What are members' views on the use of AI in writing?

[Molyfar]

I completely understand why many authors are sceptical of AI. But for me, it is an essential accessibility tool.

As someone who is deaf and autistic, my head is always buzzing with sci-fi stories and ideas bursting to get out. My challenge isn't a lack of imagination—it’s organising that chaotic jumble of thoughts into a structured format others can read.

Storytelling and world-building shouldn't be limited by communication barriers. AI doesn't create my ideas; it acts as a bridge, helping me translate the worlds in my mind so I can share them with all of you.

 

[Hobbit]

Lots of discussion in my Book Clubs at the moment. It is still often possible to see what is AI and what is not. The biggest issue for us, and I think that this is something that you've said, Molyfar, (welcome by the way!) is that AI can replicate but not originate - at least at the moment.

The result is bland generic material that lacks the thoughts/insights/experiences of a human writer. Readers appreciate that someone has imagined, created, refined and put effort into a written piece of work, rather than just pressed a button.

The issue, as I see it, is that some readers are happy with that.

 

[RedMage]

Hi @Molyfar! Welcome to SFFWorld!

I confess, I'm uncertain how to answer. AI is something I reject immediately as a writer. However, your situation is relatively rare. It makes me think of the current "Own Voices" movement in publishing for stories about minorities and written by people from those same minorities--be the minority race, sexuality, disability, etc.

We've had discussions over the years--one very recently!--about authors who publicize their reasons for not finishing their series. Some have not given any reason, and it's been over a decade since the last book in their series, which ended in such a way that it was not the final book. However, others have publicized and openly discussed the reasons they have struggled to publish the next book in the series. Readers seem to be universally understanding and supportive of those authors who talk about their personal difficulties and how those affect their writing. They still want the next book, but they accept the delay. Meanwhile, the same readers also seem unanimous in their frustration with authors who do not discuss their personal struggles.

Whatever we deal with in our own lives, it is our choice who to share those things with. No one can force you to share. But I think the community of readers and authors, and aspiring authors, would be far more open and understanding of your use of AI if you include an explanation for them just like what you've provided us. Of course, that's not a guarantee but just my experience and belief about how others might react.

 

[Jonas Stark]

I think your situation is one of those genuine use cases where AI may be able to help augment, but there is almost assuredly going to have be some sandboxing on your part to make sure it doesn't try to take over more than you want it to.

I work in cybersecurity these days, so using AI is something with which I'm exceedingly familiar, and the pitfalls are there, to be sure. AI can be a great tool, used wisely.

It is awful at drafting (even technical papers), as well as being creative with story development.

I did an experiment where I pasted half of one of my books into the AI to see how it would finish the story. It was horrific. And this was fairly recent. I don't think the latest fad version of AI will be much more help.

Use it, if you must. Completely understandable. Be sure to fully internalize its limits and ensure you are not tempted to use it for purposes that could wind up hurting what you're trying to build.

 

[kmtolan]

While AI is essentially plagiarism, I could understand your need for it. It remains, however, a justifiable kiss of death for most publishers and writers and should be avoided in most circumstances. My opinion, of course, and one heavily prejudiced as I've had two of my novels stolen by AI databases.

 

[Jonas Stark]

While AI is essentially plagiarism, I could understand your need for it. It remains, however, a justifiable kiss of death for most publishers and writers and should be avoided in most circumstances. My opinion, of course, and one heavily prejudiced as I've had two of my novels stolen by AI databases.

I am extremely curious to hear what you mean by this. How could that happen? Do you mean they were used to train an AI model? I have so many questions, especially since I'm sure my own books are likely to be primarily digital releases here in the modern age we live in.

Another reason I'm paranoid is that in my experiment above, I gave an AI model half of one of my books and had it try to draft the rest of the story, just to see what would happen.

Side note, I just realized that the way AI finished the story reminds me a lot of what we're seeing in film/TV storytelling. I wonder how much of all that stuff is, at a minimum, AI-augmented.

The scary version is people getting accustomed to this subpar version of storytelling.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

If I was paralyzed, and told someone how I wanted a picture to be painted, did I paint that picture?

 

[Max_Ravenby]

It depends if you use AI as a writer or a tool I guess. I found it useful for tasks like how many times did i use a specific word. Or check if I mention some term before I actually want (because I write by scenes and then tie it together). Or if you set up a personality for opinion - read it like a kid - is it understandable? read it like a hardcore sci-fi fan, are the mechanics clear? But I strictly forbid it to write antyhing, even suggestions. When AI gives you an image of something (character or scene) its hard to not thing about it afterwards.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

Find a word is built into every browser and word processor. Why use AI for that?

 

[RedMage]

It depends if you use AI as a writer or a tool I guess. I found it useful for tasks like how many times did i use a specific word. Or check if I mention some term before I actually want (because I write by scenes and then tie it together). Or if you set up a personality for opinion - read it like a kid - is it understandable? read it like a hardcore sci-fi fan, are the mechanics clear? But I strictly forbid it to write antyhing, even suggestions. When AI gives you an image of something (character or scene) its hard to not thing about it afterwards.

Welcome to SFFWorld, Max! I think that's a use that many may get behind. However, as @Stanley Steamboy said, most word processors can tell you the word count, include search functions for either the whole document or a selection of text -- which will tell you how many times that word appears. There are also a number of sites that assess the reading level of a passage, used by fiction writers and people in other professions to determine the reading and literacy level of their work so they may better serve their audience. I haven't looked, but I imagine many of those are using the modern AI now, though they didn't used to. (If anyone knows more on that, please correct me.)

I know many authors and aspiring authors have a knee jerk reaction to AI. And for good reason, as @kmtolan has alluded to. I certainly do. It might be helpful in my day job and my coworkers do use it, but I refuse to.

All that said, I think AI has it's place and uses, fewer in the creative arts such as writing fiction than in other professions and activities. But it can be used even here, and I think @Molyfar's intent and uses makes a case for it.

 

[Cicero]

In terms writing Ai is a very good tool which is going to get alot better and, maybe to point where the publishing Industry be able to turn out books that might not be original or creatively groundbreaking but will be just good enough to satisfy readers basic demand for literary entertainment.

You can't stop progress and innovation and its consequences.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

Of course you can "stop progress". Laws do that all the time to prevent various behaviors from becoming common.

Today, governments could simply ban any sort of use of AI having direct language-based interaction with the public. AI providers would simply be unable to answer a large range of queries - including working with prose.

Above and beyond that, writers should be critical of AI because it can replace us. So why should any writer embrace and train their replacement???? Not just helping you write, but even looking for feedback is helping AI make you superfluous.


If you are unable to write on your own, it may not be the right avocation for you. Take whatever creative juices you have and sink them into something you can do. Post them on Reddit or something without feeling the need to embed them in the stolen intellectual property of all the authors' work stolen to train AI.

 

[Jonas Stark]

If people wonder what the issue is with AI taking over the creative literary space, it essentially crowds out human voices writing about our condition. The way AI writes creates an unsettling, uncanny valley-type of effect where the reader understands they have received a story, but something is wrong.

It could be worth an experiment to post two versions of the three part structure/summary of the book I ran through AI and offer a blind test to see if people can pick which version is AI or not.

AI, by its nature, runs to the average experience, calculating based on the highest probabilities for what might be written. This is why the term "slop" is actually fairly apt. What AI produces is a greyed-out version of a real composition, an amorphous blob without a shape or color of its own.

This isn't just in writing, but in all art forms. I have encountered AI slop on YouTube and Spotify, hearing songs where something just didn't sit right. It was like a bowl of sugar, enjoyable at first before my mind realized something was amiss. I have yet to investigate one of these without stumbling onto AI slop. The human mind can still perceive it, and I don't know if that will go away. Let's see.

 

[Alan L]

I completely understand why many authors are sceptical of AI. But for me, it is an essential accessibility tool.

As someone who is deaf and autistic, my head is always buzzing with sci-fi stories and ideas bursting to get out. My challenge isn't a lack of imagination—it’s organising that chaotic jumble of thoughts into a structured format others can read.

Storytelling and world-building shouldn't be limited by communication barriers. AI doesn't create my ideas; it acts as a bridge, helping me translate the worlds in my mind so I can share them with all of you.

As a fellow neurodivergent, I understand where you're coming from. I've made limited use of generative AI in a commercial context and the results have ranged from unsatisfying to unusable.

My slightly educated guess is that at best, you'll be able to use AI to turn your ideas into a passable rough draft. A lot of the "AI slop" that we see, especially in non-fiction, looks like someone took that rough draft, gave it a few touch-ups, stuck a cover on it, and then published it on Amazon. The result is serious push-back from some readers against anything that mentions AI, generative or not.

At the same time, a some writers start with a rough draft that's unpublishable and hone it into an award-winning story. That's where the true skills of mastering prose, pace, plot, character development, genre beats, and so on come in. As of the current state of AI, it's going to be of little help with that, those are skills you need. Although there are non-generative AI analysis tools (eg ProWritingAid) that can help you identify problems with the story.

I think if you're transparent about the use of these tools, there's a cohort of readers who will dismiss you out of hand, even if you explain why and how you used them. But I also think they're more vocal than the people who don't care and the people who see you using them to overcome disability as a positive thing. One hopes that the people who aren't radically anti-AI will judge your work on merit rather than how you got there.

Personally, generative AI won't touch my stories. I even removed Grammarly after a week because I got tired of it making dumb suggestions that I make my prose more bland, generic, and corporate. However I am leaning toward using AI based analysis tools to look for faults in story structure so I can address (or ignore) those issues before giving it to beta readers and then a developmental editor.

 

[Alan L]

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting, nuanced take on it: https://oreillyradar.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

Tim O'Reilly has an interesting, nuanced take on it: https://oreillyradar.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai

This is the same tired argument offered about the industrial revolution and automation. Both fail to see that AI has the ability to do both the creative and mechanical side of any sort of labor endeavor.

Talking about AI like it is just another tool like the typewriter misses the fact that there has never been a device that could observe you passing gas, take "inspiration" from that event and then craft something you are completely incapable of producing on your own. But we'll call that fart the "human creative input" and keep pretending they we are not abdicating all responsibility for creation to a universal human emulator.

 

[Alan L]

This is the same tired argument offered about the industrial revolution and automation. Both fail to see that AI has the ability to do both the creative and mechanical side of any sort of labor endeavor.

That's what the people backing these stochastic generators want you to think (some of them might actually believe it, which boggles my mind.) In fact all they're capable of is spitting out the most statistically probable piece of all the accumulated creativity they've been trained on. True algorithmic creativity requires AGI and AGI is orders of magnitude more complex than what the current generative AI models can do, despite what they tell their investors. Until that happens, generative AI is only as creative as the person giving it prompts.

 

[Stanley Steamboy]

That's what the people backing these stochastic generators want you to think (some of them might actually believe it, which boggles my mind.) In fact all they're capable of is spitting out the most statistically probable piece of all the accumulated creativity they've been trained on. True algorithmic creativity requires AGI and AGI is orders of magnitude more complex than what the current generative AI models can do, despite what they tell their investors. Until that happens, generative AI is only as creative as the person giving it prompts.

That will be true for what, a year? Maybe three? AI is rapidly improving, and what we consider acceptable fiction writing is hardly the product of creative brilliance.

No, AI can't currently conceive of and write a best selling novel. Nor can it design and manufacture an airplane or a house. But you aren't paying attention if think AI won't do all of those in less than a decade. How long you want to wait to object to that trend is up to you, but it is already quite late.

 

[Alan L]

That will be true for what, a year? Maybe three? AI is rapidly improving, and what we consider acceptable fiction writing is hardly the product of creative brilliance.

No, AI can't currently conceive of and write a best selling novel. Nor can it design and manufacture an airplane or a house. But you aren't paying attention if think AI won't do all of those in less than a decade. How long you want to wait to object to that trend is up to you, but it is already quite late.

I'm paying attention and I have a wee bit of expertise in the field. There's going to have to be some huge algorithmic breakthroughs before we get there. Right now, all we have is essentially the same computations done on bigger and bigger models and faster chips, which requires bigger and bigger data centres, and silicon that wears out in a year or two, max. All these companies think that somehow if they scale it up to some magical point, AGI will pop out the other end. It's ludicrous. It's delusional.

Not only that, but the AI companies are passing trillions of dollars in debt back and forth between them so it doesn't show up on their balance sheets, and every single query costs them more money. The AI bubble is going to burst simply because what they're doing now is not sustainable.

I happen to think AGI is possible. Just not with the class of algorithms we're currently using, and certainly not with the companies who are currently pushing it, most of which will be disappearing in a way that makes the failures from the dot com bust look like a ripple. So no, not a year or three... a decade, maybe.

I remember being told in the 1970's that fusion power was a tough problem and we might not see it until the year 2000. AGI is also a tough problem and we're not going to be seeing it anytime soon.

Maybe, just maybe some group of researchers come up with a better hardware/software approach that can replicate human creativity without consuming more power than a small town, but I haven't heard of that happening yet, and without that kind of a leap, I'm not worried.