Writing with Robots
While this post is mostly going to be talking about my experiments with AI, I did want to give everybody a quick update on where I am at with publishing this year. Although my timelines are a little bit further out than I originally anticipated, I am still on track to get some books released this year, so there'll be more information coming out about that shortly.
Earlier in the year, I talked about how I was planning on using and experimenting with AI tools. Here is my update on how it's gone. I've been experimenting with text generation models, and while it has been fun, I don't see them taking over content creation for me at this time. That said, I think there is a lot of potential for creating stories with these tools, and I think there are many ways for writers to use them.
I tried both Novel AI and ChatGPT for trying to speed up writing new content. Both platforms did an ok job and would speed up my workflow. In the case of ChatGPT, it struggled to create content that wasn't G-rated and lacked some of the memory needed for writing anything past a short story. Novel AI, on the other hand, has tools that are built for creating long-form fiction.
NovelAI did ok and could speed up my workflow significantly, but the AI needs a lot of hand-holding, and I felt like I was moving away from creating a story and moving over to directing one. Picture having an assistant who can write but has no clue what you want them to write about. Now you're standing over their shoulder trying to guide them along by giving them tidbits of information. Sometimes you write a bit of a section for them and then ask them to keep that text going. Then you ask them to do it again… and again… and again. This is what writing with an AI is like.
Even though that might sound time-consuming, it actually moves pretty quickly. It just wasn't something that worked for me. And none of the content I created while testing NovelAI or ChatGPT will be seeing the light of day.
I could see platforms like NovelAI being fun for anyone who wants to create a story in conjunction with the AI. Almost like a writing companion or a digital DM. In fairness to NovelAI, that is what this tool is really geared for - people creating a story for themselves alongside the AI, not producing finished work that they are planning on publishing.
What does seem to be working for me, however, is dictation. I've wanted to dictate stories for years but haven't because dictation software hasn't been very effective, in my opinion. That was before Whisper.
I have been using Whisper to write pretty much everything from chapters to work emails. Whisper is from OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) and is pretty remarkable. I can feed in files, and it does a near-perfect job of transcription, including all of the punctuation. When I'm done dictating a section, I run the block of text through GPT-3.5 to clean up the formatting, as Whisper doesn't break up paragraphs.
For me, the big win is that I can write the first draft of a chapter much faster, and that first draft doesn't require nearly as much cleanup. That's not to say that there isn't a learning curve. It's been a bit of a switch from my mind moving from written storytelling to oral storytelling, and I'll be curious to see how this impacts my writing style over time.
As I experiment more with different tools, I will blog more about it. I am also considering turning this into a series about using AI, where I can talk about how I see AI impacting writers and giving some advice. But right now, I'm on the fence about that. For one, AI is changing very quickly, and most posts I write would be instantly out of date. But the second point is that I want my site to be more focused on my stories and not around giving advice to people in the publishing industry.
Regardless of what I do, I hope you enjoy whatever I create.