I don't think the question is "should you use AI in your writing?" But rather "how should you use AI in your writing?" AI is a tool, just like the internet. It's neither ethical nor unethical. It's how you use it that matters. I understand the fears that authors feel about generative AI, I used to share them. I'm both a software developer and an author, so it's threatening both of my jobs. AI isn't going anywhere, railing against it like a modern day Paul Bunyan won't end any better for authors than it did for Paul. I think it's important to find ways to embrace technology in an ethical and productive way. I've done a lot of research and experimentation in this avenue, and it's made an enormous difference. Part of the fear that authors feel is because they imagine that entire novels are being created by AI, this simply isn't the case... at least for any successful books. There are low-content books that are flooding the market with 100% AI written trash, and yes, they are trash. AI is inaccurate, it's not creative, it is not going to create a book that anyone actually wants to read. So why use it? Because it is absolutely amazing at brainstorming. I used to be a pantser for several decades because plotting took so long and it seemed to suck the magic out of my story. Now, with my brainstorming buddy, I'm able to plan my novel in a couple of weeks, instead of months or years. Writers block? I haven't had more than a few minutes worth since I embraced this technology. I simply bounce ideas off of my AI assistant, usually I hate most if not all of the suggestions, but it gets my creative juices flowing again, and I'm able to come up with my own solution. I don't think that we'll ever see people lining up around the block for AI written books like we do for J.K. Rowling's next Harry Potter novel for instance. People attach to authors, not words.
(Skipping the ethical and copyright issues of using AI generated text.) As an editor, I hate it when clients use AI to generate text. It takes more work to fix than if it were a badly written human draft. Why? Because AI is writing words that sound good (sometimes debatable) but lack a deeper underlying content. Fixing AI text often involves a complete rewrite. There are ways to improve the output (like telling it to focus on creative verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs), but no matter how good it gets, it still lacks a certain underlying significance that comes from an insightful human writer. As a writer, there are some use cases where I've found AI a huge timesaver. Converting dictation to text and converting that text to a properly formatted scene, brainstorming, outlining, summarizing, scanning 50k words of book notes and comparing it to the book's outline to see which I forgot to incorporate, these are all things that AI can do so much faster than a human can. Given full notes/book context, it can also help solve convoluted technical problems like meshing multiple POVs into the right order in the overall outline. It can also function as an amateur developmental editor for quick and dirty analysis of your book/scene/outline, if you ask the right questions and provide enough context. I think the key is what you said: Don't let AI tell your story. Instead, use it to quickly get through those repetitive and uninspired tasks you'd otherwise waste your creative energy on. If you do use it, it's crucial to understand its limitations and how to properly and ethically use it.
It sounds like the authors you're dealing with are relying too heavily on AI. AI should be a tool to help the writer, not replace the writer. I write with AI, but almost nothing the AI writes ends up in my final draft. No one would ever buy the book, as you said, AI writing is trash. That doesn't make it useless, it just means that having it write your novel for you is a bad idea.
@@BruceWayne15325 For sure, my statement contains visibility bias. I can only identify AI-generated text if people tell me they used AI or if I can tell it's AI text based on textual features. If writers used AI but did it in a way that either produced actual human-like text, or they rewrote it afterward, then I wouldn't know they used AI, and I'd assume it's human text. So, yes, I'm referring more to the "default" AI-generated text ending up in the final product. The farther you get from that default the harder it is to know it's AI-generated. I think our appreciation for art also follows the same curve. Fully AI-generated, we don't consider it art. But when the artist plans out their composition using Midjourney, but then paints it by hand, most would still consider that art.
@@aaronhunyady I agree completely, and it's frustrating to see so many RUclipsr's pushing the "get rich quick" schemes. I laugh when I see those videos. If they only knew how poor authors really were lol. They'd be more successful starting a bad garage band. In the interest of fairness, I should amend my previous statement to say that there's only one editor that is exposed to a fair amount of AI writing from me, the developmental editor. That's simply because of how early that editing happens in the process. I know that some developmental editors will do line level edits, and if you're in that category, then I can certainly see what you mean and I'll confess I'm guilty as charged. I suspect that in the age of AI, we'll end up seeing less line level editing at the developmental editor stage. Perhaps they confine them to just the critical scenes if they do it at all. This could reduce editorial costs as well.
@@aaronhunyady Yikes that actually scares me. (Not you, your clients). There's a lot of non-authors that have started cranking out low-content books, trying to "get rich quick." They have zero integrity, they don't care about getting things right. They only care about selling (scamming) the public. Hopefully if they are coming to you, they are simply using AI to speed up their writing, rather than letting AI write something they know nothing about.
I read something a while back about a sci-fi magazine that stopped taking submissions temporarily bc they'd been inundated with AI-generated submissions. The publisher said that the way AI "writes" is technically plagiarism, since it draws from whatever human-generated source material it's been trained on. I feel that story-telling is about a human connecting to other humans from a place of shared human experiences. Readers connect to authors not just bc the author is entertaining, but bc the author says things that resonate with them. An AI cannot have the same history of human experiences.
This is really up to interpretation. But sure, but to be a storyteller, you have to live your story, and then using A.I. to help you lay it out, that is a tool for someone to share their story with the world.
@SignificantOwl What about a narrative designer? Screenwriter? Their products are the final design, in fact, narrative design doesn't require a script sometimes.
@@SignificantOwl Who are you to dictate what makes someone a writer or not? Mister uh... nobody? Are you Stephen King by any case? Brandon Sanderson? J.R.R. Tolkien? Now, if Tolkien stood up from his grave and told me I'm not a writer, I'd glad accept it. You? Pfft.
@@SignificantOwl This is just an amount of selfishness and snobiness. Jackson from The Nerdy Novelist channel has talked about this before, that AI has helped a lot not only burned out writers, but also neurodivergent ones. Like me, who has Autism and ADHD. Are you saying I don't deserve to be a writer just because I'm not doing what YOU assume to be real writing? My brain doesn't work the same way, and I found a way to make it work. Before I couldn't barely keep up with my studies and writing one book was impossible, now having ideas to brainstorm, generating structures and focusing on individual scenes helped me achieve 50k words in less than a month. I even stopped relying on Ritalin as much as before. So here's the thing: AI is here to stay. Don't like it, stop breathing.
I've experimented with this, not to have my book written by an AI but more like a curious scholar. I've let Microsoft Bing write parts of one of my novella. I took already written chapter and copy pasted half of it to the AI, then asked them to write the rest of the chapter following my style and structure. Then I compared my second half of the chapter with AI's version. I've repeated this experiment multiple times with multiple texts. What I've discovered is that an AI is perfectly capable of writing impeccable structure and even come up with amazing complications, twists and so on, it is even capable of using metaphors, similes and allegories correctly and efficiently. HOWEVER I also discovered that texts written by an AI, in my experience anyway, always lack certain depth. Texts just don't seem lively enough, they don't feel like they're coming from someone who knows what they're talking about. In my opinion, this is due to the lack of actual real-life experiences as well as experience and knowledge of what it really feels like to use human senses and feel human emotions. In other words, writing is all about conveying and manipulating emotion, about eliciting emotion, and this is why writers are always advised to write about what they know and what they've experienced themselves. An AI does not have that luxury, and they will never be able to fully grasp what it feels like to have a human condition. For this reason, I do not believe human writers will ever truly be replaced by an AI. In my opinion, using an AI to write YOUR story is useless, at the very least.
Love the BJJ metaphor (I'm a brown belt too, out of 10PATX in Austin, TX). Fully agree on focusing on writing the book only you can write using experiences only you have had. Great reminder, man. Keep it up 🤘
I read somewhere, “If you don’t invest time writing your book, why should anyone waste their time reading it?” For me, the answer is clear. As AI is now, they can't, specially if your language is not English (ChatGPT is awful at writing a language with many flavors, such as Spanish). Furthermore, not only does not the AI know how to write (mastering the language), it knows little about getting out of the clichés. Remember, AIs work to find the most probable outcome. It's difficult for an AI to come with a really novel idea. It might seem wild, but if you analyze it and take the disguise out of it, it's conveying a very common idea with a predictable perspective on that issue (or problem). All that said, AIs make a great writing partner. You pointed it out in the intro: they're a good tool to help you in research, even for brainstorming. Use AIs as you use calculators, as a tool that can make your job easier. But you must know what you want (master the skills so you can evaluate) to fully take the best AIs (or any other tool) have to offer.
The more I find out about writing the more I realise. At the core, its hard to get Ai to write a stroy the way you want. Its like when you try to write descriptions, hoping the reader sees what exactly you see-a wasted ambition. You have much less control over your story than most writers would like.
I agree on a scene level. On a broader level, I recently did an experiment where I uploaded my entire book notes to an AI model as contextual information, then I had it develop outlines for some parts I was having trouble developing. After giving it the full context, there were times when I felt it was reading my mind, knowing exactly what I wanted. There were also times when it wanted to take the story in completely the wrong direction. Though to be fair, my notes contained a lot of old ideas that I knew were no longer applicable, but which it didn't know were outdated.
The line for me is on either side of the editing process. I would never want AI to actually write my book, but how much it can help with editing is the question.
Some of these comments here imply that they havent watched the whole video. He says that writing a book yourself is a best method since its not about churning out work but leaving a legacy and creating art, something AI can't do. He also says that all AI does is regurgitate what its learned and has no ability to create. Hes siding WITH creators, not against them.
I'm not a writer and I'm not an illustrator, but I have a story to tell and a topic to teach. AI tools are making that possible for me. They are opening up a world of possibility that until recently I could only dream about. I'm looking at creating a mixture of my real life (not about me, but a hobby of sorts) experience and a hidden cartoon world I interact with to teach a topic and without money, would likely never even be able to consider doing while working a completely different full time job. I'm excited for the future thanks to the possibilities these tools bring where without them, I'd likely only end up working my job until I die, leaving no real lasting impact on the world. Just my perspective.
I love using Chat GPT to help me get through some tough spots. I'm stuck on an idea and this really helps give me ideas on the current situation. You still have to use your noodle and you still get the AHA moments having to figure things out, this just sort of helps nudge you in the correct direction. Also, it can't write as well as us humans yet, its still a bit mechanical. I can take something it tells me, then rewrite it in my words and it will sound so much better...at least to me. Situational descripting with dialogue is also still more in our favor as well. But, when I did ask it to write some dialogue in using the stylings of Steven King, it was able to give some pretty decent dialogue. For me its a tool to aid, not to write.
I don't consider myself a professional writer, so I take my opinion with that in mind. I wouldn't use AI to write a story, but I would use it to flesh out a character. I've used generative AI to quickly generate different scenes of how a character might react in different situations. Then, once I have an idea of who my character is, I know which direction to take my stories.
It works. You just have to have a hyper specific outline and micromanage the ai. Turn it into a word picker and nothing more. My light novel 'My Moon-Worshipping Wife and I Are Being Hunted By The Sun God's Zealot' turned out really good.
Ai is a great tool for helping you organize thoughts or to see if your description is as vivid as you wrote it or if others can understand your writing. It's like having a second person helping you see your work objectively. I love it for that, but it's not good for writing. Ai can write, but it can't take your vision and create it the way you want perfectly. At least, not yet. Who knows where it will take us. It's being normalized now
One of my weaknesses is finding unique character voices. I sometimes use AI to help. I describe the character’s traits and ask it to write some random dialogue for that character. I don’t use the exact material it generates, but it can help give me an idea of what they might sound like, or at least start me in the right direction
Can we get more content on the two factor problem. Like how a bunch of movies have gone through the process? Would also be good to get some examples of the society genre.....that one seems to get forgotten about.
My brother uses Romo AI to write ebooks and upload rhose ebooks as it is on amazon. He is making around 1200 dollrs per month. So i think it dependa on the AI tool that what kind of AI tool someone is using
I guess you could still get a few idea/brainstorm/research with ai. No need to let it do all the work, especially not the parts that matter to you to have done by yourself.
When KDP launched, there were already multiple successful self-publishing platforms. I'm not sure it's fair to credit Amazon with a gold rush on self-publishing that was already ongoing at the time.
Use the best tools possible to become the best artist possible or be relegated to the dustbin of history. Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things? -Pablo Picasso
I'm not sure when he said that, but it's interesting that 50 years after he died, painting is still going strong, and I'd say possibly more popular than before - though most paintings are now made on computers. But it's a different model. You don't need to be rich or have a wealthy patron, or be extraordinarily talented to begin to paint professionally. You need a computer or tablet, and time.
Be aware there could be issues in terms of privacy. Posting your text on the internet opens it up to theft. If it's an early draft, that might not be much of a problem. If it's close to publication, that could be more of a problem. Not all AI companies have the same privacy policies and code of ethics, or the same regulatory requirements. Some will use the content you upload to train their future models, meaning your text could potentially be spit out elsewhere or stolen. Even the best companies note that your content will not be private if content flags are triggered (does a character getting brutally murdered trigger this flag?). OpenAI has a track record of violating privacy, while Anthropic seems to do better and is much more transparent, but I haven't done an industry-wide comparison. If you're just a starting writer desperate for all the feedback you can get, then this potential privacy aspect is probably outweighed by the benefits.
AI can be good for getting out of that blank page, but in my experience AI can't really keep things consistent for long. when i tested it, it often gave me terrible suggestions. after 3 terrible suggestions i usually knew what i wanted and wrote it myself. at this point in time, it's more of a terrible co writer you say "no" to all the time. The AI suggestions you end up using vanishes 90% of the time in editing in my own experience. It's often easier to just write it yourself.
Great take. AI is a misnomer at this point. The day it can actually write a piece of art, we may as well kill ourselves--because Skynet will be doing it shortly. In the meantime, it just seems like we are losing wisdom as a people... How many times have you heard the saying, "It's not about the destination but the journey." That's life. If you want a possibly-profitable-but-lacking-in-meaning life, then take shortcuts on everything you can. If you want to experience what it means to be human, then struggle, fail, and try again.
Can AI write your book for you? Can your publishing house? Can your alpha readers? Can your beta readers? Yes, they can all do it. You don't have to put any work in. I didn't even write this comment, or did I? You'll never know, or care.
Anything you offload to the AI you cheat yourself out of practicing, and hopefully enjoying. If you hatte writing so much, why be a writer? It sucks to struggle, but the only way you're going to get better is by actually doing the thing.
You can learn something from it. Personally I put in my best effort when I write, and when I'm done I have an AI critique it and point out flaws. It's like a proofreader, and if used right, it can give tons of hints. If you just do your best and then don't reflect on it, you don't improve very quickly. AI gives you feedback (some accurate, some not) that forces you to think about your writing from a different perspective. It can also point out when you're using repetitive sentence structure, filter words, if your dialogue is off... Then you learn those patterns and improve faster.
@@exurkyzed8823 that's a good use for it, but now that you know what to look for, do you think you would improve faster if you did the proofreading yourself? It's fine if you don't want to practice proofreading, everyone uses a spellchecker for example. I meant exactly what I wrote, you don't practice what your don't do, and that's fine if you don't want to practice proofreading for example. I might recommend doing a rough proofread looking for the things the AI spotted last time before giving me texts to the AI, but you do you.
The problem with ai books is this! They push other books out of the market. Good luck readers finding your book in the deluge of ai books. Screws us writers….
1. How do AI books “push” other books out of the market? 2. The point of the video was to encourage writers to find out why they are writing and lean into it. He suggests writing a book that only you could write, rendering the formulaic AI competition useless. You should be playing in your own market
@@Sisanf I believe they are referring to places like Amazon, where most books are sold. It's already difficult enough for self-published human-authored books to come to the top of algorithm and be displayed in searches. Now dilute all of those keywords by a factor of 10 or 100 and it's even more of a problem. The AI-authored books aren't any good (except the mass market romances because who can tell the difference anyway), so they won't stay in the algorithm long-but then neither will your amazing human-authored book. It's a problem of visibility; when my room is cluttered with junk, I can't find what I'm looking for.
AI writing is ridiculous. Not because of quality - it will get better. Or ethics - it's a rip off but the corporations have done it and got away with it. And not because non-writers think they can make money with it - very few writers make much money, and if there is cash to be extracted from publishing via AI, you can bet Open AI is going to pocket that cash, not its "users." It's ridiculous for how it misses the point, the primary appeal of what we think of as long-form* writing: it's one human communicating to other humans. Not using a computer to communicate for you. (*AI will probably dominate copy writing and news digests) Many have used the metaphor that it's like ordering a meal and calling yourself the chef because you specified "hold the lettuce." I think a better metaphor is the marathon runner: Runners do something hard, that takes time. Other people know the work required, and while they may not care about running, at least admire the effort. AI writers are like wannabe non-runners who say it would be more efficient to drive a car along the marathon route. The car is just a tool after all, so who could object? And then they think they've accomplished as much as a real runner, and that other people should appreciate their "effort" (they steered the car!) and the result: they got to the finish line. That's also why I think it will die out. There's not a lot of money for them to siphon. There's no fame. And there won't even be any self-satisfaction. No AI user will be able to continue the delusion they are accomplishing anything as the rest of the world first scoffs at them, and then no longer pays them any attention. And it will come down to readers. Some may buy AI books at first and be satisfied that they were entertained. Most will, as the saying goes, turn away from AI and tell the producer of it "If you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?"
Having AI write a novel, partially or in its entirety, is a panster approach. Maybe even worse because the panster is doing less work. AI is a tool for plotters. Plotters must provide all of the hard work: structure, characters, scene breakdown, and even a full manuscript, like the bronze block for a statue. AI can help refine the statue WITH the author, not replacing the author. The author also needs to know how to prompt engineer and teach AI effectively to achieve improvements, or else AI will produce ineffective responses. Ex. The Story Grid 5 commandments works really well with giving AI structure to evaluate scenes and providing helpful feedback. I’ve been working with ChatGPT for months now, and my story has improved exponentially-uncovering blind spots, improvements to consider, being able to see end-to-end at the macro level, even pinpointing discrepancies at the sentence level. I’m pushing ChatGPT to its limits, but as a readily available assistant for months of late nights, it has been crucial in helping me improve my craft and story coupled with other writing education.
If you can write, the question of AI would never come up. If you find yourself even considering AI, it is a certainty you cannot write. Time to close the lid on your laptop and find another path in life. Instead of being a writer, maybe work the "writing advice" grift on RUclips.
And this is before I watched this video. If you use Ai, you may get some shorties in that sound good, but once you go long-form the Ai will start going off the rails at some point. It takes a lot of work to get Ai to do what you actually want to the point you wonder if it wouldn't just to be easier to manually type/write it. That being said, if you are new to writing you can learn a lot real fast by using Ai to write. So in the end Ai actually will lead to a lot of authors that wouldn't have even been interested in looking at a sentence if it wasn't for Ai, and some of them will even transition to manual writing. So thank Ai I guess. 😅
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I don't think the question is "should you use AI in your writing?" But rather "how should you use AI in your writing?" AI is a tool, just like the internet. It's neither ethical nor unethical. It's how you use it that matters. I understand the fears that authors feel about generative AI, I used to share them. I'm both a software developer and an author, so it's threatening both of my jobs. AI isn't going anywhere, railing against it like a modern day Paul Bunyan won't end any better for authors than it did for Paul. I think it's important to find ways to embrace technology in an ethical and productive way. I've done a lot of research and experimentation in this avenue, and it's made an enormous difference.
Part of the fear that authors feel is because they imagine that entire novels are being created by AI, this simply isn't the case... at least for any successful books. There are low-content books that are flooding the market with 100% AI written trash, and yes, they are trash. AI is inaccurate, it's not creative, it is not going to create a book that anyone actually wants to read. So why use it? Because it is absolutely amazing at brainstorming. I used to be a pantser for several decades because plotting took so long and it seemed to suck the magic out of my story. Now, with my brainstorming buddy, I'm able to plan my novel in a couple of weeks, instead of months or years. Writers block? I haven't had more than a few minutes worth since I embraced this technology. I simply bounce ideas off of my AI assistant, usually I hate most if not all of the suggestions, but it gets my creative juices flowing again, and I'm able to come up with my own solution.
I don't think that we'll ever see people lining up around the block for AI written books like we do for J.K. Rowling's next Harry Potter novel for instance. People attach to authors, not words.
(Skipping the ethical and copyright issues of using AI generated text.) As an editor, I hate it when clients use AI to generate text. It takes more work to fix than if it were a badly written human draft. Why? Because AI is writing words that sound good (sometimes debatable) but lack a deeper underlying content. Fixing AI text often involves a complete rewrite. There are ways to improve the output (like telling it to focus on creative verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs), but no matter how good it gets, it still lacks a certain underlying significance that comes from an insightful human writer.
As a writer, there are some use cases where I've found AI a huge timesaver. Converting dictation to text and converting that text to a properly formatted scene, brainstorming, outlining, summarizing, scanning 50k words of book notes and comparing it to the book's outline to see which I forgot to incorporate, these are all things that AI can do so much faster than a human can. Given full notes/book context, it can also help solve convoluted technical problems like meshing multiple POVs into the right order in the overall outline. It can also function as an amateur developmental editor for quick and dirty analysis of your book/scene/outline, if you ask the right questions and provide enough context.
I think the key is what you said: Don't let AI tell your story. Instead, use it to quickly get through those repetitive and uninspired tasks you'd otherwise waste your creative energy on. If you do use it, it's crucial to understand its limitations and how to properly and ethically use it.
It sounds like the authors you're dealing with are relying too heavily on AI. AI should be a tool to help the writer, not replace the writer. I write with AI, but almost nothing the AI writes ends up in my final draft. No one would ever buy the book, as you said, AI writing is trash. That doesn't make it useless, it just means that having it write your novel for you is a bad idea.
@@BruceWayne15325 For sure, my statement contains visibility bias. I can only identify AI-generated text if people tell me they used AI or if I can tell it's AI text based on textual features. If writers used AI but did it in a way that either produced actual human-like text, or they rewrote it afterward, then I wouldn't know they used AI, and I'd assume it's human text. So, yes, I'm referring more to the "default" AI-generated text ending up in the final product. The farther you get from that default the harder it is to know it's AI-generated. I think our appreciation for art also follows the same curve. Fully AI-generated, we don't consider it art. But when the artist plans out their composition using Midjourney, but then paints it by hand, most would still consider that art.
@@aaronhunyady I agree completely, and it's frustrating to see so many RUclipsr's pushing the "get rich quick" schemes. I laugh when I see those videos. If they only knew how poor authors really were lol. They'd be more successful starting a bad garage band.
In the interest of fairness, I should amend my previous statement to say that there's only one editor that is exposed to a fair amount of AI writing from me, the developmental editor. That's simply because of how early that editing happens in the process. I know that some developmental editors will do line level edits, and if you're in that category, then I can certainly see what you mean and I'll confess I'm guilty as charged. I suspect that in the age of AI, we'll end up seeing less line level editing at the developmental editor stage. Perhaps they confine them to just the critical scenes if they do it at all. This could reduce editorial costs as well.
@@BruceWayne15325 I usually don't do developmental editing. I prefer hacking at words, and most of my work is non-fiction/scientific writing.
@@aaronhunyady Yikes that actually scares me. (Not you, your clients). There's a lot of non-authors that have started cranking out low-content books, trying to "get rich quick." They have zero integrity, they don't care about getting things right. They only care about selling (scamming) the public. Hopefully if they are coming to you, they are simply using AI to speed up their writing, rather than letting AI write something they know nothing about.
I read something a while back about a sci-fi magazine that stopped taking submissions temporarily bc they'd been inundated with AI-generated submissions. The publisher said that the way AI "writes" is technically plagiarism, since it draws from whatever human-generated source material it's been trained on.
I feel that story-telling is about a human connecting to other humans from a place of shared human experiences. Readers connect to authors not just bc the author is entertaining, but bc the author says things that resonate with them. An AI cannot have the same history of human experiences.
Using "AI" to "write" is like pissing your pants to stay warm. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. You. Not an LLM.
This is really up to interpretation. But sure, but to be a storyteller, you have to live your story, and then using A.I. to help you lay it out, that is a tool for someone to share their story with the world.
@@AuthenticBranding Nah. Writing is execution. If you can't be bothered to do that, sorry, but you're not a writer.
@SignificantOwl What about a narrative designer? Screenwriter? Their products are the final design, in fact, narrative design doesn't require a script sometimes.
@@SignificantOwl Who are you to dictate what makes someone a writer or not? Mister uh... nobody? Are you Stephen King by any case? Brandon Sanderson? J.R.R. Tolkien? Now, if Tolkien stood up from his grave and told me I'm not a writer, I'd glad accept it. You? Pfft.
@@SignificantOwl This is just an amount of selfishness and snobiness. Jackson from The Nerdy Novelist channel has talked about this before, that AI has helped a lot not only burned out writers, but also neurodivergent ones. Like me, who has Autism and ADHD. Are you saying I don't deserve to be a writer just because I'm not doing what YOU assume to be real writing? My brain doesn't work the same way, and I found a way to make it work. Before I couldn't barely keep up with my studies and writing one book was impossible, now having ideas to brainstorm, generating structures and focusing on individual scenes helped me achieve 50k words in less than a month. I even stopped relying on Ritalin as much as before. So here's the thing: AI is here to stay. Don't like it, stop breathing.
I've experimented with this, not to have my book written by an AI but more like a curious scholar. I've let Microsoft Bing write parts of one of my novella. I took already written chapter and copy pasted half of it to the AI, then asked them to write the rest of the chapter following my style and structure. Then I compared my second half of the chapter with AI's version. I've repeated this experiment multiple times with multiple texts. What I've discovered is that an AI is perfectly capable of writing impeccable structure and even come up with amazing complications, twists and so on, it is even capable of using metaphors, similes and allegories correctly and efficiently. HOWEVER I also discovered that texts written by an AI, in my experience anyway, always lack certain depth. Texts just don't seem lively enough, they don't feel like they're coming from someone who knows what they're talking about. In my opinion, this is due to the lack of actual real-life experiences as well as experience and knowledge of what it really feels like to use human senses and feel human emotions. In other words, writing is all about conveying and manipulating emotion, about eliciting emotion, and this is why writers are always advised to write about what they know and what they've experienced themselves. An AI does not have that luxury, and they will never be able to fully grasp what it feels like to have a human condition. For this reason, I do not believe human writers will ever truly be replaced by an AI. In my opinion, using an AI to write YOUR story is useless, at the very least.
Love the BJJ metaphor (I'm a brown belt too, out of 10PATX in Austin, TX).
Fully agree on focusing on writing the book only you can write using experiences only you have had.
Great reminder, man. Keep it up 🤘
I needed this video!
I read somewhere, “If you don’t invest time writing your book, why should anyone waste their time reading it?”
For me, the answer is clear. As AI is now, they can't, specially if your language is not English (ChatGPT is awful at writing a language with many flavors, such as Spanish).
Furthermore, not only does not the AI know how to write (mastering the language), it knows little about getting out of the clichés. Remember, AIs work to find the most probable outcome. It's difficult for an AI to come with a really novel idea. It might seem wild, but if you analyze it and take the disguise out of it, it's conveying a very common idea with a predictable perspective on that issue (or problem).
All that said, AIs make a great writing partner. You pointed it out in the intro: they're a good tool to help you in research, even for brainstorming. Use AIs as you use calculators, as a tool that can make your job easier. But you must know what you want (master the skills so you can evaluate) to fully take the best AIs (or any other tool) have to offer.
The more I find out about writing the more I realise. At the core, its hard to get Ai to write a stroy the way you want. Its like when you try to write descriptions, hoping the reader sees what exactly you see-a wasted ambition. You have much less control over your story than most writers would like.
I agree on a scene level. On a broader level, I recently did an experiment where I uploaded my entire book notes to an AI model as contextual information, then I had it develop outlines for some parts I was having trouble developing. After giving it the full context, there were times when I felt it was reading my mind, knowing exactly what I wanted. There were also times when it wanted to take the story in completely the wrong direction. Though to be fair, my notes contained a lot of old ideas that I knew were no longer applicable, but which it didn't know were outdated.
The line for me is on either side of the editing process. I would never want AI to actually write my book, but how much it can help with editing is the question.
Thank so much for sending the Story Grid book!!!
Some of these comments here imply that they havent watched the whole video. He says that writing a book yourself is a best method since its not about churning out work but leaving a legacy and creating art, something AI can't do.
He also says that all AI does is regurgitate what its learned and has no ability to create. Hes siding WITH creators, not against them.
I'm not a writer and I'm not an illustrator, but I have a story to tell and a topic to teach.
AI tools are making that possible for me.
They are opening up a world of possibility that until recently I could only dream about.
I'm looking at creating a mixture of my real life (not about me, but a hobby of sorts) experience and a hidden cartoon world I interact with to teach a topic and without money, would likely never even be able to consider doing while working a completely different full time job.
I'm excited for the future thanks to the possibilities these tools bring where without them, I'd likely only end up working my job until I die, leaving no real lasting impact on the world.
Just my perspective.
Too good! Definitely a great writer!
I love using Chat GPT to help me get through some tough spots. I'm stuck on an idea and this really helps give me ideas on the current situation. You still have to use your noodle and you still get the AHA moments having to figure things out, this just sort of helps nudge you in the correct direction. Also, it can't write as well as us humans yet, its still a bit mechanical. I can take something it tells me, then rewrite it in my words and it will sound so much better...at least to me. Situational descripting with dialogue is also still more in our favor as well. But, when I did ask it to write some dialogue in using the stylings of Steven King, it was able to give some pretty decent dialogue. For me its a tool to aid, not to write.
I don't consider myself a professional writer, so I take my opinion with that in mind. I wouldn't use AI to write a story, but I would use it to flesh out a character. I've used generative AI to quickly generate different scenes of how a character might react in different situations. Then, once I have an idea of who my character is, I know which direction to take my stories.
I really like your take on it! I definitely feel the same way.
It works. You just have to have a hyper specific outline and micromanage the ai. Turn it into a word picker and nothing more.
My light novel 'My Moon-Worshipping Wife and I Are Being Hunted By The Sun God's Zealot' turned out really good.
Ai is a great tool for helping you organize thoughts or to see if your description is as vivid as you wrote it or if others can understand your writing. It's like having a second person helping you see your work objectively. I love it for that, but it's not good for writing. Ai can write, but it can't take your vision and create it the way you want perfectly. At least, not yet. Who knows where it will take us. It's being normalized now
AI can be a great tool to help you write a book but the human mind is more imaginative
Isn't "the point" of writing whatever we say it is?
Thank you. I needed this. Like you said, this time is an opportunity to write authentically. Otherwise, what’s the point?
One of my weaknesses is finding unique character voices. I sometimes use AI to help. I describe the character’s traits and ask it to write some random dialogue for that character. I don’t use the exact material it generates, but it can help give me an idea of what they might sound like, or at least start me in the right direction
Can we get more content on the two factor problem. Like how a bunch of movies have gone through the process?
Would also be good to get some examples of the society genre.....that one seems to get forgotten about.
My brother uses Romo AI to write ebooks and upload rhose ebooks as it is on amazon. He is making around 1200 dollrs per month. So i think it dependa on the AI tool that what kind of AI tool someone is using
I guess you could still get a few idea/brainstorm/research with ai. No need to let it do all the work, especially not the parts that matter to you to have done by yourself.
When KDP launched, there were already multiple successful self-publishing platforms. I'm not sure it's fair to credit Amazon with a gold rush on self-publishing that was already ongoing at the time.
Use the best tools possible to become the best artist possible or be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?
-Pablo Picasso
I'm not sure when he said that, but it's interesting that 50 years after he died, painting is still going strong, and I'd say possibly more popular than before - though most paintings are now made on computers. But it's a different model. You don't need to be rich or have a wealthy patron, or be extraordinarily talented to begin to paint professionally. You need a computer or tablet, and time.
I hope there's no harm in using AI to review a written story by you?
Be aware there could be issues in terms of privacy. Posting your text on the internet opens it up to theft. If it's an early draft, that might not be much of a problem. If it's close to publication, that could be more of a problem. Not all AI companies have the same privacy policies and code of ethics, or the same regulatory requirements. Some will use the content you upload to train their future models, meaning your text could potentially be spit out elsewhere or stolen. Even the best companies note that your content will not be private if content flags are triggered (does a character getting brutally murdered trigger this flag?). OpenAI has a track record of violating privacy, while Anthropic seems to do better and is much more transparent, but I haven't done an industry-wide comparison. If you're just a starting writer desperate for all the feedback you can get, then this potential privacy aspect is probably outweighed by the benefits.
AI can be good for getting out of that blank page, but in my experience AI can't really keep things consistent for long. when i tested it, it often gave me terrible suggestions. after 3 terrible suggestions i usually knew what i wanted and wrote it myself. at this point in time, it's more of a terrible co writer you say "no" to all the time. The AI suggestions you end up using vanishes 90% of the time in editing in my own experience. It's often easier to just write it yourself.
Great take. AI is a misnomer at this point. The day it can actually write a piece of art, we may as well kill ourselves--because Skynet will be doing it shortly. In the meantime, it just seems like we are losing wisdom as a people... How many times have you heard the saying, "It's not about the destination but the journey." That's life. If you want a possibly-profitable-but-lacking-in-meaning life, then take shortcuts on everything you can. If you want to experience what it means to be human, then struggle, fail, and try again.
Can AI write your book for you? Can your publishing house? Can your alpha readers? Can your beta readers? Yes, they can all do it. You don't have to put any work in. I didn't even write this comment, or did I? You'll never know, or care.
Anything you offload to the AI you cheat yourself out of practicing, and hopefully enjoying.
If you hatte writing so much, why be a writer? It sucks to struggle, but the only way you're going to get better is by actually doing the thing.
You can learn something from it. Personally I put in my best effort when I write, and when I'm done I have an AI critique it and point out flaws. It's like a proofreader, and if used right, it can give tons of hints. If you just do your best and then don't reflect on it, you don't improve very quickly. AI gives you feedback (some accurate, some not) that forces you to think about your writing from a different perspective. It can also point out when you're using repetitive sentence structure, filter words, if your dialogue is off... Then you learn those patterns and improve faster.
@@exurkyzed8823 that's a good use for it, but now that you know what to look for, do you think you would improve faster if you did the proofreading yourself? It's fine if you don't want to practice proofreading, everyone uses a spellchecker for example. I meant exactly what I wrote, you don't practice what your don't do, and that's fine if you don't want to practice proofreading for example. I might recommend doing a rough proofread looking for the things the AI spotted last time before giving me texts to the AI, but you do you.
The problem with ai books is this! They push other books out of the market. Good luck readers finding your book in the deluge of ai books. Screws us writers….
1. How do AI books “push” other books out of the market?
2. The point of the video was to encourage writers to find out why they are writing and lean into it. He suggests writing a book that only you could write, rendering the formulaic AI competition useless. You should be playing in your own market
@@Sisanf I believe they are referring to places like Amazon, where most books are sold. It's already difficult enough for self-published human-authored books to come to the top of algorithm and be displayed in searches. Now dilute all of those keywords by a factor of 10 or 100 and it's even more of a problem. The AI-authored books aren't any good (except the mass market romances because who can tell the difference anyway), so they won't stay in the algorithm long-but then neither will your amazing human-authored book. It's a problem of visibility; when my room is cluttered with junk, I can't find what I'm looking for.
AI writing is ridiculous.
Not because of quality - it will get better.
Or ethics - it's a rip off but the corporations have done it and got away with it.
And not because non-writers think they can make money with it - very few writers make much money, and if there is cash to be extracted from publishing via AI, you can bet Open AI is going to pocket that cash, not its "users."
It's ridiculous for how it misses the point, the primary appeal of what we think of as long-form* writing: it's one human communicating to other humans. Not using a computer to communicate for you. (*AI will probably dominate copy writing and news digests)
Many have used the metaphor that it's like ordering a meal and calling yourself the chef because you specified "hold the lettuce."
I think a better metaphor is the marathon runner: Runners do something hard, that takes time. Other people know the work required, and while they may not care about running, at least admire the effort. AI writers are like wannabe non-runners who say it would be more efficient to drive a car along the marathon route. The car is just a tool after all, so who could object? And then they think they've accomplished as much as a real runner, and that other people should appreciate their "effort" (they steered the car!) and the result: they got to the finish line.
That's also why I think it will die out. There's not a lot of money for them to siphon. There's no fame. And there won't even be any self-satisfaction. No AI user will be able to continue the delusion they are accomplishing anything as the rest of the world first scoffs at them, and then no longer pays them any attention.
And it will come down to readers. Some may buy AI books at first and be satisfied that they were entertained. Most will, as the saying goes, turn away from AI and tell the producer of it "If you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?"
Using AI is just for lazy people who think they are artists or writers by using it... I have absolute zero respect for those people
Having AI write a novel, partially or in its entirety, is a panster approach. Maybe even worse because the panster is doing less work. AI is a tool for plotters.
Plotters must provide all of the hard work: structure, characters, scene breakdown, and even a full manuscript, like the bronze block for a statue. AI can help refine the statue WITH the author, not replacing the author. The author also needs to know how to prompt engineer and teach AI effectively to achieve improvements, or else AI will produce ineffective responses. Ex. The Story Grid 5 commandments works really well with giving AI structure to evaluate scenes and providing helpful feedback. I’ve been working with ChatGPT for months now, and my story has improved exponentially-uncovering blind spots, improvements to consider, being able to see end-to-end at the macro level, even pinpointing discrepancies at the sentence level. I’m pushing ChatGPT to its limits, but as a readily available assistant for months of late nights, it has been crucial in helping me improve my craft and story coupled with other writing education.
If you can write, the question of AI would never come up. If you find yourself even considering AI, it is a certainty you cannot write. Time to close the lid on your laptop and find another path in life. Instead of being a writer, maybe work the "writing advice" grift on RUclips.
Why are you so nice to those other RUclipsrs that write books with ai? And take credit for it all.
not the book i would want to write unless have full jailbreak to remove all big tech bias programmed in!
The answer is no.
And this is before I watched this video.
If you use Ai, you may get some shorties in that sound good, but once you go long-form the Ai will start going off the rails at some point. It takes a lot of work to get Ai to do what you actually want to the point you wonder if it wouldn't just to be easier to manually type/write it.
That being said, if you are new to writing you can learn a lot real fast by using Ai to write.
So in the end Ai actually will lead to a lot of authors that wouldn't have even been interested in looking at a sentence if it wasn't for Ai, and some of them will even transition to manual writing. So thank Ai I guess. 😅