Eclectic_Asininity
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Recently, I've dabbled in ChatGPT as a writing tool, and I do believe that it has some great uses for a writer. My opinions have changed after using it for a while, so I thought I would create a little pros and cons list. We'll start with pros.
And I'm sure there are many more positive uses; however, I'm not going to go over the ones that you SHOULDN'T use when writing.
And last but not least:
Censorship: This one deserves its own category altogether. Thanks to everything being a social or political issue, the people who run these AIs tend to lobotomize them so that they are incapable of writing anything explicit. You can work around most of these, and it is possible to generate gore and stuff, but you will never bypass the NSFW filter, so if you write smut, don't even consider using these AIs. I had a funny thing happen where I wrote about some character calling another character a "bitch," and the AI decided to make the character have an internal monologue about why he shouldn't call the other character a "derogatory and sexist" word.
Thanks for coming to my scribbletalk.
- Inspiration: Sometimes you have a really hard time figuring out what you should do for a story or hit the beloathed "writer's block." Sometimes, when I'm not sure how to progress, I can ask the AI to "give me ideas for blank" or "write a scene for blank." Sometimes all you need is that little bit of foundation to start writing again, and wouldn't you know it, the end product doesn't even resemble whatever the AI outputted. You can get inspiration from anywhere, so why not get it from a machine?
- Calculation: size, weight, volume, distances, structural integrity—this is truly where the AI shines. No more will you have to scour Google for hours just to find the proper measurements of something just to satisfy your monkey brain. (No? Just me? Okay :("
- Description: This might also be a personal thing, but I absolutely suck at describing buildings. I can give you a full-on essay on goblin architecture, but ask me to describe an office building, and I'll blank out on you. But now you have a nifty little tool where you can just say, "Describe what blank looks like." Hell, you can fiddle around with it and even ask it to describe the place from a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective; you can even make it describe the place as if it were a person who has no idea what they are looking at! A true saving grace for somebody who has fully disassociated with real life
- Names: Need I say more?
And I'm sure there are many more positive uses; however, I'm not going to go over the ones that you SHOULDN'T use when writing.
- Dialogue: Unless you want your characters to sound robotic and sterile, never use the AI to generate anything character-related. TRUST ME, I have experimented a lot with this, and the only time I got anything nearly decent was when I described pretty much the entire novel and gave an in-depth description of the characters to the AI, and even at that, it still produced something mediocre.
- Scenes: I have mentioned before that you can generate a "scene" using the AI for inspiration. HOWEVER, DO NOT USE THESE. You can take them and edit them, but don't just paste the AI-generated scenes into your novel; they suck. The AIs have the same level of creative flourish as a Chinese instruction manual. Never underestimate your ability to tell a better scene using the same concept.
- Editing: You are better off using something like Quillbot unless you want the personality of your work sucked out. The AI has no concept of style; it will take any stylizations of yours and consider them flaws. Plus, you won't get better as a writer if you never edit your own stuff.
And last but not least:
Censorship: This one deserves its own category altogether. Thanks to everything being a social or political issue, the people who run these AIs tend to lobotomize them so that they are incapable of writing anything explicit. You can work around most of these, and it is possible to generate gore and stuff, but you will never bypass the NSFW filter, so if you write smut, don't even consider using these AIs. I had a funny thing happen where I wrote about some character calling another character a "bitch," and the AI decided to make the character have an internal monologue about why he shouldn't call the other character a "derogatory and sexist" word.
Thanks for coming to my scribbletalk.