex game of match-making. It's not thinking. In the world of programming especially, it's regularly wrong or inefficient with it's answers. It does well with simple mistakes, but it's not a programmer... and I'd argue that it never will be.
It's not a writer, either... and it never will be. It's not an artist, and it never will be.
So what will it be? A tool!
Here, we get to my point in writing this. It's a tool in your arsenal of tools, and you'd be a goddamn fool not to use AI as a tool. This isn't a replacement and you shouldn't think of it as such. So many folks right now are copy/paste throwing content in and out of ChatGPT and Midjourney, and that - to me - is a disservice to what this actually should be used as.
These are first drafts. They should be used in the same way as we writers and bloggers use prompts. Lacking an idea on how to start something? Throw it into ChatGPT and refine it. Suck at art but need to get an idea out? Toss it into Midjourney and then provide that to a real artist as an example for them to then build upon.
Let's look at @mariannewest's Freewrite prompt - animal tracks today as an example, which I fed into ChatGPT with the prompt:
choose a genre from science fiction, fantasy, modern, or horror and write a short story based on the prompt: "animal tracks"
It spat out:
Genre: Horror
The snow fell softly on the ground, covering the forest in a white blanket. Jenny loved taking walks in the woods, especially in winter. The silence was comforting, and the cold air made her feel alive. But today, something felt off. As she walked, she noticed strange tracks in the snow. They were too large to belong to any animal she knew, and they seemed to lead deeper into the forest.
Jenny's curiosity got the best of her, and she decided to follow the tracks. As she walked, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was being watched. The tracks seemed to lead her deeper and deeper into the woods until she came upon a clearing. In the center of the clearing, she saw a strange animal. It was massive, with razor-sharp teeth and claws, and eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness.
Jenny tried to turn and run, but her feet were frozen in place. She was paralyzed with fear as the creature approached her. It sniffed at her, and Jenny could feel its hot breath on her skin. Suddenly, the creature turned and ran back into the woods, leaving Jenny alone in the clearing.
Jenny stumbled back to her house, her heart pounding with fear. She knew she had to tell someone what she had seen, but she also knew that no one would believe her. The next day, the news reported that a hiker had been killed in the woods, and Jenny knew that she had narrowly escaped a similar fate.
From that day on, Jenny never ventured into the woods alone, and she never forgot the terror of seeing those animal tracks in the snow. She never knew what that creature was, but she knew that it was something not of this world, and something that she never wanted to encounter again.
Not bad, right? It's... passable. It's a story for sure. It has used the prompt. For some folks this might be enough that they're happy with how it looks and just toss that down as a finished product... but, if we actually stop to consider the writing here... is it good?
The answer, of course, is no. It's not good. There's repetition that is needless; it's rare that we'd need to name the subject every paragraph like this. We know we're talking about Jenny - we don't need to bring her name into every single paragraph. That's something that a very novice writer does. I remember being taught something similar wayyyy back in grade school when we were first being introduced to creative writing... but it's certainly not something a professional writer would put out as a final product! We might do something similar as a first draft when we're not worried about anything but getting the words from our brains onto paper... but never as a final product.
As a prime example, let's take a look at a Sample Chapter from Brandon Sanderson's "The Way of Kings":
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. The enormous stone beast lay on its side, riblike protrusions from its chest broken and cracked. The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone. They faded.
Even after all these centuries, seeing a thunderclast up close made Kalak shiver. The beast’s hand was as long as a man was tall. He’d been killed by hands like those before, and it hadn’t been pleasant.
Of course, dying rarely was.
He rounded the creature, picking his way more carefully across the battlefield. The plain was a place of misshapen rock and stone, natural pillars rising around him, bodies littering the ground. Few plants lived here.
The stone ridges and mounds bore numerous scars. Some were shattered, blasted-out sections where Surgebinders had fought. Less frequently, he passed cracked, oddly shaped hollows where thunderclasts had ripped themselves free of the stone to join the fray.
Many of the bodies around him were human; many were not. Blood mixed. Red. Orange. Violet. Though none of the bodies around him stirred, an indistinct haze of sounds hung in the air. Moans of pain, cries of grief. They did not seem like the sounds of victory. Smoke curled from the occasional patches of growth or heaps of burning corpses. Even some sections of rock smoldered. The Dustbringers had done their work well.
But I survived, Kalak thought, hand to breast as he hastened to the meeting place. I actually survived this time.
Kalak - the POV character of this section - gets mentioned all of 3 times here. Looking back to our AI-generated prompt response, Jenny is mentioned 5 times - once per paragraph. This is not good writing.
But it IS a good starting place! And, I would say, it's what we as writers should be using ChatGPT for. A starting that we can chop up, refine, and fix.
I'm a true believer in the idea of taking something you like and cutting it up and mixing up the pieces and fixing it to fit whatever you're doing. I do it all the time in my tabletop worldbuilding and writing, and without fail what comes out is always something uniquely mine. It doesn't matter if I ripped the plot of some old Star Trek episode off, because by the time I'm done twisting it around and ripping out the bits I don't like and replacing them with stuff that I do like and that does work for my world, my fiction... it no longer resembles the source material much - if at all. Occasionally folks who know me really well can spot where I stole something from, but often, it goes unnoticed.
And, again, to reinforce this idea - I think we as writers should be using ChatGPT (and other AI models) in this same way. They're a tool in our case of tricks. They're not a final product.
Refining into a finished product
So, let's go back and reinforce this by fixing the ChatGPT prompt reply... and let's see if we can come out with something that's a little better than what we were provided. Something that's got some actual craft behind it.
The forest was covered in a thick carpet of snow, which continued to drift down. Jenny had always loved walking through this forest in the winter; the crunch of snow beneath her boots, the crisp silence of the woods that both amplified some sounds and muffled others, the chill air in her lungs. She'd come out here seeking that stillness in an effort to calm her mind and push out the seemingly never-ending burdens of being an entrepreneur. Something was off today though. A nagging anxiety had been slowly taking over the deeper into the woods she walked, pushing her to move, driving her forward.
She chuckled and stuffed a stray hair back under her toque as she realized that she'd been basically speed-walking for several minutes. She forcefully reminded herself that this was her safe space - her center - as she took a minute to just stop and breathe. There was no reason to feel anxious here. Back in the office? Sure. But here? She chuckled again and reached for her water bottle that dangled on a carabiner at her hip.
She froze mid-movement as she spotted them. Tracks, just off to her left, and fresh enough to still be well-defined even as snow swirled lazily into the depressions. She finished reaching for the water bottle as she studied the tracks from where she stood. They looked way too big to be a wolf... wrong shape for a bear (Weren't bears typically hibernating now, anyhow?), definitely not anything like a moose or other deer-family beasts... what the hell could make tracks like that?
She tried to push the question out of her mind. Her focus was personal finance, not zoology or hunting or whatever. She knew enough of the local wildlife to vaguely identify a pretty wide variety of tracks, but she certainly wasn't an expert. Plus, it seemed to have moved on deeper into the woods. If it was nearby, it certainly didn't seem interested in her, and she was fine keeping it that way.
She turned to head back, putting the strange tracks out of her mind and focusing in on the stillness again. A call unlike anything she'd ever heard rang out before she made it ten steps.
"What the fuck are you?" she muttered, turning back to eye the tracks. Curiosity burned within her, and before she really realized she'd made up her mind, she was already following them into the thicker forest, away from the well-trod path. A prickling sensation on the back of her neck made her feel like she was being watched, but she pushed that from her mind. It was nothing more than her anxiety surfacing in a new way. Likely, the call was from some wounded animal and the tracks were from some freakishly sized wolf or something.
The snow was deeper here, off the beaten path. Slogging through it up to her mid-calf, the journey seemed to take hours. The tracks were still fresh, and with a glance behind her, so were hers. It'd be easy to backtrack once she'd figured out what the hell was in her woods.
A soft growl prompted her to whip her head back forward, as a beast easily the size of a horse seemed to materialize out of the snow a dozen feet ahead. The entire frame was a bulk of white fur-covered muscles, and it padded forward on clawed paws that sunk into the snow far less than she would have expected for a beast of this size. Its eyes never left her, and she was frozen in place even as every molecule of her existence screamed at her to run.
It did a slow circle around her, sniffing her pack... her water... her face. Hot breath rife with the smell of rancid meat puffed out as its tongue lolled out of the maw crowded with razor-sharp teeth.
Jenny whimpered, still frozen by fear and able to do anything but fixate on the beast. This was how she was going to die, she realized. A meal for some demon in her favourite woods.
The beast narrowed its eyes at her and, with one last look over its shoulder, padded back into the woods. She lost sight of it in the span of two heartbeats. The soft snow was the perfect camouflage for this strange predator.
She had no recollection of leaving the woods but realized as her shaking hands fumbled the key into her front door that the sun was setting and she was home. She plopped down at her computer, looking for the number of her real estate agent. She knew that she'd never set foot in the woods behind her house again.
There! Now that has more life to it, doesn't it? We retain some of the prompt reply ChatGPT gave us, but have ended up with a (to my mind at least) MUCH BETTER final product. Now, this is way more than I intended to write on this subject today... but I hope you see from this example how we can use these tools to create something better than what they provide. We don't need to fear them, because they're inherently an inferior product... but we can appreciate their ability to abstract out some of the less-engaging aspects of our craft - like creating first drafts and generating ideas!
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Absolutely agree that AI (ChatGPT) is an exciting new tool for writers. It hadn't occurred to me to use it as a kind of first draft generator, that you can then transform into your own work. I have 'ripped off' the plot of stories I like in the past, and made them my own, and I feel like my version is in some way a step forward, or that it goes further than the original (or at least in a unique direction with my input).
And I think this is how AI can be a tool that takes us forward as storytellers. You made a key point here:
We're always doing this as writers, beginning with what we've read in the past and writing our own version. But AI can draw from far more than any single human brain can; it can draw from literally every piece of literature ever digitized, and do so more directly than a human brain inspired from stories it read in early stages of development. In this way I think it's a huge leap forward as a starting point for our stories.
I used ChatGPT as a reader for my latest short story, and was blown away with the feedback I got. It was simply 10 times more comprehensive than any reader response I've ever received, in any writing class or writing group, or from any friend reading my story. I used it to analyze my plot for conflict and resolution. It could only really provide a surface analysis; it missed a lot that I was trying to show or imply. But as a writer it's invaluable to know what is readily apparent and what is not. And, it showed me themes I didn't realize were there and a subplot or side plot that I wasn't fully aware of either. In the end I changed one sentence directly based on its feedback, making an overt statement about what the character wanted instead of trying to show it, but I suspect that one sentence made the story work. I don't feel like I fully utilized it as a reader or tool for feedback, but the potential of using it in that way is enormous.
Exactly! And ooo I hadn't even considered using it as a reader! That's a freaking great use of the tool! I'm going to have to give that a try soon.
This is really the monster in the room and it makes it tricky for curators as well. I have asked a long time ago about this but I guess, people only picking up how chatgpt works and its technology. Now even some academics use it as a tool to help them refine their research and many more. It's a great tool to summarize, to also help you correct grammar mistakes etc. However, certainly the human aspect to it is something that I think missing. Writing isn't the only one but it's a full set content creation. There are video that can generate content and even record it with a person narrating the story. Oh well, I don't know maybe eventually we will rely on it?
I honestly think the most this will ever really do is be a time saving device. It's not good enough to really replace the human element but it can make writing more accessible and easier for folks who perhaps write in a second language or folks who (as Cliff suggested) might want an AI beta reader, or folks who have trouble with drafts or breaking out of their preferred genre... But it'll always be a tool for us to use and improve upon, and never a end product.
https://leofinance.io/threads/@cliffagreen/re-leothreads-dg931wiv
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I think you're right about it being good for first drafts. I find AI-written text, even the best of it, still has that "uncanny valley" effect. I can usually spot when it's been machine-written. It's somehow cold, stilted, and while grammatically correct somehow lacks pace, as if each sentence or paragraph was constructed without reference to their place in the overall flow of the story.
Where it is succeeding is in generating spam that gets past most boolean filters - I'm seeing a huge spike in the damn stuff. Where it will totally fail, I think, is in creating documentation for software, business processes, technical manuals and the like, where precision, clarity, structure and 100% accuracy (usually involving brand new products) are all essential components.
Yeah, anything like that which requires a human touch will never be outsourced to machines. At most it'll provide a first-pass that folks can then fix.
I like your example and see how it could be useful both to help people practice editing drafts and to help get out of ruts.
I have to say that I think a lot of magic happens in the first draft and I'd hate to see the use of ai to construct first drafts common practice.
But it could be used when you get stuck in a story and need help getting from one point to another.
Definitely agree, yeah. I've never seen an output that didn't need fixing is the big thing. For ruts and getting over writers block and even for learning, I think it is a great tool. One that we should be aware of the limitations and benefits of, but not one we should rely upon.
You just found a cheat code to using ChatGPT properly.
GRACIAS !!!
I view this like any advancement in the space... it's useful, but only if you know how to use it, and what its limitations are.
In the case of writing blogs, it can do a great job summarizing a topic, pointing out key points about a given topic, etc... but they just aren't good enough to replace folks like us!
Exactly! Im very sure that these models will become incredibly useful, but there's no replicating our creativity and ingenuity. The AI can only ever think inside the box, and so much of what we do is outside the box. We push those boundaries, and I don't see how you could reasonably train an AI to do that.
As an experiment I decided to ask it to rewrite the original prompt reply in the style of Brando-Sando and it returned as such.
More flowery language, but ultimately still pretty rudimentary. I do like it for first drafting scripts. It is a handy tool for that. Especially if you're in a rut. The bot will provide ideas.
Heck yeah. Even with someone as prolific as Brando-Sando it doesn't do well at emulating his style... which isn't surprising, it'd take a massive amount of tweaking to get it to achieve that.
Very good tool for ideas, drafts, and launching-off points though!