The pros and cons of ChatGPT and other AI writing tools.

[Eclectic_Asininity]

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.

1. 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?
2. 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 :("
3. 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
4. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

 

[K5Rakitan]

Very good to know.

 

[Paul_Tromba]

Thank you for this information. I just don't want to be lazy and have something else write for me. If I did, then it wouldn't be my story so I'mma stick to doing it myself.

 

[TMBTL]

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.

1. 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?
2. 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 :("
3. 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
4. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Have you used novel AI. I researched a little about it before and found out that Its costliest version basically is the answer to all the cons here. Of course it isn't perfect.

 

[KrakenRiderEmma]

The stories in my sig are all written using NovelAI, which has very different pros and cons than the ChatGPT list above. (That list is basically why I don’t use ChatGPT or Sudowrite, which is an uncensored ChatGPT but still has the generic-ness problem.)

NovelAI is much less generic, as it’s fine-tuned on various kinds of literature (a lot of it public domain, but likely not all). With the right modules and settings it produces some fairly wild stuff and can pick up the personality of characters based on existing dialogue. I’ve been pretty surprised that it picks up on whether a character is bubbly, tsundere, grouchy etc without being told (you can also give it those notes, but YMMV). Like sudowrite, NovelAI has no NSFW filter. All the stories below are smut, for instance. ( Hot tip: you can mess with lots of AI writing tools without filters by using the “Compare” feature on nat.dev )

The drawback that comes with that is how NovelAI models tend to want to spin off and do their own thing instead of following instructions like ChatGPT; they get lost and off-track more easily. So what works better is to write back and forth like a ping-pong match, where you write some and then let the AI write some. At moments that can be the human writing one sentence and letting the AI do some paragraphs, at other times the reverse — depends on how specifically you know what comes next, often, and how weird or unpredictable that idea is. The fourth story, below, is proving particularly hard for the AI to figure out.

Then a human has to edit to catch any weird inconsistencies and add in polish, as much or as little as you want. But that’s a very different process than rough drafting, which can be massively faster with AI assistance. I don’t recommend letting any AI do everything for you unless you want something generic, however!

 

[georgelee5786]

I see.

 

[Eclectic_Asininity]

The stories in my sig are all written using NovelAI, which has very different pros and cons than the ChatGPT list above. (That list is basically why I don’t use ChatGPT or Sudowrite, which is an uncensored ChatGPT but still has the generic-ness problem.)

NovelAI is much less generic, as it’s fine-tuned on various kinds of literature (a lot of it public domain, but likely not all). With the right modules and settings it produces some fairly wild stuff and can pick up the personality of characters based on existing dialogue. I’ve been pretty surprised that it picks up on whether a character is bubbly, tsundere, grouchy etc without being told (you can also give it those notes, but YMMV). Like sudowrite, NovelAI has no NSFW filter. All the stories below are smut, for instance. ( Hot tip: you can mess with lots of AI writing tools without filters by using the “Compare” feature on nat.dev )

The drawback that comes with that is how NovelAI models tend to want to spin off and do their own thing instead of following instructions like ChatGPT; they get lost and off-track more easily. So what works better is to write back and forth like a ping-pong match, where you write some and then let the AI write some. At moments that can be the human writing one sentence and letting the AI do some paragraphs, at other times the reverse — depends on how specifically you know what comes next, often, and how weird or unpredictable that idea is. The fourth story, below, is proving particularly hard for the AI to figure out.

Then a human has to edit to catch any weird inconsistencies and add in polish, as much or as little as you want. But that’s a very different process than rough drafting, which can be massively faster with AI assistance. I don’t recommend letting any AI do everything for you unless you want something generic, however!

I just don't like the idea of the AI writing any of my story by itself, it makes me feel as if it doesn't "completely" belong to me.

 

[CalypsoNymph]

There's something else to know about AI generated stories. This isn't based on personal usage; I actually know something about how they work, and, in summary, they can't do anything that is truly original. For more details...

Hi! Welcome to AI Basics with CalypsoNymph. What we call 'AI writing' is really just advanced pattern matching. It basically works by going, 'what is the most likely next word in this sentence, given all the data I have in my massive library of books?' on repeat. This is why AI works are, typically, fairly neutral; if you want something more stylized... as in, something actually worth publishing... you would need to train it fairly extensively first. And even then, AI has no concept of 'starting' or 'ending'. It can learn that things start and end, yes, but it can't learn the broader narrative rules and flows. An example is an old basic music AI that was trained on soundbites from classical music. Sometimes the produced examples would just end without any actual proper ending, because all the AI knew was that 'sometimes, classical music ends'.

So, all that in mind, there are a few things to keep in mind when using AI to help write:

• AI can't make anything truly unique. It uses pattern recognition to figure out word order; you need to make something yourself, based on your life, in order to make something fully new.
• AI can't understand narrative arcs. It understands things start and end, and sometimes the mood is light and sometimes tense, but it has no understanding of why or when those apply.
  • This is actually a limit more on computational power -- it gets exponentially harder to analyze each new word. To understand full arcs, you need to analyze entire books at a time, instead of feeding the AI sentences.
• AI is generic. It needs to be trained carefully if you want any style, or any unique voice; otherwise expect everything to be filled with the most generic word choice.

AI is effectively sentence-based word pattern recognition with some randomness thrown in so you don't realize it. It can be a great tool, but it is a tool. It's like throwing dive to figure out your plot. Can it work? Yes! Does it create anything new or anything that doesn't need to be heavily edited? No. Not it does not.

I hope that this is helpful!

 

[Eclectic_Asininity]

There's something else to know about AI generated stories. This isn't based on personal usage; I actually know something about how they work, and, in summary, they can't do anything that is truly original. For more details...

Hi! Welcome to AI Basics with CalypsoNymph. What we call 'AI writing' is really just advanced pattern matching. It basically works by going, 'what is the most likely next word in this sentence, given all the data I have in my massive library of books?' on repeat. This is why AI works are, typically, fairly neutral; if you want something more stylized... as in, something actually worth publishing... you would need to train it fairly extensively first. And even then, AI has no concept of 'starting' or 'ending'. It can learn that things start and end, yes, but it can't learn the broader narrative rules and flows. An example is an old basic music AI that was trained on soundbites from classical music. Sometimes the produced examples would just end without any actual proper ending, because all the AI knew was that 'sometimes, classical music ends'.

So, all that in mind, there are a few things to keep in mind when using AI to help write:

• AI can't make anything truly unique. It uses pattern recognition to figure out word order; you need to make something yourself, based on your life, in order to make something fully new.
• AI can't understand narrative arcs. It understands things start and end, and sometimes the mood is light and sometimes tense, but it has no understanding of why or whenthose apply.
  • This is actually a limit more on computational power -- it gets exponentially harder to analyze each new word. To understand full arcs, you need to analyze entire books at a time, instead of feeding the AI sentences.
• AI is generic. It needs to be trained carefully if you want any style, or any unique voice; otherwise expect everything to be filled with the most generic word choice.

AI is effectively sentence-based word pattern recognition with some randomness thrown in so you don't realize it. It can be a great tool, but it is a tool. It's like throwing dive to figure out your plot. Can it work? Yes! Does it create anything new or anything that doesn't need to be heavily edited? No. Not it does not.

I hope that this is helpful!

I don't even like using the word, I've just gotten into too many arguments trying to explain the difference between AI and neural networks that I gave up a while ago.

 

[KrakenRiderEmma]

I just don't like the idea of the AI writing any of my story by itself, it makes me feel as if it doesn't "completely" belong to me.

Definitely true -- I don't feel like these stories are 100% authored by me. I also don't consider Krake to be an "author" in the same way that a human can be, but it's a little bit as if I was letting weather patterns decide what happens next in a story, or tarot cards. Or dice, exactly as CalypsoNymph said. A lot of interpretation and "steering," but not 100% the product of my own mind for sure. That's why this pen name has "Krake" in it, and why the author page describes it as a collaboration.

• AI can't make anything truly unique. It uses pattern recognition to figure out word order; you need to make something yourself, based on your life, in order to make something fully new.

Here's where it gets interesting, however. A number of things in the second story below are based on life experiences (mine, those of two close friends, and of a former roommate's). However, that doesn't mean I wrote all of it -- or even thought to do it. The plot direction and twists that suggested "hey what if this happened" came from the AI, and much as if I happened to draw a tarot card or get a random die roll, I thought "oh shit, I guess we could write it that way, that reminds of something that really happened." And so off we went, with me steering things towards "reality" and Krake driving the process along as well, sometimes having to be reined back in.

It's a lot like riding a horse vs. walking, in my experience -- you are not 100% in control of where you go, and the human has to figure out the destination, but it's faster and you can let the "horse" roam. Or to go back to the tarot deck metaphor, it's as if the tarot deck were composed of a large percentage of existing human writing, shuffled into tiny fragments and then floating up towards the top of the deck based on fine-tuned training.

This doesn't contradict anything CalypsoNymph pointed out, I don't think -- the points about starting/ending and training to avoid generic-ness are exactly right. For the second story below, it started out about 50/50 written, but by the end, because the plot had to come together in a coherent way, I was writing more like 75-80% of the words to get things right. In the case of all of the stories below, the unique quality is "cybernetic" and wouldn't exist without both human and machine parts. (You could say the same about a photograph and a human + camera, but the AI has a much more complex process and a bizarrely different "source" than light.)

If anyone wants to use AIs for starting and endings, it's possible to use tools like ChatGPT or Bing to "brainstorm" plot directions and such, as Eclectic_Asininity suggested. But it's worth knowing that the suggestions made are a little different than "continuations" and are drawing on training material like articles about plot ideas for genre fiction etc. So they're often ideas that are paraphrased from other authors' writing tips! This might be just fine, kind of like reading an actual to get an idea and having a friend "apply" the idea to your own story in a conversation, but it's also not going to give you anything wildly new. If you're someone who tends to feel that all good fiction operates on similar structures and tropes, then this might be totally acceptable to you.

 

[lambenttyto]

If you use AI, you're not an artist, or a writer, and you're certainly not creating art. But hey, if the cookie-cutter off-the-assembly-line style story as "corporate product" is your thing, then go for it!

What most writers don't understand is that what makes writing an art is the voice of the person putting words to paper. A machine voice is not art, and a machine voice emulating your voice (not sure these AIs can even do that, but they probably can) still isn't art.

My initial reaction to AI was that it would be the death of art. But I changed my mind. AI will inevitably rule the field with reams of mechanical dross that low-brow readers may find enjoyment from, but inevitably it will create a niche of true artists and fanatical patrons who want something real.

As an example, imagine the Mona Lisa. People have wondered over that painting for hundreds of years, her gaze, her tiny little smile, the dreariness of the background atmosphere, did da Vinci know this woman, was she his mistress or his daughter, who knows!

Now imagine if the Mona Lisa had been painted by an AI. Literally no meaning whatsoever behind anything. The painting would be nothing but a depiction generated by 1s and 0s without anything behind it, the "art" of the art would be dead on arrival and there would be no point whatsoever behind wondering about rhyme or reason other than the fact that the "AI" used algorithms from a million other paintings to imitate, copy and generate something completely meaningless.

Certainly a passerby of this machine-generated piece of "art" might look at it for a moment and nod and say, "that's pretty"--and that's it. That's the only worth or value the piece will contain.

Art is an expression of the individual, a tiny depiction into the person's conscious soul, and AI just murdered that.

If you consider the philosophical connotations behind the meaning, or lack thereof, of AI generated "art," you come to realize ugly it really is.

This little mini rant is not a rant against OP, but rather my personal thoughts. I didn't even read his post, lol.

 

[UnknownSaint171]

I tried using it but honestly, it's not as good as I heard. I'm starting to think the claims are very exaggerated even. I've tried getting a genuine answer but it just leads me to google lol.

I've had a better experience on NovelAi but you have to pay $ for it!

Anyways, thanks for the post I suppose, it does help using ChatGPT a lot more efficiently as a tool.

EDIT: Now I'm testing it again. It's not bad to generate inspiration however that consumes too much time. I wouldn't use it for serious writing.

 

[bulmabriefs144]

I think it's okay to use AI for cover art, but it's too tempting to get ChatGPT to try to write it for you. I saw an AI-written war poem once, and it was rather lacking. Checked all the boxes for technical writing, totally lacked emotionality.

 

[proxybaba]

sucks on dialogue writing and it gets repetitive the more you use them.
at first, I was so happy to find AI writing, it helped me get into creative writing, but words get repetitive and so does the flow.

So i get things from ChatGpt and edit it again

 

[UnknownSaint171]

sucks on dialogue writing and it gets repetitive the more you use them.
at first, I was so happy to find AI writing, it helped me get into creative writing, but words get repetitive and so does the flow.

So i get things from ChatGpt and edit it again

It depends. But it's also very confusing. Does it gather all the previous prompts and uses them together? Or does it ignore what you have said in the beginning and kicks it off your newer question? Have no idea.

 

[KrakenRiderEmma]

Does it gather all the previous prompts and uses them together? Or does it ignore what you have said in the beginning and kicks it off your newer question? Have no idea.

Depends on the model, from what I understand, and with some models you can adjust how the "gathering" works. ChatGPT is more like using a phone operating system -- you can't really adjust it under the hood or see what it can remember, it just tries to be as "user friendly" as possible at the expense of tweaking. They all have limited "memory." Someone who fine-tunes this stuff told me that ChatGPT can remember some information from the beginning of your whole chat session (first prompt) and does some summarizing of the rest for itself to try and keep track. But the more prompts you enter in a session, the more it forgets -- GPT3.5 remembers around 3000 words, which includes your prompts and its answers. GPT4 remembers twice as much. And there's also a "huge context" version of GPT4, which almost nobody has access to yet, which remembers about eight times -- around 50 pages. That would probably be useful for people writing long stories... but I think it remains to be seen how well GPT4 can "pay attention" to details across that much information.

If ChatGPT is like a phone OS, then models like NovelAI and KoboldAI are more like Windows or Linux, you have to "look under the hood" to get them working the way you want. But you can adjust what they remember -- for instance, always keeping information about your MC's behavior or personality, rules of how magic works, the overall plot direction of your story or scene. It's still a bit bumpy, but the tech is advancing every month in disturbingly fast ways. The more "customizable" tools are not as powerful (yet) as ChatGPT. But ChatGPT is generic and bad at dialogue, and it's hard to get it to remember what you want. I wouldn't recommend it for writing actual material, just for brainstorming.

 

[UnknownSaint171]

From testing these past few days, it does seem like it remembers my previous prompts. It even feels like it's learning from its mistakes or gaps of knowledge. 'We' were able to arrive to a 'conclusion' but it still seem very limited. Useful tool though!

I heard in the beginning ChatGPT was powerful but they had to tone it down because it was getting abused. Now we get slow daily updates.

Depends on the model, from what I understand, and with some models you can adjust how the "gathering" works. ChatGPT is more like using a phone operating system -- you can't really adjust it under the hood or see what it can remember, it just tries to be as "user friendly" as possible at the expense of tweaking. They all have limited "memory." Someone who fine-tunes this stuff told me that ChatGPT can remember some information from the beginning of your whole chat session (first prompt) and does some summarizing of the rest for itself to try and keep track. But the more prompts you enter in a session, the more it forgets -- GPT3.5 remembers around 3000 words, which includes your prompts and its answers. GPT4 remembers twice as much. And there's also a "huge context" version of GPT4, which almost nobody has access to yet, which remembers about eight times -- around 50 pages. That would probably be useful for people writing long stories... but I think it remains to be seen how well GPT4 can "pay attention" to details across that much information.

If ChatGPT is like a phone OS, then models like NovelAI and KoboldAI are more like Windows or Linux, you have to "look under the hood" to get them working the way you want. But you can adjust what they remember -- for instance, always keeping information about your MC's behavior or personality, rules of how magic works, the overall plot direction of your story or scene. It's still a bit bumpy, but the tech is advancing every month in disturbingly fast ways. The more "customizable" tools are not as powerful (yet) as ChatGPT. But ChatGPT is generic and bad at dialogue, and it's hard to get it to remember what you want. I wouldn't recommend it for writing actual material, just for brainstorming.

 

[Aader]

As you stated using ai to fill in the gaps of my story is my main method. Mostly names, I also use it for acronyms

 

[TheEldritchGod]

I futz around with AI and they all seem to be "woke" to some extent. They are all political as far as I'm found. The best way I've found to use it is, write the story, then feed it one paragraph at a time and ask it to rewrite, then make a fusion of the original and the new AI version. The AI Cannot be trusted. Think of it as a free Editor, not as a writing tool. Grammerly does a great job helping with fixing spelling errors, and the AI is great for fixing paragraph structure and pointing out obvious stuff you might miss.

But in the end, if you rely on it for the actual creative process, you will wind up with shit. I got lazy and tried using it for a while. I wound up having to throw out an entire week's worth of work.

 

[Deleted member 122296]

Hello.
My series https://www.scribblehub.com/series/729507/station-breeder-athena/
Is co-authored by ChatGPT using the API. It is written like an RP chat, while I correct some mistakes or adjust or regenerate when I feel it is needed, I feel it is very fun and works well. It does smut X:D
Although as said it is very concerned about CONSENT! GPT enjoys roleplaying as an AI in stories also, and captures their personality great!