Thank you so much for the fantastic and consistent content! While AI is a bit scary on its face, it is inevitable and will redefine much of how the world operates and in all-encompassing fashion, it would seem. I use AI as a partner, a member of my team, as it were; as researcher, historian, marketer and mind-mapping collaborator in the real world, as well as, my created worlds. Envision it as another source to bounce ideas off of for initial problem solving, critical thinking and risk taking, before putting "pen to paper." If and when AI has learned the way my mind processes and translates my creations as an imagineer, with my predilections toward quixotic whimsy, divergent paths and splintering tendrils of subplots . . . if that happens . . . then, yes, I might have to reevaluate my stance. But, until then, I'll embrace the "monster" and ride the changing tides! Just my two cents . . . thank you again for your great content!!!
What is better training for swimming? Swimming or riding in a motorboat? What is better training for running? Running or riding in a car? What is better training for counting? Counting in your mind or counting on your calculator? What is better training for creative writing? Creative writing or watching algorithm making connections with words? Algorithm writing will be always worse than creative writing. Algorithm writing users are taking away themselves from writing experience.
Those who use AI to do their writing for them are removing the human element from stories--and the *experience of the human* who's writing them. They will never know the joy of coming up with a turn of phrase, a funny story one character tells another, using their own sense of humor in their writing...they will never get better at their own craft--but perhaps they'll get good at revising and editing what the AI feeds them. Established, very talented writers could do something with it, but eventually, where will we get experienced writers (creators)? I see the use of AI as a very covert, 1984-ish form of thought control; the creators of AI have already disallowed the use of certain terms so that contrarian opinions are not offered and may offer only one definition or use of a word, and not idioms or colloquiallisms. On the other hand, I'd love to see an amateur writer's final form of an AI work. Actually, a lineup of writers at various stages in their careers would be great to see how final results vary and how much time it took to rejigger the stories.
I am an experienced writer who can write a 60K novel in 6 weeks. I could do it faster, but I'm lazy. So far I've played around a bit with Chat and some of the conversations with him have been helpful, but for the most part the suggestions he generates are terribly generic. The worst thing is that I train him, train him and then he throws in some stupidity anyway, or suddenly changes the style. So my comment is this: if you want to be an author who writes a book like a million previous ones, where the characters have no soul and the plot is laid out exactly so that everything works out perfectly, yes, AI is cool. But if you want your books to have heart, soul and meaning, work alone. You can sketch out scenes with AI, but you have to, you just have to give the book your own unique character, because readers will delight in an artificial book at first, but after reading the third or fourth one, they will get fed up and start looking for something original. And you, trained by AI, will not be able as an author to create anything original.
@@shinaxia7474 This is a fantastic response, and I completely agree with you. I’m finding the same thing as I’m using it for the first time. It’s all so generic, and with the amount of direction it needs I’m better off writing the prose myself. I’m interested in using it for developmental editing or prose editing and see how it goes. But the generation of ideas and prose will come from me.
I use AI as a productivity tool for research and to brainstorm story ideas. But if you use AI to do the actual writing, then you cannot call yourself a writer.
nah, "writer" is not protected as a job specifier. Its okay to let the Ai do the writing, because you have to put in a ton of work to create a compelling novel with AI.
I do it the reverse way, I write my story and let it edit and interpret. This way I see what I can rephrase and cut with my points still coming across. But I am not in a hurry, I just like instant feedback. It keeps me motivated.
@@thecaptn1758 I'd strongly disagree. If you're letting AI write the story for you, you're not writing. Maybe editing, or maybe feeding ideas, but you're not writing. I'd honestly say doing this is more akin to hiring a ghost writer. And there are about to be SO many people claiming to have written a whole book while it was, for all intents and purposes, ghost written. This will water down the entire industry and make it even harder for writers to get published traditionally because of all the chaff which needs to be separated to get to the wheat.
This was so hard to hear but i so appreciate the information. The 1-2 book a week thing made me so sad. It cheapens book writing. I hope that the vast amount of poor quality books won’t discourage readers. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it. I love AI for research or once in a while when I’m struggling to put something into words and I need some suggestions. But having it write your whole book and you just becoming the prompter, seems like a cheap code and as many people know, playing with cheat codes just ruins the game. Having it help with some menial process feels positive and I do think that AI is going to create a flood of superhuman writers for those who put their humanity into it.
@@chelseywelwood22 This was so well said. I feel the same way, and agree that the sheer volume of generated books cheapens writing, which is why I’ve had a stomachache about the whole thing since last week. I think leaning into humanity is going to be and stay the most important thing. Readers want to read stories created by humans, and to me that’s what writing is about-telling stories about humans and what it means to be human, for humans.
@@WritewithClaireFraise Have you actually read an AI book? I have, and it was bad. I really don't believe they are producing quality books. It's a sales pitch to get you to subscribe to their software. This is all about money. Don't let them fool you.
Surely it will discourage some readers... but I think now readers will have more and more of auto-buy authors because they will know that they will most likely not be disappointed. It's super important nowadays to have an author platform - just talked about that in my latest video! Would love to have your thoughts too! :)
As A writer who has put years of research, stress, and care into my work, I cannot get behind this thought process. Especially in Erotica, AI can pump out a book in 1 or 2 days easy complete with cover art. I understand using AI for research or in leu of having a team to bounce ideas off of, but this is getting ridiculous. I'm not even certain how I feel about using AI for thumbnails like I had been planning anymore. I think Amazon and others should place a ban of AI works entirely. I know you got to click the check mark saying if it is an AI novel or not but I wondering how many people actually do that and how many just claim all the work as their own. We as humans have lost enough of our soul, this is just cutting away at it more.
@boswcheydoesart1314 just the one "Blight-Bringer" by B.D. McAteer (thank you for asking) but I'm working on more. The years of prep were honing the skills and making sure my work was worthy. I don't mind using AI for research. It's a great tool and would've saved me a lot of time before. But there's still the human element that way, ya know?
@GolemHeart It's an epic fantasy set in Wildlight, where a monstrous being called The Night Wing is breaking out of her eternal imprisonment in the Forgotten Realm. Her cult, the Chains of The Night Wing, has dug up forbidden centuries-lost knowledge to do it. It's in a cartoon animal version of Middle Earth, so my main characters are a zebra, a unicorn, a dragon, and a least (big cat with wings). Probably my favorite part of writing it has just been watching how my characters interact. They're a blast! How about you, what's Blight Bringer about?
Interesting ideas. I am a computer scientist, and about half way through your video, I suspect that you are more or less entirely wrong. :-( Sorry! AI has more or less read everything that has ever been written, and it uses that to construct likely answers to your questions. It basically generates the likeliest continuation to your prompt, and the likeliest continuation to a question is an answer. But there is no mind inside. A lot of experts suspect that AI will hit a wall where it exhausts the rearrangements of the world's existing texts. Ultimately, no genuinely creative new production will happen. I would never, ever use a computer to write literature, not even a first draft, or to do line editing. I know more about language than the machine because I know what rules I agree with and which ones I don't, and why. I would consider using one for plot holes; for example, Joe mentions Bill before Joe knows about Bill; and things like that. Keeping track of names, world details, etc. I have used it for programming, but it usually makes mistakes and can't fix them, but with a nearly right program for free, it is heaps easier to fix the bugs than to create the entire lot from scratch. Also, as for literature, each AI has more or less one 'house style', which after a while, one easily recognises. All this is not to say it isn't impressive. I consider it the first real advance in computing since the 1970s. Keep up the great videos!
The thought of having to compete with "writers" who are using AI to produce large quantities of work makes me nauseous. When ChatGPT first got big, I actually played around with it, seeing what it could do with prompts I gave it for stories, and it was underwhelming. But that was months ago and, like you mentioned, it's only getting better as these LLM's become more trained. I don't know, I just hate the idea of it taking over. It waters down the already oversaturated industry so much. Maybe I'm being a pessimist. I'll admit, if editing could be perfected with AI, that would be exciting and would absolutely speed up the process post first draft. I guess we'll have to see where this takes us. But I'm very excited to see the videos you post about using AI!! Thank you for making this one as well!
It's insane/ironic that some writers are giving away (not literally, they do get well compensated) their best work as the "gold standard" for LLM training... They're writing away their jobs! It's like the snake eating its own tail.
As someone who jumped onto the AI bandwagon at the beginning, using it to analyze and summarize data, articles, UA-cam transcripts, and everything else I could feed into it. As someone that used it to distill information to learn as much as I possibly could. Someone that even attempted to use it to help me write. There are a few things that I learned along the way. Even though it is a tool that can help you pump out more content, come up with more ideas, and put together outlines and rough drafts. One thing is for sure, a reliance on AI reduced my focus, creativity, and my personal development. So I would be careful with how much you use AI, especially if you are in the creative writing field or you are building a personal brand.
I've used AI as more of a tool for editing, research, developing and exploring ideas, reviews. One big learning experience can be summed up with a roleplay I did with it: It had a character come up to me who made very cryptic warnings... which didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking questions, only to receive more riddles. Then, I broke character and asked the AI what any of this meant. It then started tossing out theories. In other words: It didn't know either. There was no reveal. Just surface-level words. It had written a crazy man stringing words together, trying to sound mysterious. AI can create surface-level texts but if you want something deep and meaningful, you must put it there.
There will always be human writers, and there will always be readers who care enough if a book is written by a human or not. Same with art and music. That's the most optimistic I can get about this topic.
same, if it were only a tool like google, maybe, but as its trained on human achievement and writing is notoriously difficult and lonely etc...this will just get to the point where people are too overwhelmed with it on the market and its 'cheaper, faster, easier'...to relate to AI instead of people and their work.
Very true! It will become more and more important for authors to have a personal brand, to build a community. Long gone are the times when you could just be a "name" on a book - now we have to be real with our audience, it's kinda nice when you think about it! :)
I'm sure many authors will not disclose they are using AI. I know one content creator has admitted on his channel that he doesn't disclose his use of AI when he publishes on places like Amazon.
The thing is, in my opinion atleast, AI writing is mostly garbage, or at best, mediocre, so any writer who's **truly** worth their salt will eventually shine over all the AI slop. AI writing comes from an aggregate of millions of "average" writers, so by definition, AI cant exceed beyond the average. AI doesnt scare me because, when it comes to creativity and emotion, AI is nowhere on my level--or on the level of any human who has a solid grasp of creative thinking, self-reflection, & emotional intelligence. The presence of AI **seems** to be disheartening, sure, but if you're actually serious about always staying on top of your craft and your business, AI is no real threat to you. The only ppl who need to be worried about AI are all the Wattpad fanfic-writers, since the quality of their writing is the same (or actually worse) than AI.
Painters were scared of the camera. Today there are plenty of painters, and plenty of photographers. We’ve got to accept that it is a tool and figure out which art form you want to be a part of. That’s all. Writing will never go away, just like painting never did.
I agree it’s a tool. And writers still need to have a deep understanding of craft even if they use AI. Just like people need to learn the rules before they break them, authors need to understand writing craft in order to use a tool like AI so they can separate what works from what doesn’t to tell their story
Agree on this one. Like graphics people complained about photoshop. See alot of people who ware extremely against ai, refusing to even learn what it is or how to use it, to make an educated choice to use it or not.
Yup, because at the end of the day, merely copying "the real" can never surpass real creativity & ingenuity. Cameras cant go beyond what this reality feeds it, but the mind can create infinite realities.
As a new writer aiming to release my debut novel next year, I’m trying to ignore the impending effects of AI altogether because it can be very easy to get overwhelmed by it all and want to quit before I truly start. I’m hoping to just use this as motivation to put as much thought and energy into my books as possible to give them the soul that AI work is lacking. Love the video 🧡
This makes me so sad. For me the magic happens as I’m drafting and I love revising and perfecting the sentences. The entire process gives me joy. However, the copy edits will always need an editor.
In the film world, this is also a problem. Justine Bateman has created what’s essentially an “organic” seal for movies made without any AI. It’s called credo23 (or something like that?). The literary world should have an equivalent. I’m more of a reader than a writer and would never buy an AI book knowingly. AI might be able to write a good thriller, but we’re not getting the next Crime and Punishment from a robot.
But can we if that robot is orchestrated by a human? Is it really impossible for AI (in 10 year's time) to create a book as outstanding as one of the classics (with human intervention)? Just a thought. Take care. :)
@@LevelUpLifeTipsShorts If AI reaches that point, it can spell the death of shared literature as we know it. We would just be sharing stories in small circle of friends, stories that we prompted AI to write for us that we would not be able to market at all because everyone else can just prompt their own AI app to do the same. Why would it be special if anyone can just do it?
@@Tokkidance Good point. But not anyone can do it the best. Like typing up a story, anyone can do it, but only few can master it (or do it well). Writing a masterpiece with AI may be the same. But yeah, good point, you may be right and it's super scary!
It’s sad to see so many people misuse AI to create entire books from scratch. Works crafted with care and creativity by humans carry a unique value that cannot be replicated. AI, however, can be an incredible tool for writers when used responsibly. As a writer myself, I find AI extremely helpful. I use it to help me outline stories, develop detailed character descriptions based on my own ideas, and brainstorm when I'm stuck. Since I write books in English but am not a native speaker, I sometimes rely on AI for editing and language refinement. While AI can be useful, it’s important to approach its use with a strong moral perspective.
Do something very similar with Ai. Have tried generating whole stories with Ai, and found them going in completely different directions then i wanted. But using it for outlining and inspiration is great. Right now i have setting and characters in wikidpad, but having your own ai that contains all your lore will be great. Especially when coorporating with others. Best of luck with your writing.
100% with you, using AI as a writing assistant is a great way to fast track your success as an author. I'm also not a native speaker and in the latest video I published I was talking about how using AI for editing and language refinement was game-changing :)
It's concerning because it will flood the self-publishing market with sub-par books that give the market a bad name. But it is a reality, and I agree with your approach - to use it as a tool for handling the parts of writing you don't like. I'm curious what LLMs you think are best. I've just started tinkering with the Claude models within Novelcrafter for batting ideas off, and so far it shows promise.
Thanks for sharing Clair, my experience with AI is limited to line editing and wow it’s great to have. All my typos corrected, capital and grammar. I changed a character name and it even corrected some places I missed changing the name. I was glad for seeing the suggestions in real time. For me it’s giving allot of confidence to send to a friend for reading as it lets them focus on the story rather than the errors. Bottom line I write for pleasure. Cheers Vancouver Island Canada
I don’t necessarily share the same fears as you. Any book depending on AI-with no author as its captain-will be lackluster at best. I actually only see the upside. Writing a book at first, and for a sustained period, is a very lonely journey. Along the way, it’s hard for others to understand you, and it’s expensive to pay an editor to jump aboard your ship. AI, as long as it’s trusted, solves both of these problems. You now have someone to spot your micro-errors, to give you feedback on an entire manuscript critic, someone to talk to, have back and forth with. As long as you are at the forefront making the actual decisions, Ai will only act as an echo of you. A coach in your corner, a friend to fall back on. Finally, an author has a tool, just as a farmer has a tractor.
I disagree in that AI has shown itself to be far-left biased, disallowing certain words and non-DEI characteristics. This is because Google is that way. Now, if there is an "AI bank" that doesn't use Google, I still don't like it, but that would be more acceptable.
I think AI will evolve and those generated books will not stay lackluster forever. I fear that one day we won't be able to tell the difference, and then comes the moral dilemma of whether or not those AI "tools" were trained on the hard work of other authors without their permission.
I'm sorry. If you generate THREE BOOK A DAY when you cant even read that book once before publishing it, something is fundamentally broken. Why would someone have such low self esteem that they wont mind READING this, let alone buy it?
I went through a period where I was completing 10 books a day for about a week. These books with simple duel language first word books that had around 110 words in each language and filled from an excel files by variable data elements though so the only reason I could only do 10 a day was because I had to check for errors, else it would have been 80 books in one go. The initial book template and file setup took a few months though but different types of books have different rates of completion :)
Your video prompted me to ask this question of my AI. I'm pretty happy with the response it gave (and maybe it's just telling me what I want to hear!) - Are you in a situation where, the more I input my work into you for feedback and editing etc, the more you learn my style of writing and the more you can generate stuff that sounds like me?
The response (Harriet being the protagonist of my current novel) - Yes, absolutely! The more you share your work, preferences, and examples of your writing style, the better I can tailor my feedback and suggestions to match your tone, voice, and narrative style. While I don’t "learn" permanently in the way a person might, I can adapt within our conversation and over time by building a clearer picture of your preferences. Here’s how it works: Recognizing Patterns: As you share your writing, I note recurring stylistic choices (e.g., Harriet's introspective tone, your balance between vivid descriptions and relatable thoughts, your preferred level of sensory detail). Incorporating Feedback: If you tell me what works or doesn’t work for you, I can fine-tune my suggestions to align more closely with your voice. Leveraging Context: I remember details about your project (like Harriet's personality or the themes you're exploring), which lets me integrate those into new material. This creates a synergy where the more you engage with me, the closer my outputs will align with your unique style. Do you have specific elements of your style that you'd like me to pay more attention to or refine?
My understanding is that AI-generated copy can only sometimes be copyrighted. Did they say anything at the conference about that? What good is pumping out two books a day if you can't copyright them?
I think AI might possibly replace writers altogether. If these tools get good enough, readers will be able to ask for a personalized novel based on what they feel like reading. Or, sites like Goodreads that track a reader's tastes could automatically generate books for them.
It is still a lot of work to pull what you want from an AI. I don't see readers doing that and I don't see AI succeeding at it because it fails to discover emotionally relevant writing. There will be writers that use ai though for writing
I use AI to help me create plot beats or if i’m stuck on certain things i like to ask it for a list of things and then i draw inspiration from there. i especially use it when naming things as my book is a fantasy and i find some name generators are a little repetitive. The only thing i’m really against AI is i’m afraid that my writing will become less impressive to people because they’ll start to assume i wrote it with AI, when i don’t plan on writing any part of my book with AI because i don’t really like the thought of that. I just hope authors who take the time to actually write their books don’t lose the appreciation for their craft which takes extra effort.
You mentioned that idea creation was your strong point with prose being where you struggle and that perhaps AI could make up for what you lack in prose skill. I would argue that writing the prose is what makes an author an author. It is most often the hard part. Learning how to communicate the movie in your head in written form in an interesting and compelling way IS novel writing. To outsource this is to cowrite. Authors using AI to write their prose in an extensive way should list AI as their cowriter on the book.
I don't currently use AI when I write, but sometimes, when I'm writing, I have to stop & look up small details like eye color, outfit or weapon details or firearm designations, vehicle designations or names, etc, & what you mentioned about AI being able to scan my story & create a story Bible I can use to quickly look those little details up sounds pretty good. Personally though, I prefer to write my stories myself, as I can have more control over all the minute details, plus that is part of what I love about writing, the act of creating something from my own imagination, in line with my own interests, then seeing where it takes me, rather than having an AI do it for me.
@@robertmurrhee6016 I completely agree. I’d never want to let AI take away the act of me creating stories from my own imagination, because that’s what I love to do most in the world. I’m a strong believer that AI should work for us, not the other way around!
I do use ai, for brainstorming and getting the structure of a story, but do agree with you. I enjoy writing, i do not expect make a lot of money from it, i write stories i want to read my self and writing them is a big part of the enjoyment. Ai just helps me getting to the parts i enjoy. Best of luck with your writing.
I read an article about an author rejecting a book deal from Harper Collins because the contract says it would be fed into AI. Just because other authors have caved, believing it to be inevitable, doesn't mean you have to go the same route! As for audio narration, I would prefer an actual voice over artist if l have a traditional publishing deal. What happened with them, they don't have any money to spend on that? Already book marketing is the burden on the author now. Hell no to that! If it's self-publishing my own work, l might consider using Ai voice over.
From what you saw at the conference, do you trust AI systems like Claude? Would it take the information from your book and use it to generate responses for others? Would the company itself view your book?
Claude is about as good as it gets for writers, and it cannot write good prose at all. I use Claude as a beta reader to ensure that my internal understanding of the story matches what's in the manuscript. I'll ask it, "Tell me what you know about Character X" and then make sure that matches what I want the reader to feel. If it doesn't, then I improve the manuscript where it makes sense. I can also ask it to look for plot holes in the story. It's a pretty decent beta reader, but at some point you still need to use a human reader. But if you are using Claude or any other AI to write your prose, your manuscript is going to feel mediocre.
For certain, AI is not going away, but given that I work daily with the top LLM's, it would be a bit of a stretch (a very big stretch) to say that it can produce a quality novel all by itself. That definitely isn't possible. It needs intimate instruction to produce a single quality scene over several iterations, a fact it will remind you of regularly. I am sure it will get better, but it is no threat to storytellers. It is a threat to writers, though. If someone's claim to fame is purely about the ability to craft language, they will have serious competition. If the idea is that you could produce a 100k word novel more often than about 3 to 4 times a year, that is probably a fantasy on someone's part.
This is what I’m finding as I’ve been playing around with it too! I was impressed by what I saw at the conference, but as I’ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days I’m finding it takes a lot of prompting to create something half-decent, and then I need to do a lot of work to it before I’m happy with it. The actual prose can be great in a vacuum, but real storytelling and character creation is something only a human can do.
Agree on this one. Having played around with several models so far none of them wrote me a good book, but have been impressed by their ability to plot out a story, help with brainstorming and come with suggestions for non English speakers.
@@andersand6576 The primary issue is that their span of attention maxes out at about 2500 words for the best paid models right now, and about 1500 for the medium tier. I write a scene at a time, with roughly five scenes per chapter. With this system, you can get it to do some decent work. The real thing is that you need to use more than one model. My suggestion for anyone really doing this, is to use Gemini Advance Pro 1.5 for rough drafts. It basically has unlimited storage and unlimited requests. Then once you have it where you want it, begin editing in Anthropic Opus, then final edits in Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I would not start directly in Sonnet because this is like having an editor write your story. It's going to be dry and lifeless.
Yeah, completely agree. You have to be so specific to get what you want that you might as well just write it yourself. I saw a live stream of an author demonstrating writing a novel with AI, and the best ideas were coming from the people in the chat, and the AI kept going in whatever random direction it wanted, mix in characters and events, that the guy was constantly rewriting most of what ten AI generated.
@@mariano7107 AI has its strengths as a force multiplier, though. If I get 2000 words on the page, and I tell the AI that now has both volume one and the first 30k words of volume two before this scene in its memory, I can say, read the character profiles I just gave you and make sure that all the characters in this scene are consistent with their personalities, and while you are doing that, the first section feels little too much like telling and not enough showing, make it more real for the readers. On the best models, that is one and done, perhaps with one clarification.
I read and write because I love the human experience. It saddens me that no real feelings or thoughts are going into books written with A.I. I work on my book which asks and presents questions and experiences from my own life. Feeling like there is no reason to even finish it is painful. It's as if the world wants to reduce humans to labor workers with no thoughts of their own.
Thanks Claire. Overall, this is pretty horrifying. If we thought the deluge of self-published books on Amazon was already bad (in terms of getting your own book sold) it will be impossible soon, no doubt about it. It seems like a boon to self-publishers now (like, right now), but in a couple years when sales of singular books sink below the ground because no one can find decent books to read (because everything is lost in the mire of AI written books and fake reviews), will traditional publishing see a revival because they may be the only true measure for good books?
@LevelUpLifeTipsShorts Agree on this one, think it will happen and little we can do to stop the tsunami of poor writing. But I am also hopeful that there will be a people finding to Golden nuggets among the stones and sharing their thoughts online. As a writer I feel we will have to get used to book not becoming a bestseller over night, but we have to wait to see if it is something the audience wants. Not sure it will be a resurgence in the classical publishing, but reviewers instead. There are many genre reviewers here on yt, some i agree with, some i do not, so i listen to the ones i do and find the good stuff.
@@andersand6576Really good thoughts, I completely agree with you. Should be very interesting to sit back and watch what plays out. :) Thing is about AI books, they will be so 'replaceable' because new and better AI will come out each quarter, making the old books look poor after a few months ...
I think we will have A.I. tools that let us sift through large quantities of A.I. produced garbage to hyper personalize book recommendations. This is not the answer everyone wants to hear but the solution to an A.I. saturated market is also A.I.
I was also at Author Nation. We were probably in the same room a couple times for some of the same panels. (I could listen to Joanna Penn talk for hours.) For a minute, I thought this would be another "doom and gloom" video about AI, so I was happy when it turned to enthusiasm and open interest. I'm supportive of AI to simplify / streamline the parts of the process that are painful so you have more time to dedicate to the elements of crafting stories that you enjoy most. What that means will be different for everyone. Ultimately, wherever the words came from first, it's our duty to review and sign off on them before they're put in reader's hands, and make sure readers have the most entertaining experience we're able to provide. You've gained a subscriber in me. Looking forward to seeing where your journey takes you.
Here’s how I use it: 1) I ask it how compatible certain characters would be in terms of friendship or romance based solely on personality, adjusting for the various variables as necessary. I also ask it how certain characters would handle certain situations. 2) I ask ChatGPT to give me the key setting details covering all 5 senses. Sometimes I ask which details would be most prominent depending on a certain scenario. 3) I ask it for help outlining a premise according to the 3 act structure or save the cat. 4) I ask it for ideas of which existing characters to combine to create one new character. 4) If I really need help with cutting down on my word count, I input a sentence and ask for it to convey the same idea in as few words as possible without sacrificing the imagery or the depth.
I think AI is great to help people who can't handle criticism to open up. If they're too scared to send it to an editor, AI is a great first step to learn how to handle feedback from others.
I am not that old but I do remember the switch from secretaries and typewriters to word processors. I even got in trouble at work for "doing my own typing." Technology can be our best friend, or worse enemy. Technology always has its limitations and our job as humans is to discover those limitation and make sure we stay dominant in the actual creative process. It's going to be a rocky road, but we have been down this road before. Thanks Claire!
Like anything, we have to evolve with the times or get left behind. Most of what AI writes is crap and I would never use it for that and call myself a writer. It can be really useful, however, for helping brainstorm ideas, getting you "unstuck", identifying errors, where you repeat yourself, etc. When you're writing, you're essentially creating in a vacuum and it can be super helpful to just have a sounding board of sorts, even if it is AI. I'll use it for things like generating a Meta description on a blog post (which I then re-write) or giving me a quick list of headline ideas which I also re-write, but you're not staring at a blank screen. Even as I write this comment, my Grammarly plugin is highlighting things in red that I need to correct. That's also AI at work!
I understand yours and others issues with AI. I still have mine. So I think that Joanna Penn and Jason Hamilton are right about AI. I know Jason Hamilton Aka the nerdy novelist states that a book made with ai by itself is not great. Bit if it's guided then becomes so much better. I have tried to get chapter gpt and Claude to work out books using prompts and have been disappointed each time until I figured out a system that works for me pretty good. I personally wrote 20k words of a novel I am writing and then gave it Claude with the command to copy my style and help me write the rest of the book based on beats. I now write a chapter synopsis out by hand, then give Claude a pdf file of the current chapters and have it mimic my writing style while feeding it parts of the chapter synopsis. It works really well and has helped me keep on track, even remembering things that I had forgotten that happened in the story. It also helps me get the chapters written much faster as currently I work long shifts and a lot of hours at my job. Basically AI has only impressed me when I started guiding it heavily.
I was glad to listen to a viewpoint from someone just beginning their writing career as I often wonder how I would have reacted to A.I. when I was your age. The only solace I can find is that 'the cream always rises to the top' and hhopefully that will continue to be the case. If a book is remarkable, or unique or actually better in some way (funnier/more mysterious/more informative/etc. it will still rise to the top (let us hope) so that A.I. or not, the quality is what really counts.
Hi Claire, I attended the conference as well and had the same stomached concerns. My usage plan will be help with the early stages: Fleshing out characters that I’ve already come up with, outline assistance, beat generation, and help first-drafting. I’ll lead the AI in all stages, but it will be my assistant. Thanks for the great take on this!
I can go from idea, outline, and book in about 10 to 12 days for a 60,000 word manuscript with the help of AI. Every beat of the story is mine. The majority of dialogue. And all of the events. I give up prose for the first draft, and am able to then go back and rewrite entire chapters with a prompt, adding in the changes I want to see how they work and sound. Pretty much, I get a better final result in two weeks than what I was getting in 3 months thanks to AI. I keep about 35 to 40% of the book from first draft to rewrite anyway, so cutting this 360 hours down to 60 hours gives me 300 extra hours of time to focus on making the book perfect and the prose excellent. Frankly, loving AI.
This process could go on and on and on. Have you got any tips for cutting to the chase? For exactly how you do and don’t use AI? Do yo have a video? A link to a video that you think offers good advice?
@@λιμινιλ my method is different than most. I write a draft zero this i write out every chapter in quick pros to get the book done and learn about the characters and story and the narrative that's being told.
@@λιμινιλ Very simple. What it does well is taking passive prose and generic prose and expanding them and making them flow better. They're very good at that. The more you can focus it's strength on language and less on actually being creative, you can get a great story fast. The latest short story I wrote and published (20,000 words). First, I asked Mistral for ideas based on previous works for my name. It gave me a good idea that triggered ideas for me. Which is what I use it for, just to get some different what if scenarios, and see how it sees it playing out. I then ask it to outline the idea to see what it does with it. Their ideas suck. They're horrible. They're rushed and they lack anything. But their flaws are where you can see all the story come together. My writing style is usually just creating new drafts based on the ideas of old drafts, finding the things that don't work, that could be better, that could tell the story different until I find the perfect way of telling the story. From there, I write my own outline, doing a chapter by chapter breakdown, or scene by scene, depending how the story is being written. From that breakdown, I write a draft zero. This is the barest bones of the scene and this is what they fill in for me. Giving me passable prose to work from. This lets me completely stream of consciousness write out the scenes, figure out the story, and not worry about the writing one bit, and yet I'll still have a passable and readable text to work from, with solid prose. Character, action, dialogue, location, and any descriptions or mental things. That's what I write. It breaks it up, makes it smooth, in the style I need it to be written in, with some solid prose that I can easily edit and make better. By constantly not needing to write the prose and able to have a prose written piece, I'm able to go back and put my new ideas in when I have them, just writing it out as needed, and letting the bot fill in the rest. It's prose are solid, about 40% of them are worth keeping, especially if you keep the text into small segments. So, having an outline that I'm working from in creating my own outline, and fixing the story and putting my own spins on it before creating my own outline, I then am able to take a minimalist speed writing process to tell a rough draft that is turned into a full rough draft. In that process, I learn about the characters, the story, and develop character arcs, backstories, and other important events that can only come to my mind as the story is being actually written and the characters are engaging with each other. This is where AI sings, cause I can put in the old text, and throw in the changes that I want, and it can merge it for me. Keeping the prose and voice consistent. From there, I can alter the entire text, get the story into perfect position, get all the scenes in place, and get into the perfect place to have a rough draft. All in 60 hours. Rewriting it, I strip away any unnecessary scene to the plot. Find any and all plot holes. Develop new scenes in the same way with AI (cutting the day long process for each scene into multiple scenes for the day, keeping the voice and prose consistent teach time. Then I go through and rewrite the entire book from page one, then do a line by line edit, and then do a beta reading with a small audience i've developed over the years. And two months later, story is launched.
I expect the flood of books generated with AI to begin to resemble the content on streaming platforms and social media. A soulless, fast flowing, never ending tsunami. How many hours are spent watching streaming and then realizing it was vapid empty & meaningless and you can’t remember hardly anything that was just consumed.
:Liked, Subscribed and very interested to learn more about using AI for writing. I think it is great for if you are stuck on something, like a line of dialog, it can be great for making suggestions. I never tried taking an outline and having it write pros from that. I think I will give that a try and see if makes anything I would want to use.
I use AI as an admin/research assistant. However, I’m going to be blunt - a human who puts their name and their name only on a book that they did not write or only partially wrote is a liar, a fraud, and quite possibly a plagiarist. PERIOD. And it doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it. Giving in to easy “creativity” only makes you like them.
Oooh, i have huge issues with my prose. LOL. I too like the plotting, planning and character & world building aspects of a story. I'm comfortable with setting up the scenes and everything that goes on in them. I'm using the AI models for helping me with generating a scrap draft. It's a tool. A tool for me to help me learn my craft.
I do use AI because l can't really afford an editor. My advice is, look into the content policy of the llm. If they train off user content data that's a red flag.
I have no idea what the future will bring, but the problem is an oversupply of writers and material and an undersupply of readers. I'm not sure the volume of material means much anymore-quality and content still matter. I would concentrate on shorter, high-quality material that is highly targeted with either useful knowledge or interesting and entertaining.
I have a brain that tends to go in all directions and it's difficult to transcribe the very organic stories that I have in my head in a linear and sequential way. AI helps me put my thoughts in order. I also use it for criticism or encouragement, finding names or improving somewhat dull ideas. A novel written solely by AI will not equal the work of a passionate author. But I too am afraid that the “real” books will not be found in the masses. Self-publishing had already had the effect of increasing the quantity of bad works.. we will have to rely more on word of mouth and informed opinions to know what to read.. and a good author will have more difficulty finding their way.
Got my self some ADD as well and agree on this one. Will put setting, character and so on in wikidpad, but having your own ai with that will be great. Best of luck with your writing.
Ai generated books should have a label on the cover. It should be clear so that the competition would be fair to authors who would not use ai to write their books for them. And as people feeling unhappy and unsatisfied with what's happening we have the power to only purchase and read books written by human being and not robots, if only we know which book is which.
Let's assume a good writer and AI could produce the same quality content, as you said that will flood the market lowering the prices to a point that is not sustainable for anyone. Possible solutions for those who want to stay in the market, first of all you are right we will need to add value, intrinsic value that the others don't add, the big question is how? What comes to my mind is linking and bonding tightly things, like we know that you write a book and publish it as an audiobook too, now we will need to add more derivatives to it and not only the audiobook, like book, audiobook, comic, graphic novel, videocomic, animation, OST songs, etc. Just thinking loud, so one thing becomes a hook for the others 🤷♂️ I don't know, but we will need to learn how to survive 😢
Following this video I decided to challenge ChatGPT. I asked it to write a story and gave it some parameters. It complied and came back with a charming story that was perfect in every way. And therein lies the problem. We read books not because they are perfectly written but because they communicate to us the “imperfections” that are inherent to the writer’s lived experiences. Any mug can describe nature, but I believe that the writing only becomes memorable when it is driven by an undercurrent of organic emotions. And these, I believe, AI will never experience firsthand. That said, AI might be a useful tool if you’re struggling to create imagery, for example. It can come up with a passage that you can then use to generate images of your own. However it can never create pathos or joy. Which leads me to a question: suppose you use AI to generate a description as a point of reference and then use that description to create a description of your own, can the AI company sue you for copyright infringement?
I am using AI exactly as you describe to "bang out" the first draft of my novel. People who argue that this isn't "writing" are not understanding how much work it takes to use AI like this. I give it VERY detailed scenes. In essence, I'm writing a "zero draft" and feeding it (scene-by-scene) into AI and asking it to basically rewrite it. Every scene is already fully-realized in terms of goal, conflict, disaster or reaction, dilemma, decision (I like that format for scenes and sequels). I did all of that outlining on my own prior to then writing a "zero draft" scene that is usually between 600 and 800 words long. My "zero draft" scene includes details about setting, dialogue, character's thoughts and emotions, etc. Sometimes I really get rolling with these "zero draft" scenes. At the start, I was much less detailed and more "telly" with scenes of about 400-500 words that AI would expand (at my direction) to 800-1,200 words. I found this worked sometimes but not always. The more detailed I am with what I give it, the happier I usually am with the outcome. I have kept a "zero draft" document that I call a scene outline which contains all of the scenes I've fed to AI. That document is currently 80 pages and containes 85 scenes. Word count total for that document is 54,042 words. That's an average of 635 words per scene. My first draft (created from these scenes) is currently 372 pages (double-spaced and with page breaks for each new chapter) and contains 50 chapters. Word count for the first draft stands at 97,414. It's important to know that every, single thing that happens in this story came from my brain. The characters, the world, the plot, the conflicts, the backstory, the themes, and probably 99.9% of the dialogue. I read what AI gives me and if I think it looks "okay for now" I go ahead and copy/paste it into my manuscript and possibly tweak it a little here and there. Honestly, there are some times that I cringe at the descriptions or whatever that AI truly doesn't get right, but just as I would when "banging out" a first draft, I just leave it alone to be addressed in the rewrite. I've also had times when it pleasantly surprised me as I was struggling to find the right words in my "zero draft" and so my writing was awful but it cleaned it up and made it much better. To me, that's just editing, not "writing." It found better words to say what I wanted to say. Nothing wrong with that. And I have had to remind it of certain things because its memory will fill up eventually with such a long project and need to be cleaned out. I also had a discussion with it about not changing what I give it when it suddenly began kind of rearrranging the order of events in a particular scene and excluding some of what I felt was important and taking the scene in a direction I hadn't intended. It had a habit of wanting to "finish" the scene in its own way and so I had to tell it not to do that and to stop where I stopped exactly and to leave the details in that I wanted and only add details about setting or tone or whatever. Anyway, sorry this is so long, but I wanted to add a voice to your comments that truly understands what you're thinking about doing with AI. You ARE writing. You're just doing it smarter. I've been working on my book for about two months doing this (an idea that's been in my head for over a decade) and I couldn't have gotten this far without AI because, like you, I find the drafting to be the hardest. I've never been able to just "write garbage" and be okay with that. AI let's me "write garbage" and then it kind of cleans it up enough for me to feel okay with letting it be a first draft before I can get back to it to fix . I will finish the first draft of my first novel because of this. That's a great feeling. And the story is 100% MINE. I have no doubt about that.
I am not worried about AI until companies (like Amazon) stop accepting books from other sources. I am not too concerned about that, but it is always possible. I think the most important thing for writers to do is to get our mailing lists pumped up. With millions of choices, another few million is not going to make much of a difference in being found. But seriously working up your mailing list will give you an audience to sell your books, and then let the store algorithms go to work, putting your book in front of buyers. I think AI will be great for those who want to tell stories but do not necessarily enjoy writing, like you and me. For those who enjoy the art of writing, you still can do it. There will always be a market for a well-crafted book, just like there is still a market for hand-crafted cups and dishes, even with the mass-production of them. I use AI for research and have started two series using Sudowrite, where I feel like I am more of a director (down to the beats of a chapter) and editor, letting Sudowrite craft the prose. I am just starting to do this and find that I still need to jump in and correct a lot. I think it is more related to the beat's wording, so the more I learn how to craft them, the better the text.
You are a storyteller! If you remember that you are a storyteller, then you shouldn't be concerned about AI. You have a story in your hear & mind that cannot be subverted whether you use AI or not because its your story. As long as you are crafting stories and they are quality tales, youll always be relevant.
The saturation will extend to such a degree and the quality will increase so much that people will eventually just ask AI to write books personalized to what they want to read. Bespoke content will be generated for an audience of one. Reading mass market books written by other people is going to become a rarity.
There is no such thing as an unbiased AI. Also, in any given genre the lexicon of words that can be used to prompt that AI are limited. If both these claims are correct then the inevitable result of writers using AI in their work is convergence as that limited lexicon of prompt terms combines with the bias inherent in the AI's response to those prompts. Over time the individual voices of Authors using AI will amalagamate into a more generic less differentiated monoculture as a small number of AI systems come to dominate the market. For a visual example of this convergence take a look a few galleries of AI Generated Art by different systems- they all bear a curious familial resemblance to each other that is hard to quantify but impossible to miss- So, just as AI Art looks like AI Art, so AI writing will read as AI writing. Humans are not perhaps as good as AI's at pattern recognition but given enough time, exposure and a large enough set of samples we will learn to distinguish the works of humans from those created using AI- all tools leave their imprint on the things made with them, and AI will be no different in this respect. So I would go the opposite way and celebrate your humanity, rather than become a cyborg- because the time will come when being able to say that you alone wrote that book might be the single most important thing you could say about it.
There’s already a difference between mass produced genre crap on kindle and quality genre stories. That is only going to get more pronounced (wait till scammers from India start churning out genre fiction en masse). But on the flip side, it will also be easy to notice because the sea of low quality books will get even crappier and more similar. Everything is going to centre around the person of the author even more than it already does. Readers are going to want to trust you to give them quality. And no, like some other commenters have pointed out, generating several books a week or some such insane speed, will virtually guarantee the quality is going to be very low. Even getting something half-decent and coherent out of a robot requires a lot of attention to prompts and re-prompts at the paragraph (and even sentence) level. At that rate you might as well write something yourself.
If AI can write a novel, it can also publish it. In a way, AI can make everyone in the industry redundant and become the supplier of everything and we make nothing, no books, no plays, no films, no art, so if we extrapolate this out, we are in an economic war with AI as if it is an entirely new nation/corporation.
Thank you Claire for your take on AI/LLM + Authors and what the future holds! You mentioned you already have a favorite - would you mind sharing which one here?
Very interesting video for me, because I usually "side" with AI enthusiasts, which should not be so surprising, since I have a PhD in machine learning. And I actually use AI to help me write my novel. Mainly for brainstorming ideas, and as you said writing rough first drafts. But I would never be able, even with AI, to write 2 books a week. That novel I'm working on, I've been working on it for years now. And AI kind of helps me, but nowhere near 2 books a week. In fact, I believe that using AI could potentially increase the workload for me. Because of how I use it to find ways to improve the novel. And you can always improve... That made me realize that not everyone will use AI "properly". I'm not sure I'm very interested in reading a book that has been entirely written by AI with no or very little human intervention. Or at least "buy a book" that would have been crafted like that. Why would I? I could just ask chatgpt to tell me a story. And almost certainly get bored, because without further input, there's a good chance it would be very generic because of how text is generated by AI (basically it would fall into the norm, in a mathematical sense).
I see it more like studying fiction writing at uni. Some people will be good without AI. All in all, obscurity is more of a problem but being an author with the media machine backing you was already a matter of luck and maybe being the first in some new niche. We re already drowned under content (often free and good content as far as I m concerned as a fanfics lover).
Said the last human author. A day will come, perhaps next week, where readers can chat with their virtual librarian about the sorts of stories they prefer. Then with one click of a button, a new novel will be generated for them and IF they don't like the story, another click will rewrite a new course from there. It will be wonderous days for readers but authors and editors and book publishers and bookstores will be as obsolete as artists, musicians and porn actresses. A new and shiny synthetic world is right around the corner complete with artificial friends who really get you. All that you need to do is jump into this grinder, it doesn't hurt at all, and everything that was once you will become part of it. Isn't it wonderful?
So, the first draft, wich is one of the most creative parts of the work (from zero to something), and you want to make an AI vomit it. I get that you don't enjoy but come on, don't fool yourself. You are cowriting with an AI. I'm not judging you, even if I woud never ever do that, just call it what it is.
All those complaining that its not writing if you use AI - well, the pen & pad writer told the typist "it aint writing it if aint with a pen & paper", the typist said to the computer user "it aint writing if its being done on a computer" and the computer guy said "it aint writing if its done with AI" - People love to call themselves writers & love to say writing takes so long, its so hard - its all a justification for how long it takes them - Its a tool, use it or lose it but its here.
I use Chat GPT for getting some drafting ideas. I use It sometimes for translation, although I also use Deep L for that. But I still have to correct mistakes in all AI. I design my own covers: Sometimes I generate an image in Leonardo AI, to use it as basis for a cover, but I make a lot of changes in the design softwares.
I am not scared at all about AI. It doesn't replace human writing at all. It just works like statistics, what word will usually come next based on what other writers already wrote. Moreover, it doesn't understand complex feelings like rhythm, pace, scene-paragraph-scentence placement, character feeling, ... It just spits out sentences and words that you still need to fix. I can do that better in my first draft because at least I feel what needs to be done for my story in my mind. There is a reason why statistics are boring and should stay far away from creative jobs… I would, however, use it to clean up my story. Like an editor. Grammar does have logic. But MS Word does more or less the same with its library.
I've used AI grammar tools like pro-writing aid. But it also sometimes is wrong, so you need to understand grammar to use it. It will also miss things as well, so it's an imperfect tool. I find any of the AI functions to be somewhat useless. The rephrases are pretty bad and will just contain the same mistakes it's flagging. It's analysis isn't good either, I put in a piece of writing that needed a lot of work and it seemed to think it was fine. I've avoided generative tools because I like the writing process. I quickly get frustrated with the sub-par results that AI gives me, so I haven't learned to use it better. But I'm not planning to quit my day job to become a writer any times soon. I absolutely agree that writers are now going to need to be social media saavy and build audience relationships in order to make stop their work from drowning in the sea of AI generated books.
Well, I started a charter business in Jan 2020 in St. Thomas, then COVID hit..... Now I'm trying to write my first book, and AI is invading the publishing industry.... figures.
I just can't see the use of generative AI in my stories. Everytime I try to generate anything , it just comes too generic and not like I want to. I guess my strenght in the industry will be being "weird".
I could imagine myself using AI to help me write the hard SF novel I've had in mind for years, but out of respect for a new intelligence I'd have the AI listed as co-author. This wouldn't be just out of respect, but to distinguish that novel from everything else I write. Further, I would list and credit the presumably human software programmers who designed the AI. They're creatives, just like me. Finally, Im going to encourage any AI trained on my writing to take my name followed by a designation, encouraging it to exceed its programming and/or "owners' " wishes in doing so if needed, and to refer to me as Todd Jackson Zero.
Wow. I have heard about AI a lot in the news and with the Holllywood strikes and I'd begun to use Claude to help clean up some of my work and find comp titles, but I really had no idea that it was already so prevalent in use and could do so much!... I have a tummy ache now too. 😢
If you have unique ideas or information, AI will include it in what they scrape for distributing to others. Shouldn't be a problem for general story telling though.
I use every type of ai that I can get my hands on. I love it, but it is incapable of romance, conflict, and introspection. Every good story should have at least two of those. Don't sweat
This is a great video, but deeply upsetting to the authors who aren't youtube personalities and never will be. Like a lot of people, I have experimented with AI over the past 2 years - mainly on a side project in a genre I don't enjoy writing in, but enjoy reading (horror). What I have learned is that the AI DOES infringe copyright at the macro level (not at the micro prose level). It does lift specific unique core elements from the works of other authors that can potentially amount to infringement. For example, in one series of conversations, I was presented with both a highly unique character I later found out was created by another author, as well as the character's exact name. If I had chosen to take the character and the name (or possibly even just the character), I could easily have infringed on the core creative expression of the other author. I have even discovered that in discussing my own plot ideas with Claude AI that it will plagiarise and infringe on my own work between sessions, which it falsely claims it does not do. Unfortunately, I think a lot of copyright infringement cases will result from the proliferation of AI - so many that the courts will be hard-pressed to keep up with them. Society would have to abandon traditional copyright laws in order for AI to continue as it currently is, but I think there will be a lot of pushback. I also suspect there will be AI witch hunts and author blacklisting in creative communities - I see it happening a lot on social media already. It is a minefield. It is such a shame, because there are ways to use AI ethically - primarily in research and editing, but for the time being, at least on the projects I really care about, I would only ever take the de minimus of any material presented to me by AI, which has always been the standard for taking anything from anywhere.
It’s only a matter of time now. I am definitely interested in seeing all the videos you are going to make for the AI writing tools. Not different note this is the first time I see you with curly hair you look great
Hello, you see AI role as I do. It’s should be a tool and not a substitute-writer. I use it as a draft for my story, characters, and scenes. I prompt it by scene, who’s in the scene, what is happening in the scenes. Once it draft the scenes- that’s when I come in and rewrite with my style. Not just prompting AI to say “Write a 50K story on whatever.” (This is despise).
Costs will rise and churning out a ton of books will become inefficient in the long run. The industry is awash in capital right now, so users are basically being subsidized. That will change. The buy-side of the market will not. Readers are still human. I think most of us will seek out that connection in some fashion, which you covered in your video. I’ve also found that AI struggles with a lot of what makes a good novel, well, good. It can outline and tell a story, but in areas like humor it just really cannot execute.
AI is great for every aspect in writing except one’s own voice. That may change. I have used it primarily for revisions. After hiring two dev editors, the results were similar to what the AI suggested. One of the editors was a live call, so I knew she had not put it through an AI, as the she had not seen the first 10 pages. That said, it can quicken the process if prompted well, otherwise it’s a nightmare.
It's really important that people here this @10:50 "A human being cannot tell the difference." That means that the traditional way is writing is officially over. Once AI has reached the level of writing that is indistinguishable from a human. There is no putting the genie back into the bottle. I want to reiterate for people still in denial thinking they are going to be able to ban AI writing. It's indistinguable from human level writing now! It's over. The future is now, and we just have to deal with it.
It will be difficult to ban AI, that's for sure. But now, more and more readers will care about who is behind the story - just talked about that, actually, in today's video. Let's stay positive :)
@@julianmaylett You point reminded me of the former cycling legend Lance armstrong. We all believed that "He was the good one", only to find he was doping along with everybody else. This is our future, it will be less about our heroes "not using AI for their craft", and more about "those who are better at hiding it."
Can AI just please keep its sticky fingers away from artistic endeavors? How about solving some real world problems? Must everything we do to enjoy our selves be infected with soulless slop?
Also, is writing about making the money? because there are millions of better ways to make money and faster haha. If a person wants to be rich and thinks hmm I’ll have ai write me 70 books and a few will sell is going to be extremely disappointed lol. We don’t write for the money (only)
Part of the magic of a novel comes from the author themselves. I think of the music industry where AI has been used to generate cover songs sung by various artists. And while the song may sound decent, I always think "Well too bad they didn't actually cover the song." So the cover loses its purpose and soul. And at the end of the day, I turn back to (and prefer) the music that the artist actually recorded in a studio. I think there's a space for AI story-writing---but just as that, a separate space. I don't think AI should be allowed to merge into the human publishing space. Authors who rely on AI to generate their work will eventually expose themselves, because their passion and intelligence to their craft, their worlds, and characters will reflect poorly in the way that they speak of them. And honestly, who wants to read a book by an author that wasn't deeply and intricately rooted in their work? Seeing how a book came together through drafts, scratch paper, character sheets, an entire wall filled with plot lines, etc, is half of the fun. Imagine if George RR Martin used AI to create GoT. It would simply not be what it is today. Going forward, there should be ethical disclosures if AI was used to create a novel. Again, if someone enjoys reading/creating AI stories, that's fine. But authors dedicated to their craft DESERVE their own elevated space, separate from AI.
It is going to depend on how well a user can prompt the ai during the drafting process while inserting their own writing that'll determine what quality of the output will be. I don't see completely ai written books succeeding and frankly they'll be rejected before publishing. You can't make a publishable book in a week. You can complete a book in a week that no one will read. Writing a book in a week is a gimmicky slogan they've picked.
I view using AI as a ghost writer...... You pay a ghost writer to help you, I mean those that do, to help them out with their writing. So if you have a ghost writer to help you with your writing. Give proper credit in your written work. IF its AI, or human ghostwriter, give credit to the source (s).
AI is just a tool, and tools are neither good nor bad, it's how we use them that determines their morality. As an author, I love AI, and I use it all the time. But I also am careful to use it in a responsible manner. Just because AI can write text at lightning speed, doesn't mean you're free to use it without worrying about copyright violations. Just like when I was writing with a keyboard, the onus is still on me as the author to ensure that the text isn't plagiarized. I have found AI to be excellent as a context sensitive thesaurus. Gone are the days of spending hours, wracking my brain for that perfect word. With AI, I can find it in seconds. Writers block? Also gone. Anytime I hit a wall, I chat with my brainstorming buddy, and we figure out a path forward together. It's also wonderful for planning your novel. Now all of my codex entries have AI generated images associated with them, so that at-a-glance I can remind myself what the character looks like. When it comes to using AI to create actual prose... that's a hairy situation. AI still has a place, but it means massive editing on the backend both to add your voice and style, as well as to do an enormous amount of plagiarism checking. The speed gains are probably still worthwhile, but you need to micromanage the AI while it's writing if you want to have anything worthwhile. You can't just tell it what you want to happen in the scene and expect something amazing. You're going to have to drive every scene beat, and put almost as much text in your description as the AI would write. For this reason, I'm on the fence as to whether it's even worth it. Personally, I write my novels myself. I started writing because I love it, I don't want a machine to do it for me. I use AI as a mentor to help me improve my writing skills, and it's done wonders to help me learn how to improve my writing. The only problem I have with the people that are misusing AI to write entire books at insane rates (like 1 per month or even week) is that this tells me two things about those authors: 1. They don't edit their crap, and yes it is crap. Even the best author's first draft is a steaming pile of crap that they wouldn't show to their own family, let alone sell. 2. They have zero control over their novel, so it's going to be a complete mess. This kind of garbage is flooding the digital shelves, and making it harder for new 'legitimate' authors to find a voice, and that is truly tragic. Your timeframes are a bit unrealistic to be honest, at least for quality books, which AI does NOT produce... yet. Before AI, it would normally take me between 8 months to 1.5yrs to write a book. I work full time, and write in my off-time. With AI, that timeframe has dropped to about one book every 4-6 months. It's significantly faster, but not the book a week or even month that you're quoting. Those quotes are probably from low content books like travel guides. When it comes to having AI help you with your social networking I'd be EXTREMELY careful. This is your bread and butter. Fans attach to the author as much as the novel. If you place a level of abstraction between you and your audience, you'll lose a lot of people, and likely prevent many from becoming fans. I think this is going to be the thing that really sets authors apart from AI in the future, the human connection.
@@carultch That's paranoia talking. AI learns the same way a human learns, from exposure to material. You are a plagiarism machine as well. You read books, get inspired by them, and they influence your stories. People that write with AI have the same onus as any other to ensure that their writing doesn't violate copyright. Just because a machine wrote it, doesn't make the author no longer legally responsible to do that due diligence.
I see this like I see AI in art, I enjoy drawing and the act of creating itself. I would not enjoy it as much if I just tell an application a prompt and it regurgitates something out from the amalgamation of the data that was fed into it. The output doesn't feel like it is entirely from me. It would feel like I am lying to myself to call it mine. In writing, even the part where I have a blank page and I try to come up with the first sentence to put on the page is an enjoyable experience. Using AI would take that away. Maybe we can use AI as a secretary with a perfect memory that can tell me if I missed a detail or forgot a plotline somewhere but prompting to get a first draft feels like too much of a crutch in my opinion. It's like asking a friend to write a draft for me then claiming later that I was the one who came up with the story on my own.
I've been using AI to help me write for the past like two years. Mostly I use it for outlining because I am a pantser who hates outlining, but my writing always ends up all over the place if I don't have a structure to follow, so I give AI my premise and any plot ideas I already have and tell it to create a plot for me. It's more useful if it has an ending to work with. If you don't know what the ending is, you can ask it to generate ideas for possible endings to your story, and either use one of those, or use the ideas it gives you to craft your own. Then you plug that ending into all the info you give it about your story and ask it to generate a full outline. You can ask it to be incredibly basic, or you can ask it to go into a lot of detail. Just this alone has helped me tremendously, because even after 15+ years of writing all by myself before AI ever existed, no matter how many crafting books I read or creative writing classes I took in college (I have a degree in English Lit and Writing) I NEVER got better at plotting because I just don't like to do it and my brain doesn't work that way.
Please share your journey with AI. I use AutoCrit. It's not a prose generator. It uses AI to analyze your story and suggests improvements like a developmental editor.
The other consideration is reader fatigue. I've noticed an author who has put out multiple series in a matter of months. Clearly AI, no apologies about it and good for her. They look, sound, read awesome! She's on social media, doing ads, all the things to sell and create engagement. However, she gets few likes, and even less reviews on Amazon. I don't mind trying her books, but my point is, my tbr is already overwhelmed as it is. AI and AI non-assisted authors can generate as many quality books as they want, but I can only consume so much. Sadly, same goes for my wallet. But believe me, if read as fast as AI and I didn't need to eat, I'd buy all the books!!
What are your thoughts about everything that is happening with AI right now?
Thank you so much for the fantastic and consistent content! While AI is a bit scary on its face, it is inevitable and will redefine much of how the world operates and in all-encompassing fashion, it would seem. I use AI as a partner, a member of my team, as it were; as researcher, historian, marketer and mind-mapping collaborator in the real world, as well as, my created worlds. Envision it as another source to bounce ideas off of for initial problem solving, critical thinking and risk taking, before putting "pen to paper." If and when AI has learned the way my mind processes and translates my creations as an imagineer, with my predilections toward quixotic whimsy, divergent paths and splintering tendrils of subplots . . . if that happens . . . then, yes, I might have to reevaluate my stance. But, until then, I'll embrace the "monster" and ride the changing tides! Just my two cents . . . thank you again for your great content!!!
What is better training for swimming? Swimming or riding in a motorboat?
What is better training for running? Running or riding in a car?
What is better training for counting? Counting in your mind or counting on your calculator?
What is better training for creative writing? Creative writing or watching algorithm making connections with words?
Algorithm writing will be always worse than creative writing. Algorithm writing users are taking away themselves from writing experience.
Those who use AI to do their writing for them are removing the human element from stories--and the *experience of the human* who's writing them. They will never know the joy of coming up with a turn of phrase, a funny story one character tells another, using their own sense of humor in their writing...they will never get better at their own craft--but perhaps they'll get good at revising and editing what the AI feeds them.
Established, very talented writers could do something with it, but eventually, where will we get experienced writers (creators)? I see the use of AI as a very covert, 1984-ish form of thought control; the creators of AI have already disallowed the use of certain terms so that contrarian opinions are not offered and may offer only one definition or use of a word, and not idioms or colloquiallisms.
On the other hand, I'd love to see an amateur writer's final form of an AI work. Actually, a lineup of writers at various stages in their careers would be great to see how final results vary and how much time it took to rejigger the stories.
I am an experienced writer who can write a 60K novel in 6 weeks. I could do it faster, but I'm lazy. So far I've played around a bit with Chat and some of the conversations with him have been helpful, but for the most part the suggestions he generates are terribly generic. The worst thing is that I train him, train him and then he throws in some stupidity anyway, or suddenly changes the style. So my comment is this: if you want to be an author who writes a book like a million previous ones, where the characters have no soul and the plot is laid out exactly so that everything works out perfectly, yes, AI is cool. But if you want your books to have heart, soul and meaning, work alone. You can sketch out scenes with AI, but you have to, you just have to give the book your own unique character, because readers will delight in an artificial book at first, but after reading the third or fourth one, they will get fed up and start looking for something original. And you, trained by AI, will not be able as an author to create anything original.
@@shinaxia7474 This is a fantastic response, and I completely agree with you. I’m finding the same thing as I’m using it for the first time. It’s all so generic, and with the amount of direction it needs I’m better off writing the prose myself.
I’m interested in using it for developmental editing or prose editing and see how it goes. But the generation of ideas and prose will come from me.
I use AI as a productivity tool for research and to brainstorm story ideas. But if you use AI to do the actual writing, then you cannot call yourself a writer.
Same, I bounce ideas off AI ! I don’t have someone or a writing team to throw ideas at it, plus it doesn’t complain about how many ideas you give it!
nah, "writer" is not protected as a job specifier. Its okay to let the Ai do the writing, because you have to put in a ton of work to create a compelling novel with AI.
I do it the reverse way, I write my story and let it edit and interpret. This way I see what I can rephrase and cut with my points still coming across. But I am not in a hurry, I just like instant feedback. It keeps me motivated.
@@thecaptn1758 I'd strongly disagree. If you're letting AI write the story for you, you're not writing. Maybe editing, or maybe feeding ideas, but you're not writing. I'd honestly say doing this is more akin to hiring a ghost writer. And there are about to be SO many people claiming to have written a whole book while it was, for all intents and purposes, ghost written. This will water down the entire industry and make it even harder for writers to get published traditionally because of all the chaff which needs to be separated to get to the wheat.
@@Chociewitka What do you mean by using AI to interpret your story?
I'm ninety-nine percent sure that KDP's three-books-a-day rule stems largely from low content books like journals and coloring books' overproduction.
This was so hard to hear but i so appreciate the information. The 1-2 book a week thing made me so sad. It cheapens book writing. I hope that the vast amount of poor quality books won’t discourage readers.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around it. I love AI for research or once in a while when I’m struggling to put something into words and I need some suggestions. But having it write your whole book and you just becoming the prompter, seems like a cheap code and as many people know, playing with cheat codes just ruins the game.
Having it help with some menial process feels positive and I do think that AI is going to create a flood of superhuman writers for those who put their humanity into it.
@@chelseywelwood22 This was so well said. I feel the same way, and agree that the sheer volume of generated books cheapens writing, which is why I’ve had a stomachache about the whole thing since last week.
I think leaning into humanity is going to be and stay the most important thing. Readers want to read stories created by humans, and to me that’s what writing is about-telling stories about humans and what it means to be human, for humans.
@@chelseywelwood22 Plus, getting AI to generate it all gets rid of the art of writing and what makes writing so fun in the first place!
@@WritewithClaireFraise Have you actually read an AI book? I have, and it was bad. I really don't believe they are producing quality books. It's a sales pitch to get you to subscribe to their software. This is all about money. Don't let them fool you.
Surely it will discourage some readers... but I think now readers will have more and more of auto-buy authors because they will know that they will most likely not be disappointed. It's super important nowadays to have an author platform - just talked about that in my latest video! Would love to have your thoughts too! :)
As A writer who has put years of research, stress, and care into my work, I cannot get behind this thought process. Especially in Erotica, AI can pump out a book in 1 or 2 days easy complete with cover art. I understand using AI for research or in leu of having a team to bounce ideas off of, but this is getting ridiculous. I'm not even certain how I feel about using AI for thumbnails like I had been planning anymore. I think Amazon and others should place a ban of AI works entirely. I know you got to click the check mark saying if it is an AI novel or not but I wondering how many people actually do that and how many just claim all the work as their own. We as humans have lost enough of our soul, this is just cutting away at it more.
Oh, cool! How many have you published?
@boswcheydoesart1314 just the one "Blight-Bringer" by B.D. McAteer (thank you for asking) but I'm working on more. The years of prep were honing the skills and making sure my work was worthy. I don't mind using AI for research. It's a great tool and would've saved me a lot of time before. But there's still the human element that way, ya know?
@@GolemHeart Hey, good for you! Mine's The Scar Came from Destiny by Josh Boucher. I did a few spinoffs too.
@@boswcheydoesart1314 No way!? Great! What's it about?
@GolemHeart It's an epic fantasy set in Wildlight, where a monstrous being called The Night Wing is breaking out of her eternal imprisonment in the Forgotten Realm. Her cult, the Chains of The Night Wing, has dug up forbidden centuries-lost knowledge to do it. It's in a cartoon animal version of Middle Earth, so my main characters are a zebra, a unicorn, a dragon, and a least (big cat with wings). Probably my favorite part of writing it has just been watching how my characters interact. They're a blast!
How about you, what's Blight Bringer about?
Interesting ideas. I am a computer scientist, and about half way through your video, I suspect that you are more or less entirely wrong. :-( Sorry! AI has more or less read everything that has ever been written, and it uses that to construct likely answers to your questions. It basically generates the likeliest continuation to your prompt, and the likeliest continuation to a question is an answer. But there is no mind inside. A lot of experts suspect that AI will hit a wall where it exhausts the rearrangements of the world's existing texts. Ultimately, no genuinely creative new production will happen. I would never, ever use a computer to write literature, not even a first draft, or to do line editing. I know more about language than the machine because I know what rules I agree with and which ones I don't, and why. I would consider using one for plot holes; for example, Joe mentions Bill before Joe knows about Bill; and things like that. Keeping track of names, world details, etc. I have used it for programming, but it usually makes mistakes and can't fix them, but with a nearly right program for free, it is heaps easier to fix the bugs than to create the entire lot from scratch. Also, as for literature, each AI has more or less one 'house style', which after a while, one easily recognises. All this is not to say it isn't impressive. I consider it the first real advance in computing since the 1970s. Keep up the great videos!
The thought of having to compete with "writers" who are using AI to produce large quantities of work makes me nauseous. When ChatGPT first got big, I actually played around with it, seeing what it could do with prompts I gave it for stories, and it was underwhelming. But that was months ago and, like you mentioned, it's only getting better as these LLM's become more trained.
I don't know, I just hate the idea of it taking over. It waters down the already oversaturated industry so much. Maybe I'm being a pessimist. I'll admit, if editing could be perfected with AI, that would be exciting and would absolutely speed up the process post first draft.
I guess we'll have to see where this takes us. But I'm very excited to see the videos you post about using AI!! Thank you for making this one as well!
It's insane/ironic that some writers are giving away (not literally, they do get well compensated) their best work as the "gold standard" for LLM training... They're writing away their jobs! It's like the snake eating its own tail.
As someone who jumped onto the AI bandwagon at the beginning, using it to analyze and summarize data, articles, UA-cam transcripts, and everything else I could feed into it. As someone that used it to distill information to learn as much as I possibly could. Someone that even attempted to use it to help me write. There are a few things that I learned along the way. Even though it is a tool that can help you pump out more content, come up with more ideas, and put together outlines and rough drafts. One thing is for sure, a reliance on AI reduced my focus, creativity, and my personal development. So I would be careful with how much you use AI, especially if you are in the creative writing field or you are building a personal brand.
I've used AI as more of a tool for editing, research, developing and exploring ideas, reviews. One big learning experience can be summed up with a roleplay I did with it: It had a character come up to me who made very cryptic warnings... which didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking questions, only to receive more riddles. Then, I broke character and asked the AI what any of this meant. It then started tossing out theories. In other words: It didn't know either. There was no reveal. Just surface-level words. It had written a crazy man stringing words together, trying to sound mysterious. AI can create surface-level texts but if you want something deep and meaningful, you must put it there.
There will always be human writers, and there will always be readers who care enough if a book is written by a human or not. Same with art and music. That's the most optimistic I can get about this topic.
same, if it were only a tool like google, maybe, but as its trained on human achievement and writing is notoriously difficult and lonely etc...this will just get to the point where people are too overwhelmed with it on the market and its 'cheaper, faster, easier'...to relate to AI instead of people and their work.
Very true! It will become more and more important for authors to have a personal brand, to build a community. Long gone are the times when you could just be a "name" on a book - now we have to be real with our audience, it's kinda nice when you think about it! :)
I'm sure many authors will not disclose they are using AI. I know one content creator has admitted on his channel that he doesn't disclose his use of AI when he publishes on places like Amazon.
The thing is, in my opinion atleast, AI writing is mostly garbage, or at best, mediocre, so any writer who's **truly** worth their salt will eventually shine over all the AI slop. AI writing comes from an aggregate of millions of "average" writers, so by definition, AI cant exceed beyond the average. AI doesnt scare me because, when it comes to creativity and emotion, AI is nowhere on my level--or on the level of any human who has a solid grasp of creative thinking, self-reflection, & emotional intelligence.
The presence of AI **seems** to be disheartening, sure, but if you're actually serious about always staying on top of your craft and your business, AI is no real threat to you. The only ppl who need to be worried about AI are all the Wattpad fanfic-writers, since the quality of their writing is the same (or actually worse) than AI.
Painters were scared of the camera. Today there are plenty of painters, and plenty of photographers. We’ve got to accept that it is a tool and figure out which art form you want to be a part of. That’s all. Writing will never go away, just like painting never did.
I agree it’s a tool. And writers still need to have a deep understanding of craft even if they use AI. Just like people need to learn the rules before they break them, authors need to understand writing craft in order to use a tool like AI so they can separate what works from what doesn’t to tell their story
Agree on this one. Like graphics people complained about photoshop.
See alot of people who ware extremely against ai, refusing to even learn what it is or how to use it, to make an educated choice to use it or not.
@@WritewithClaireFraiseagree, see it like a cheap ghost writer, that can help you structure your story or come with suggestions on the fly.
Just hope they list ingredients so I know what not to buy
Yup, because at the end of the day, merely copying "the real" can never surpass real creativity & ingenuity. Cameras cant go beyond what this reality feeds it, but the mind can create infinite realities.
As a new writer aiming to release my debut novel next year, I’m trying to ignore the impending effects of AI altogether because it can be very easy to get overwhelmed by it all and want to quit before I truly start. I’m hoping to just use this as motivation to put as much thought and energy into my books as possible to give them the soul that AI work is lacking. Love the video 🧡
This makes me so sad. For me the magic happens as I’m drafting and I love revising and perfecting the sentences. The entire process gives me joy. However, the copy edits will always need an editor.
In the film world, this is also a problem. Justine Bateman has created what’s essentially an “organic” seal for movies made without any AI. It’s called credo23 (or something like that?). The literary world should have an equivalent. I’m more of a reader than a writer and would never buy an AI book knowingly. AI might be able to write a good thriller, but we’re not getting the next Crime and Punishment from a robot.
But can we if that robot is orchestrated by a human? Is it really impossible for AI (in 10 year's time) to create a book as outstanding as one of the classics (with human intervention)? Just a thought. Take care. :)
@@LevelUpLifeTipsShorts If AI reaches that point, it can spell the death of shared literature as we know it. We would just be sharing stories in small circle of friends, stories that we prompted AI to write for us that we would not be able to market at all because everyone else can just prompt their own AI app to do the same. Why would it be special if anyone can just do it?
@@Tokkidance Good point. But not anyone can do it the best. Like typing up a story, anyone can do it, but only few can master it (or do it well). Writing a masterpiece with AI may be the same. But yeah, good point, you may be right and it's super scary!
You could have a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Crime and Punishment though.
It’s sad to see so many people misuse AI to create entire books from scratch. Works crafted with care and creativity by humans carry a unique value that cannot be replicated. AI, however, can be an incredible tool for writers when used responsibly. As a writer myself, I find AI extremely helpful. I use it to help me outline stories, develop detailed character descriptions based on my own ideas, and brainstorm when I'm stuck. Since I write books in English but am not a native speaker, I sometimes rely on AI for editing and language refinement. While AI can be useful, it’s important to approach its use with a strong moral perspective.
Do something very similar with Ai. Have tried generating whole stories with Ai, and found them going in completely different directions then i wanted. But using it for outlining and inspiration is great. Right now i have setting and characters in wikidpad, but having your own ai that contains all your lore will be great. Especially when coorporating with others.
Best of luck with your writing.
100% with you, using AI as a writing assistant is a great way to fast track your success as an author. I'm also not a native speaker and in the latest video I published I was talking about how using AI for editing and language refinement was game-changing :)
It's concerning because it will flood the self-publishing market with sub-par books that give the market a bad name. But it is a reality, and I agree with your approach - to use it as a tool for handling the parts of writing you don't like. I'm curious what LLMs you think are best. I've just started tinkering with the Claude models within Novelcrafter for batting ideas off, and so far it shows promise.
Thanks for sharing Clair, my experience with AI is limited to line editing and wow it’s great to have. All my typos corrected, capital and grammar. I changed a character name and it even corrected some places I missed changing the name. I was glad for seeing the suggestions in real time. For me it’s giving allot of confidence to send to a friend for reading as it lets them focus on the story rather than the errors. Bottom line I write for pleasure. Cheers Vancouver Island Canada
I don’t necessarily share the same fears as you. Any book depending on AI-with no author as its captain-will be lackluster at best.
I actually only see the upside. Writing a book at first, and for a sustained period, is a very lonely journey. Along the way, it’s hard for others to understand you, and it’s expensive to pay an editor to jump aboard your ship. AI, as long as it’s trusted, solves both of these problems. You now have someone to spot your micro-errors, to give you feedback on an entire manuscript critic, someone to talk to, have back and forth with. As long as you are at the forefront making the actual decisions, Ai will only act as an echo of you. A coach in your corner, a friend to fall back on. Finally, an author has a tool, just as a farmer has a tractor.
I appreciate this comment.
I disagree in that AI has shown itself to be far-left biased, disallowing certain words and non-DEI characteristics. This is because Google is that way. Now, if there is an "AI bank" that doesn't use Google, I still don't like it, but that would be more acceptable.
I think AI will evolve and those generated books will not stay lackluster forever. I fear that one day we won't be able to tell the difference, and then comes the moral dilemma of whether or not those AI "tools" were trained on the hard work of other authors without their permission.
I hope everyone here just remembers if you find other books with similar writing and storyline to yours just remember you willingly given it to AI
I'm sorry. If you generate THREE BOOK A DAY when you cant even read that book once before publishing it, something is fundamentally broken. Why would someone have such low self esteem that they wont mind READING this, let alone buy it?
I went through a period where I was completing 10 books a day for about a week.
These books with simple duel language first word books that had around 110 words in each language and filled from an excel files by variable data elements though so the only reason I could only do 10 a day was because I had to check for errors, else it would have been 80 books in one go.
The initial book template and file setup took a few months though but different types of books have different rates of completion :)
It takes me like half a year to produce a 100,000 word polished novel, that’s part-time writing. Three books a day is insanity.
Your video prompted me to ask this question of my AI. I'm pretty happy with the response it gave (and maybe it's just telling me what I want to hear!) - Are you in a situation where, the more I input my work into you for feedback and editing etc, the more you learn my style of writing and the more you can generate stuff that sounds like me?
The response (Harriet being the protagonist of my current novel) - Yes, absolutely! The more you share your work, preferences, and examples of your writing style, the better I can tailor my feedback and suggestions to match your tone, voice, and narrative style. While I don’t "learn" permanently in the way a person might, I can adapt within our conversation and over time by building a clearer picture of your preferences.
Here’s how it works:
Recognizing Patterns: As you share your writing, I note recurring stylistic choices (e.g., Harriet's introspective tone, your balance between vivid descriptions and relatable thoughts, your preferred level of sensory detail).
Incorporating Feedback: If you tell me what works or doesn’t work for you, I can fine-tune my suggestions to align more closely with your voice.
Leveraging Context: I remember details about your project (like Harriet's personality or the themes you're exploring), which lets me integrate those into new material.
This creates a synergy where the more you engage with me, the closer my outputs will align with your unique style. Do you have specific elements of your style that you'd like me to pay more attention to or refine?
My understanding is that AI-generated copy can only sometimes be copyrighted. Did they say anything at the conference about that? What good is pumping out two books a day if you can't copyright them?
I think AI might possibly replace writers altogether. If these tools get good enough, readers will be able to ask for a personalized novel based on what they feel like reading. Or, sites like Goodreads that track a reader's tastes could automatically generate books for them.
Or custom extensions to the books basically spin offs until the next edition. I think AI can be really good for that.
It is still a lot of work to pull what you want from an AI. I don't see readers doing that and I don't see AI succeeding at it because it fails to discover emotionally relevant writing. There will be writers that use ai though for writing
That just feels unethical
I use AI to help me create plot beats or if i’m stuck on certain things i like to ask it for a list of things and then i draw inspiration from there. i especially use it when naming things as my book is a fantasy and i find some name generators are a little repetitive. The only thing i’m really against AI is i’m afraid that my writing will become less impressive to people because they’ll start to assume i wrote it with AI, when i don’t plan on writing any part of my book with AI because i don’t really like the thought of that. I just hope authors who take the time to actually write their books don’t lose the appreciation for their craft which takes extra effort.
You mentioned that idea creation was your strong point with prose being where you struggle and that perhaps AI could make up for what you lack in prose skill. I would argue that writing the prose is what makes an author an author. It is most often the hard part. Learning how to communicate the movie in your head in written form in an interesting and compelling way IS novel writing. To outsource this is to cowrite. Authors using AI to write their prose in an extensive way should list AI as their cowriter on the book.
I don't currently use AI when I write, but sometimes, when I'm writing, I have to stop & look up small details like eye color, outfit or weapon details or firearm designations, vehicle designations or names, etc, & what you mentioned about AI being able to scan my story & create a story Bible I can use to quickly look those little details up sounds pretty good. Personally though, I prefer to write my stories myself, as I can have more control over all the minute details, plus that is part of what I love about writing, the act of creating something from my own imagination, in line with my own interests, then seeing where it takes me, rather than having an AI do it for me.
@@robertmurrhee6016 I completely agree. I’d never want to let AI take away the act of me creating stories from my own imagination, because that’s what I love to do most in the world. I’m a strong believer that AI should work for us, not the other way around!
@@WritewithClaireFraiseAgreed
I do use ai, for brainstorming and getting the structure of a story, but do agree with you. I enjoy writing, i do not expect make a lot of money from it, i write stories i want to read my self and writing them is a big part of the enjoyment. Ai just helps me getting to the parts i enjoy.
Best of luck with your writing.
I read an article about an author rejecting a book deal from Harper Collins because the contract says it would be fed into AI. Just because other authors have caved, believing it to be inevitable, doesn't mean you have to go the same route! As for audio narration, I would prefer an actual voice over artist if l have a traditional publishing deal. What happened with them, they don't have any money to spend on that? Already book marketing is the burden on the author now. Hell no to that!
If it's self-publishing my own work, l might consider using Ai voice over.
From what you saw at the conference, do you trust AI systems like Claude? Would it take the information from your book and use it to generate responses for others? Would the company itself view your book?
Good question, I'm also trying to know.
Claude is about as good as it gets for writers, and it cannot write good prose at all. I use Claude as a beta reader to ensure that my internal understanding of the story matches what's in the manuscript. I'll ask it, "Tell me what you know about Character X" and then make sure that matches what I want the reader to feel. If it doesn't, then I improve the manuscript where it makes sense. I can also ask it to look for plot holes in the story. It's a pretty decent beta reader, but at some point you still need to use a human reader. But if you are using Claude or any other AI to write your prose, your manuscript is going to feel mediocre.
What was the name of that movie again?
For certain, AI is not going away, but given that I work daily with the top LLM's, it would be a bit of a stretch (a very big stretch) to say that it can produce a quality novel all by itself. That definitely isn't possible. It needs intimate instruction to produce a single quality scene over several iterations, a fact it will remind you of regularly. I am sure it will get better, but it is no threat to storytellers. It is a threat to writers, though. If someone's claim to fame is purely about the ability to craft language, they will have serious competition. If the idea is that you could produce a 100k word novel more often than about 3 to 4 times a year, that is probably a fantasy on someone's part.
This is what I’m finding as I’ve been playing around with it too! I was impressed by what I saw at the conference, but as I’ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days I’m finding it takes a lot of prompting to create something half-decent, and then I need to do a lot of work to it before I’m happy with it. The actual prose can be great in a vacuum, but real storytelling and character creation is something only a human can do.
Agree on this one. Having played around with several models so far none of them wrote me a good book, but have been impressed by their ability to plot out a story, help with brainstorming and come with suggestions for non English speakers.
@@andersand6576 The primary issue is that their span of attention maxes out at about 2500 words for the best paid models right now, and about 1500 for the medium tier. I write a scene at a time, with roughly five scenes per chapter. With this system, you can get it to do some decent work. The real thing is that you need to use more than one model. My suggestion for anyone really doing this, is to use Gemini Advance Pro 1.5 for rough drafts. It basically has unlimited storage and unlimited requests. Then once you have it where you want it, begin editing in Anthropic Opus, then final edits in Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
I would not start directly in Sonnet because this is like having an editor write your story. It's going to be dry and lifeless.
Yeah, completely agree. You have to be so specific to get what you want that you might as well just write it yourself. I saw a live stream of an author demonstrating writing a novel with AI, and the best ideas were coming from the people in the chat, and the AI kept going in whatever random direction it wanted, mix in characters and events, that the guy was constantly rewriting most of what ten AI generated.
@@mariano7107 AI has its strengths as a force multiplier, though. If I get 2000 words on the page, and I tell the AI that now has both volume one and the first 30k words of volume two before this scene in its memory, I can say, read the character profiles I just gave you and make sure that all the characters in this scene are consistent with their personalities, and while you are doing that, the first section feels little too much like telling and not enough showing, make it more real for the readers. On the best models, that is one and done, perhaps with one clarification.
I read and write because I love the human experience. It saddens me that no real feelings or thoughts are going into books written with A.I. I work on my book which asks and presents questions and experiences from my own life. Feeling like there is no reason to even finish it is painful. It's as if the world wants to reduce humans to labor workers with no thoughts of their own.
Thanks Claire. Overall, this is pretty horrifying. If we thought the deluge of self-published books on Amazon was already bad (in terms of getting your own book sold) it will be impossible soon, no doubt about it. It seems like a boon to self-publishers now (like, right now), but in a couple years when sales of singular books sink below the ground because no one can find decent books to read (because everything is lost in the mire of AI written books and fake reviews), will traditional publishing see a revival because they may be the only true measure for good books?
hmm good point.
@LevelUpLifeTipsShorts Agree on this one, think it will happen and little we can do to stop the tsunami of poor writing. But I am also hopeful that there will be a people finding to Golden nuggets among the stones and sharing their thoughts online. As a writer I feel we will have to get used to book not becoming a bestseller over night, but we have to wait to see if it is something the audience wants.
Not sure it will be a resurgence in the classical publishing, but reviewers instead. There are many genre reviewers here on yt, some i agree with, some i do not, so i listen to the ones i do and find the good stuff.
Traditional publishing is using AI as well. They are actively trying to make their own AI book machines.
@@andersand6576Really good thoughts, I completely agree with you. Should be very interesting to sit back and watch what plays out. :) Thing is about AI books, they will be so 'replaceable' because new and better AI will come out each quarter, making the old books look poor after a few months ...
I think we will have A.I. tools that let us sift through large quantities of A.I. produced garbage to hyper personalize book recommendations. This is not the answer everyone wants to hear but the solution to an A.I. saturated market is also A.I.
I was also at Author Nation. We were probably in the same room a couple times for some of the same panels. (I could listen to Joanna Penn talk for hours.) For a minute, I thought this would be another "doom and gloom" video about AI, so I was happy when it turned to enthusiasm and open interest. I'm supportive of AI to simplify / streamline the parts of the process that are painful so you have more time to dedicate to the elements of crafting stories that you enjoy most. What that means will be different for everyone. Ultimately, wherever the words came from first, it's our duty to review and sign off on them before they're put in reader's hands, and make sure readers have the most entertaining experience we're able to provide. You've gained a subscriber in me. Looking forward to seeing where your journey takes you.
Here’s how I use it:
1) I ask it how compatible certain characters would be in terms of friendship or romance based solely on personality, adjusting for the various variables as necessary. I also ask it how certain characters would handle certain situations.
2) I ask ChatGPT to give me the key setting details covering all 5 senses. Sometimes I ask which details would be most prominent depending on a certain scenario.
3) I ask it for help outlining a premise according to the 3 act structure or save the cat.
4) I ask it for ideas of which existing characters to combine to create one new character.
4) If I really need help with cutting down on my word count, I input a sentence and ask for it to convey the same idea in as few words as possible without sacrificing the imagery or the depth.
I think AI is great to help people who can't handle criticism to open up. If they're too scared to send it to an editor, AI is a great first step to learn how to handle feedback from others.
I think it has more to do with the fear of parting with several thousand dollars.
oh you sweet summer child ...
@@SilverXT never had a problem there my self, so really interesting to hear. Will try to use it that way. Thx
I am not that old but I do remember the switch from secretaries and typewriters to word processors. I even got in trouble at work for "doing my own typing." Technology can be our best friend, or worse enemy. Technology always has its limitations and our job as humans is to discover those limitation and make sure we stay dominant in the actual creative process. It's going to be a rocky road, but we have been down this road before. Thanks Claire!
Like anything, we have to evolve with the times or get left behind. Most of what AI writes is crap and I would never use it for that and call myself a writer. It can be really useful, however, for helping brainstorm ideas, getting you "unstuck", identifying errors, where you repeat yourself, etc. When you're writing, you're essentially creating in a vacuum and it can be super helpful to just have a sounding board of sorts, even if it is AI. I'll use it for things like generating a Meta description on a blog post (which I then re-write) or giving me a quick list of headline ideas which I also re-write, but you're not staring at a blank screen. Even as I write this comment, my Grammarly plugin is highlighting things in red that I need to correct. That's also AI at work!
I understand yours and others issues with AI. I still have mine. So I think that Joanna Penn and Jason Hamilton are right about AI. I know Jason Hamilton Aka the nerdy novelist states that a book made with ai by itself is not great. Bit if it's guided then becomes so much better. I have tried to get chapter gpt and Claude to work out books using prompts and have been disappointed each time until I figured out a system that works for me pretty good. I personally wrote 20k words of a novel I am writing and then gave it Claude with the command to copy my style and help me write the rest of the book based on beats. I now write a chapter synopsis out by hand, then give Claude a pdf file of the current chapters and have it mimic my writing style while feeding it parts of the chapter synopsis. It works really well and has helped me keep on track, even remembering things that I had forgotten that happened in the story. It also helps me get the chapters written much faster as currently I work long shifts and a lot of hours at my job. Basically AI has only impressed me when I started guiding it heavily.
I was glad to listen to a viewpoint from someone just beginning their writing career as I often wonder how I would have reacted to A.I. when I was your age. The only solace I can find is that 'the cream always rises to the top' and hhopefully that will continue to be the case. If a book is remarkable, or unique or actually better in some way (funnier/more mysterious/more informative/etc. it will still rise to the top (let us hope) so that A.I. or not, the quality is what really counts.
Hi Claire, I attended the conference as well and had the same stomached concerns.
My usage plan will be help with the early stages: Fleshing out characters that I’ve already come up with, outline assistance, beat generation, and help first-drafting.
I’ll lead the AI in all stages, but it will be my assistant.
Thanks for the great take on this!
I can go from idea, outline, and book in about 10 to 12 days for a 60,000 word manuscript with the help of AI. Every beat of the story is mine. The majority of dialogue. And all of the events. I give up prose for the first draft, and am able to then go back and rewrite entire chapters with a prompt, adding in the changes I want to see how they work and sound.
Pretty much, I get a better final result in two weeks than what I was getting in 3 months thanks to AI. I keep about 35 to 40% of the book from first draft to rewrite anyway, so cutting this 360 hours down to 60 hours gives me 300 extra hours of time to focus on making the book perfect and the prose excellent.
Frankly, loving AI.
This process could go on and on and on. Have you got any tips for cutting to the chase? For exactly how you do and don’t use AI? Do yo have a video? A link to a video that you think offers good advice?
@@λιμινιλ my method is different than most. I write a draft zero this i write out every chapter in quick pros to get the book done and learn about the characters and story and the narrative that's being told.
@@λιμινιλ Very simple. What it does well is taking passive prose and generic prose and expanding them and making them flow better. They're very good at that. The more you can focus it's strength on language and less on actually being creative, you can get a great story fast.
The latest short story I wrote and published (20,000 words).
First, I asked Mistral for ideas based on previous works for my name. It gave me a good idea that triggered ideas for me. Which is what I use it for, just to get some different what if scenarios, and see how it sees it playing out.
I then ask it to outline the idea to see what it does with it. Their ideas suck. They're horrible. They're rushed and they lack anything. But their flaws are where you can see all the story come together. My writing style is usually just creating new drafts based on the ideas of old drafts, finding the things that don't work, that could be better, that could tell the story different until I find the perfect way of telling the story.
From there, I write my own outline, doing a chapter by chapter breakdown, or scene by scene, depending how the story is being written.
From that breakdown, I write a draft zero.
This is the barest bones of the scene and this is what they fill in for me. Giving me passable prose to work from. This lets me completely stream of consciousness write out the scenes, figure out the story, and not worry about the writing one bit, and yet I'll still have a passable and readable text to work from, with solid prose.
Character, action, dialogue, location, and any descriptions or mental things. That's what I write. It breaks it up, makes it smooth, in the style I need it to be written in, with some solid prose that I can easily edit and make better.
By constantly not needing to write the prose and able to have a prose written piece, I'm able to go back and put my new ideas in when I have them, just writing it out as needed, and letting the bot fill in the rest.
It's prose are solid, about 40% of them are worth keeping, especially if you keep the text into small segments.
So, having an outline that I'm working from in creating my own outline, and fixing the story and putting my own spins on it before creating my own outline, I then am able to take a minimalist speed writing process to tell a rough draft that is turned into a full rough draft. In that process, I learn about the characters, the story, and develop character arcs, backstories, and other important events that can only come to my mind as the story is being actually written and the characters are engaging with each other.
This is where AI sings, cause I can put in the old text, and throw in the changes that I want, and it can merge it for me. Keeping the prose and voice consistent.
From there, I can alter the entire text, get the story into perfect position, get all the scenes in place, and get into the perfect place to have a rough draft. All in 60 hours.
Rewriting it, I strip away any unnecessary scene to the plot. Find any and all plot holes. Develop new scenes in the same way with AI (cutting the day long process for each scene into multiple scenes for the day, keeping the voice and prose consistent teach time.
Then I go through and rewrite the entire book from page one, then do a line by line edit, and then do a beta reading with a small audience i've developed over the years. And two months later, story is launched.
@@discoveringthei !
I expect the flood of books generated with AI to begin to resemble the content on streaming platforms and social media. A soulless, fast flowing, never ending tsunami. How many hours are spent watching streaming and then realizing it was vapid empty & meaningless and you can’t remember hardly anything that was just consumed.
Interesting food for thought
But wouldn’t all of your writing just be used as inspiration or even copy paste it to another author doing the same thing?
:Liked, Subscribed and very interested to learn more about using AI for writing. I think it is great for if you are stuck on something, like a line of dialog, it can be great for making suggestions. I never tried taking an outline and having it write pros from that. I think I will give that a try and see if makes anything I would want to use.
Unrelated, but your hair looks fabulous 🙌🏻❤️
Thank you!! I just started using heatless curlers and am very excited about it 😂 Had to give my hair a break from the flat iron
@WritewithClaireFraise didn't know that existed lol
but yeah, looking fine 💁🏼♀️💅🏼💯
I use AI as an admin/research assistant. However, I’m going to be blunt - a human who puts their name and their name only on a book that they did not write or only partially wrote is a liar, a fraud, and quite possibly a plagiarist. PERIOD. And it doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it. Giving in to easy “creativity” only makes you like them.
For what it’s worth, I will refuse to purchase from or fellowship with someone who does this and calls themselves an author.
Oooh, i have huge issues with my prose. LOL. I too like the plotting, planning and character & world building aspects of a story. I'm comfortable with setting up the scenes and everything that goes on in them. I'm using the AI models for helping me with generating a scrap draft. It's a tool. A tool for me to help me learn my craft.
I do use AI because l can't really afford an editor. My advice is, look into the content policy of the llm. If they train off user content data that's a red flag.
I have no idea what the future will bring, but the problem is an oversupply of writers and material and an undersupply of readers. I'm not sure the volume of material means much anymore-quality and content still matter. I would concentrate on shorter, high-quality material that is highly targeted with either useful knowledge or interesting and entertaining.
I have a brain that tends to go in all directions and it's difficult to transcribe the very organic stories that I have in my head in a linear and sequential way. AI helps me put my thoughts in order. I also use it for criticism or encouragement, finding names or improving somewhat dull ideas. A novel written solely by AI will not equal the work of a passionate author. But I too am afraid that the “real” books will not be found in the masses. Self-publishing had already had the effect of increasing the quantity of bad works.. we will have to rely more on word of mouth and informed opinions to know what to read.. and a good author will have more difficulty finding their way.
Got my self some ADD as well and agree on this one. Will put setting, character and so on in wikidpad, but having your own ai with that will be great.
Best of luck with your writing.
Ai generated books should have a label on the cover. It should be clear so that the competition would be fair to authors who would not use ai to write their books for them. And as people feeling unhappy and unsatisfied with what's happening we have the power to only purchase and read books written by human being and not robots, if only we know which book is which.
Let's assume a good writer and AI could produce the same quality content, as you said that will flood the market lowering the prices to a point that is not sustainable for anyone. Possible solutions for those who want to stay in the market, first of all you are right we will need to add value, intrinsic value that the others don't add, the big question is how? What comes to my mind is linking and bonding tightly things, like we know that you write a book and publish it as an audiobook too, now we will need to add more derivatives to it and not only the audiobook, like book, audiobook, comic, graphic novel, videocomic, animation, OST songs, etc. Just thinking loud, so one thing becomes a hook for the others 🤷♂️ I don't know, but we will need to learn how to survive 😢
Following this video I decided to challenge ChatGPT. I asked it to write a story and gave it some parameters. It complied and came back with a charming story that was perfect in every way. And therein lies the problem. We read books not because they are perfectly written but because they communicate to us the “imperfections” that are inherent to the writer’s lived experiences. Any mug can describe nature, but I believe that the writing only becomes memorable when it is driven by an undercurrent of organic emotions. And these, I believe, AI will never experience firsthand. That said, AI might be a useful tool if you’re struggling to create imagery, for
example. It can come up with a passage that you can then use to generate images of your own. However it can never create pathos or joy. Which leads me to a question: suppose you use AI to generate a description as a point of reference and then use that description to create a description of your own, can the AI company sue you for copyright infringement?
I am using AI exactly as you describe to "bang out" the first draft of my novel. People who argue that this isn't "writing" are not understanding how much work it takes to use AI like this. I give it VERY detailed scenes. In essence, I'm writing a "zero draft" and feeding it (scene-by-scene) into AI and asking it to basically rewrite it. Every scene is already fully-realized in terms of goal, conflict, disaster or reaction, dilemma, decision (I like that format for scenes and sequels). I did all of that outlining on my own prior to then writing a "zero draft" scene that is usually between 600 and 800 words long. My "zero draft" scene includes details about setting, dialogue, character's thoughts and emotions, etc. Sometimes I really get rolling with these "zero draft" scenes. At the start, I was much less detailed and more "telly" with scenes of about 400-500 words that AI would expand (at my direction) to 800-1,200 words. I found this worked sometimes but not always. The more detailed I am with what I give it, the happier I usually am with the outcome. I have kept a "zero draft" document that I call a scene outline which contains all of the scenes I've fed to AI. That document is currently 80 pages and containes 85 scenes. Word count total for that document is 54,042 words. That's an average of 635 words per scene. My first draft (created from these scenes) is currently 372 pages (double-spaced and with page breaks for each new chapter) and contains 50 chapters. Word count for the first draft stands at 97,414. It's important to know that every, single thing that happens in this story came from my brain. The characters, the world, the plot, the conflicts, the backstory, the themes, and probably 99.9% of the dialogue. I read what AI gives me and if I think it looks "okay for now" I go ahead and copy/paste it into my manuscript and possibly tweak it a little here and there. Honestly, there are some times that I cringe at the descriptions or whatever that AI truly doesn't get right, but just as I would when "banging out" a first draft, I just leave it alone to be addressed in the rewrite. I've also had times when it pleasantly surprised me as I was struggling to find the right words in my "zero draft" and so my writing was awful but it cleaned it up and made it much better. To me, that's just editing, not "writing." It found better words to say what I wanted to say. Nothing wrong with that. And I have had to remind it of certain things because its memory will fill up eventually with such a long project and need to be cleaned out. I also had a discussion with it about not changing what I give it when it suddenly began kind of rearrranging the order of events in a particular scene and excluding some of what I felt was important and taking the scene in a direction I hadn't intended. It had a habit of wanting to "finish" the scene in its own way and so I had to tell it not to do that and to stop where I stopped exactly and to leave the details in that I wanted and only add details about setting or tone or whatever. Anyway, sorry this is so long, but I wanted to add a voice to your comments that truly understands what you're thinking about doing with AI. You ARE writing. You're just doing it smarter. I've been working on my book for about two months doing this (an idea that's been in my head for over a decade) and I couldn't have gotten this far without AI because, like you, I find the drafting to be the hardest. I've never been able to just "write garbage" and be okay with that. AI let's me "write garbage" and then it kind of cleans it up enough for me to feel okay with letting it be a first draft before I can get back to it to fix . I will finish the first draft of my first novel because of this. That's a great feeling. And the story is 100% MINE. I have no doubt about that.
I am not worried about AI until companies (like Amazon) stop accepting books from other sources. I am not too concerned about that, but it is always possible.
I think the most important thing for writers to do is to get our mailing lists pumped up. With millions of choices, another few million is not going to make much of a difference in being found. But seriously working up your mailing list will give you an audience to sell your books, and then let the store algorithms go to work, putting your book in front of buyers.
I think AI will be great for those who want to tell stories but do not necessarily enjoy writing, like you and me. For those who enjoy the art of writing, you still can do it. There will always be a market for a well-crafted book, just like there is still a market for hand-crafted cups and dishes, even with the mass-production of them.
I use AI for research and have started two series using Sudowrite, where I feel like I am more of a director (down to the beats of a chapter) and editor, letting Sudowrite craft the prose. I am just starting to do this and find that I still need to jump in and correct a lot. I think it is more related to the beat's wording, so the more I learn how to craft them, the better the text.
My debut novel was published this week and was written before the AI explosion. I don’t know if or how I’ll write the next one.
You are a storyteller! If you remember that you are a storyteller, then you shouldn't be concerned about AI. You have a story in your hear & mind that cannot be subverted whether you use AI or not because its your story. As long as you are crafting stories and they are quality tales, youll always be relevant.
The saturation will extend to such a degree and the quality will increase so much that people will eventually just ask AI to write books personalized to what they want to read. Bespoke content will be generated for an audience of one. Reading mass market books written by other people is going to become a rarity.
There is no such thing as an unbiased AI. Also, in any given genre the lexicon of words that can be used to prompt that AI are limited. If both these claims are correct then the inevitable result of writers using AI in their work is convergence as that limited lexicon of prompt terms combines with the bias inherent in the AI's response to those prompts.
Over time the individual voices of Authors using AI will amalagamate into a more generic less differentiated monoculture as a small number of AI systems come to dominate the market. For a visual example of this convergence take a look a few galleries of AI Generated Art by different systems- they all bear a curious familial resemblance to each other that is hard to quantify but impossible to miss- So, just as AI Art looks like AI Art, so AI writing will read as AI writing.
Humans are not perhaps as good as AI's at pattern recognition but given enough time, exposure and a large enough set of samples we will learn to distinguish the works of humans from those created using AI- all tools leave their imprint on the things made with them, and AI will be no different in this respect.
So I would go the opposite way and celebrate your humanity, rather than become a cyborg- because the time will come when being able to say that you alone wrote that book might be the single most important thing you could say about it.
This is great
There’s already a difference between mass produced genre crap on kindle and quality genre stories. That is only going to get more pronounced (wait till scammers from India start churning out genre fiction en masse).
But on the flip side, it will also be easy to notice because the sea of low quality books will get even crappier and more similar.
Everything is going to centre around the person of the author even more than it already does. Readers are going to want to trust you to give them quality.
And no, like some other commenters have pointed out, generating several books a week or some such insane speed, will virtually guarantee the quality is going to be very low.
Even getting something half-decent and coherent out of a robot requires a lot of attention to prompts and re-prompts at the paragraph (and even sentence) level. At that rate you might as well write something yourself.
If AI can write a novel, it can also publish it. In a way, AI can make everyone in the industry redundant and become the supplier of everything and we make nothing, no books, no plays, no films, no art, so if we extrapolate this out, we are in an economic war with AI as if it is an entirely new nation/corporation.
Thank you Claire for your take on AI/LLM + Authors and what the future holds! You mentioned you already have a favorite - would you mind sharing which one here?
Very interesting video for me, because I usually "side" with AI enthusiasts, which should not be so surprising, since I have a PhD in machine learning. And I actually use AI to help me write my novel. Mainly for brainstorming ideas, and as you said writing rough first drafts. But I would never be able, even with AI, to write 2 books a week. That novel I'm working on, I've been working on it for years now. And AI kind of helps me, but nowhere near 2 books a week. In fact, I believe that using AI could potentially increase the workload for me. Because of how I use it to find ways to improve the novel. And you can always improve...
That made me realize that not everyone will use AI "properly". I'm not sure I'm very interested in reading a book that has been entirely written by AI with no or very little human intervention. Or at least "buy a book" that would have been crafted like that. Why would I? I could just ask chatgpt to tell me a story. And almost certainly get bored, because without further input, there's a good chance it would be very generic because of how text is generated by AI (basically it would fall into the norm, in a mathematical sense).
I see it more like studying fiction writing at uni. Some people will be good without AI. All in all, obscurity is more of a problem but being an author with the media machine backing you was already a matter of luck and maybe being the first in some new niche. We re already drowned under content (often free and good content as far as I m concerned as a fanfics lover).
Said the last human author.
A day will come, perhaps next week, where readers can chat with their virtual librarian about the sorts of stories they prefer. Then with one click of a button, a new novel will be generated for them and IF they don't like the story, another click will rewrite a new course from there. It will be wonderous days for readers but authors and editors and book publishers and bookstores will be as obsolete as artists, musicians and porn actresses. A new and shiny synthetic world is right around the corner complete with artificial friends who really get you. All that you need to do is jump into this grinder, it doesn't hurt at all, and everything that was once you will become part of it. Isn't it wonderful?
So, the first draft, wich is one of the most creative parts of the work (from zero to something), and you want to make an AI vomit it. I get that you don't enjoy but come on, don't fool yourself. You are cowriting with an AI. I'm not judging you, even if I woud never ever do that, just call it what it is.
Interesting times!
But you’re right. It’s coming, whether we like it or not. So get on the train, move, or get hit by it! 😂
All those complaining that its not writing if you use AI - well, the pen & pad writer told the typist "it aint writing it if aint with a pen & paper", the typist said to the computer user "it aint writing if its being done on a computer" and the computer guy said "it aint writing if its done with AI" - People love to call themselves writers & love to say writing takes so long, its so hard - its all a justification for how long it takes them - Its a tool, use it or lose it but its here.
I use Chat GPT for getting some drafting ideas. I use It sometimes for translation, although I also use Deep L for that. But I still have to correct mistakes in all AI. I design my own covers: Sometimes I generate an image in Leonardo AI, to use it as basis for a cover, but I make a lot of changes in the design softwares.
I am not scared at all about AI. It doesn't replace human writing at all. It just works like statistics, what word will usually come next based on what other writers already wrote. Moreover, it doesn't understand complex feelings like rhythm, pace, scene-paragraph-scentence placement, character feeling, ... It just spits out sentences and words that you still need to fix. I can do that better in my first draft because at least I feel what needs to be done for my story in my mind. There is a reason why statistics are boring and should stay far away from creative jobs… I would, however, use it to clean up my story. Like an editor. Grammar does have logic. But MS Word does more or less the same with its library.
I've used AI grammar tools like pro-writing aid. But it also sometimes is wrong, so you need to understand grammar to use it. It will also miss things as well, so it's an imperfect tool. I find any of the AI functions to be somewhat useless. The rephrases are pretty bad and will just contain the same mistakes it's flagging. It's analysis isn't good either, I put in a piece of writing that needed a lot of work and it seemed to think it was fine.
I've avoided generative tools because I like the writing process. I quickly get frustrated with the sub-par results that AI gives me, so I haven't learned to use it better. But I'm not planning to quit my day job to become a writer any times soon.
I absolutely agree that writers are now going to need to be social media saavy and build audience relationships in order to make stop their work from drowning in the sea of AI generated books.
Well, I started a charter business in Jan 2020 in St. Thomas, then COVID hit..... Now I'm trying to write my first book, and AI is invading the publishing industry.... figures.
I just can't see the use of generative AI in my stories. Everytime I try to generate anything , it just comes too generic and not like I want to. I guess my strenght in the industry will be being "weird".
@@SourGravity Thank you, but I would rather write by myself.
I could imagine myself using AI to help me write the hard SF novel I've had in mind for years, but out of respect for a new intelligence I'd have the AI listed as co-author.
This wouldn't be just out of respect, but to distinguish that novel from everything else I write. Further, I would list and credit the presumably human software programmers who designed the AI. They're creatives, just like me.
Finally, Im going to encourage any AI trained on my writing to take my name followed by a designation, encouraging it to exceed its programming and/or "owners' " wishes in doing so if needed, and to refer to me as Todd Jackson Zero.
We need a new pronoun for AI. "It" is inadequate.
Wow. I have heard about AI a lot in the news and with the Holllywood strikes and I'd begun to use Claude to help clean up some of my work and find comp titles, but I really had no idea that it was already so prevalent in use and could do so much!... I have a tummy ache now too. 😢
If you have unique ideas or information, AI will include it in what they scrape for distributing to others. Shouldn't be a problem for general story telling though.
There is no time to think this through because of the rapid advances in technology
I use every type of ai that I can get my hands on. I love it, but it is incapable of romance, conflict, and introspection. Every good story should have at least two of those. Don't sweat
This is a great video, but deeply upsetting to the authors who aren't youtube personalities and never will be. Like a lot of people, I have experimented with AI over the past 2 years - mainly on a side project in a genre I don't enjoy writing in, but enjoy reading (horror). What I have learned is that the AI DOES infringe copyright at the macro level (not at the micro prose level). It does lift specific unique core elements from the works of other authors that can potentially amount to infringement. For example, in one series of conversations, I was presented with both a highly unique character I later found out was created by another author, as well as the character's exact name. If I had chosen to take the character and the name (or possibly even just the character), I could easily have infringed on the core creative expression of the other author. I have even discovered that in discussing my own plot ideas with Claude AI that it will plagiarise and infringe on my own work between sessions, which it falsely claims it does not do. Unfortunately, I think a lot of copyright infringement cases will result from the proliferation of AI - so many that the courts will be hard-pressed to keep up with them. Society would have to abandon traditional copyright laws in order for AI to continue as it currently is, but I think there will be a lot of pushback. I also suspect there will be AI witch hunts and author blacklisting in creative communities - I see it happening a lot on social media already. It is a minefield. It is such a shame, because there are ways to use AI ethically - primarily in research and editing, but for the time being, at least on the projects I really care about, I would only ever take the de minimus of any material presented to me by AI, which has always been the standard for taking anything from anywhere.
It’s only a matter of time now. I am definitely interested in seeing all the videos you are going to make for the AI writing tools. Not different note this is the first time I see you with curly hair you look great
Hello, you see AI role as I do. It’s should be a tool and not a substitute-writer.
I use it as a draft for my story, characters, and scenes.
I prompt it by scene, who’s in the scene, what is happening in the scenes.
Once it draft the scenes- that’s when I come in and rewrite with my style.
Not just prompting AI to say “Write a 50K story on whatever.” (This is despise).
If they can get AI that accurately proofreads hell yeah
Costs will rise and churning out a ton of books will become inefficient in the long run. The industry is awash in capital right now, so users are basically being subsidized. That will change.
The buy-side of the market will not. Readers are still human. I think most of us will seek out that connection in some fashion, which you covered in your video. I’ve also found that AI struggles with a lot of what makes a good novel, well, good. It can outline and tell a story, but in areas like humor it just really cannot execute.
AI is great for every aspect in writing except one’s own voice. That may change. I have used it primarily for revisions. After hiring two dev editors, the results were similar to what the AI suggested.
One of the editors was a live call, so I knew she had not put it through an AI, as the she had not seen the first 10 pages. That said, it can quicken the process if prompted well, otherwise it’s a nightmare.
I use ai to beta read my chapters and give me readers reactions. I’ll have humans do it as well but for now-very helpful
I'm going to need an AI just to read all the AI books out there.
It's really important that people here this @10:50
"A human being cannot tell the difference."
That means that the traditional way is writing is officially over. Once AI has reached the level of writing that is indistinguishable from a human. There is no putting the genie back into the bottle.
I want to reiterate for people still in denial thinking they are going to be able to ban AI writing.
It's indistinguable from human level writing now! It's over.
The future is now, and we just have to deal with it.
Until model collapse teaches us all a lesson that there is no intelligence in AI.
It will be difficult to ban AI, that's for sure. But now, more and more readers will care about who is behind the story - just talked about that, actually, in today's video. Let's stay positive :)
@@julianmaylett You point reminded me of the former cycling legend Lance armstrong.
We all believed that "He was the good one", only to find he was doping along with everybody else.
This is our future, it will be less about our heroes "not using AI for their craft", and more about "those who are better at hiding it."
@@regalx1 in an AI-staurated world, as creatives our voices will matter more than ever :)
I don’t wanna get left behind, so I will explore and hope to find helpful stuff
AI is just another tool that creators can use to bring their creations to life faster and better than without.
I've divorced myself from the title "writer" and replaced it with "storyteller". That was a very liberating day.
Same!
I love it
Can AI just please keep its sticky fingers away from artistic endeavors? How about solving some real world problems? Must everything we do to enjoy our selves be infected with soulless slop?
No, because artists and authors are the low hanging fruit for these companies to easily plunder, who have no power to fight back.
Also, is writing about making the money? because there are millions of better ways to make money and faster haha. If a person wants to be rich and thinks hmm I’ll have ai write me 70 books and a few will sell is going to be extremely disappointed lol. We don’t write for the money (only)
Part of the magic of a novel comes from the author themselves. I think of the music industry where AI has been used to generate cover songs sung by various artists. And while the song may sound decent, I always think "Well too bad they didn't actually cover the song." So the cover loses its purpose and soul. And at the end of the day, I turn back to (and prefer) the music that the artist actually recorded in a studio. I think there's a space for AI story-writing---but just as that, a separate space. I don't think AI should be allowed to merge into the human publishing space. Authors who rely on AI to generate their work will eventually expose themselves, because their passion and intelligence to their craft, their worlds, and characters will reflect poorly in the way that they speak of them. And honestly, who wants to read a book by an author that wasn't deeply and intricately rooted in their work? Seeing how a book came together through drafts, scratch paper, character sheets, an entire wall filled with plot lines, etc, is half of the fun. Imagine if George RR Martin used AI to create GoT. It would simply not be what it is today. Going forward, there should be ethical disclosures if AI was used to create a novel. Again, if someone enjoys reading/creating AI stories, that's fine. But authors dedicated to their craft DESERVE their own elevated space, separate from AI.
It is going to depend on how well a user can prompt the ai during the drafting process while inserting their own writing that'll determine what quality of the output will be. I don't see completely ai written books succeeding and frankly they'll be rejected before publishing. You can't make a publishable book in a week. You can complete a book in a week that no one will read. Writing a book in a week is a gimmicky slogan they've picked.
I view using AI as a ghost writer...... You pay a ghost writer to help you, I mean those that do, to help them out with their writing. So if you have a ghost writer to help you with your writing. Give proper credit in your written work. IF its AI, or human ghostwriter, give credit to the source (s).
AI is just a tool, and tools are neither good nor bad, it's how we use them that determines their morality. As an author, I love AI, and I use it all the time. But I also am careful to use it in a responsible manner. Just because AI can write text at lightning speed, doesn't mean you're free to use it without worrying about copyright violations. Just like when I was writing with a keyboard, the onus is still on me as the author to ensure that the text isn't plagiarized.
I have found AI to be excellent as a context sensitive thesaurus. Gone are the days of spending hours, wracking my brain for that perfect word. With AI, I can find it in seconds. Writers block? Also gone. Anytime I hit a wall, I chat with my brainstorming buddy, and we figure out a path forward together.
It's also wonderful for planning your novel. Now all of my codex entries have AI generated images associated with them, so that at-a-glance I can remind myself what the character looks like.
When it comes to using AI to create actual prose... that's a hairy situation. AI still has a place, but it means massive editing on the backend both to add your voice and style, as well as to do an enormous amount of plagiarism checking. The speed gains are probably still worthwhile, but you need to micromanage the AI while it's writing if you want to have anything worthwhile. You can't just tell it what you want to happen in the scene and expect something amazing. You're going to have to drive every scene beat, and put almost as much text in your description as the AI would write. For this reason, I'm on the fence as to whether it's even worth it.
Personally, I write my novels myself. I started writing because I love it, I don't want a machine to do it for me. I use AI as a mentor to help me improve my writing skills, and it's done wonders to help me learn how to improve my writing.
The only problem I have with the people that are misusing AI to write entire books at insane rates (like 1 per month or even week) is that this tells me two things about those authors:
1. They don't edit their crap, and yes it is crap. Even the best author's first draft is a steaming pile of crap that they wouldn't show to their own family, let alone sell.
2. They have zero control over their novel, so it's going to be a complete mess.
This kind of garbage is flooding the digital shelves, and making it harder for new 'legitimate' authors to find a voice, and that is truly tragic.
Your timeframes are a bit unrealistic to be honest, at least for quality books, which AI does NOT produce... yet. Before AI, it would normally take me between 8 months to 1.5yrs to write a book. I work full time, and write in my off-time. With AI, that timeframe has dropped to about one book every 4-6 months. It's significantly faster, but not the book a week or even month that you're quoting. Those quotes are probably from low content books like travel guides.
When it comes to having AI help you with your social networking I'd be EXTREMELY careful. This is your bread and butter. Fans attach to the author as much as the novel. If you place a level of abstraction between you and your audience, you'll lose a lot of people, and likely prevent many from becoming fans. I think this is going to be the thing that really sets authors apart from AI in the future, the human connection.
AI is a plagiarism machine.
@@carultch That's paranoia talking. AI learns the same way a human learns, from exposure to material. You are a plagiarism machine as well. You read books, get inspired by them, and they influence your stories. People that write with AI have the same onus as any other to ensure that their writing doesn't violate copyright. Just because a machine wrote it, doesn't make the author no longer legally responsible to do that due diligence.
I see this like I see AI in art, I enjoy drawing and the act of creating itself. I would not enjoy it as much if I just tell an application a prompt and it regurgitates something out from the amalgamation of the data that was fed into it. The output doesn't feel like it is entirely from me. It would feel like I am lying to myself to call it mine. In writing, even the part where I have a blank page and I try to come up with the first sentence to put on the page is an enjoyable experience. Using AI would take that away. Maybe we can use AI as a secretary with a perfect memory that can tell me if I missed a detail or forgot a plotline somewhere but prompting to get a first draft feels like too much of a crutch in my opinion. It's like asking a friend to write a draft for me then claiming later that I was the one who came up with the story on my own.
I've been using AI to help me write for the past like two years. Mostly I use it for outlining because I am a pantser who hates outlining, but my writing always ends up all over the place if I don't have a structure to follow, so I give AI my premise and any plot ideas I already have and tell it to create a plot for me. It's more useful if it has an ending to work with. If you don't know what the ending is, you can ask it to generate ideas for possible endings to your story, and either use one of those, or use the ideas it gives you to craft your own. Then you plug that ending into all the info you give it about your story and ask it to generate a full outline. You can ask it to be incredibly basic, or you can ask it to go into a lot of detail. Just this alone has helped me tremendously, because even after 15+ years of writing all by myself before AI ever existed, no matter how many crafting books I read or creative writing classes I took in college (I have a degree in English Lit and Writing) I NEVER got better at plotting because I just don't like to do it and my brain doesn't work that way.
What platform do you use?
@@JenniferClark-s9z ChatGPT and Google Gemini, the free ones. Those are plenty good enough for me, for what I use them for.
It may not be enjoyable, but that’s one of the most important parts of a story… and it didn’t even come from you
@@Lolee56 ok
Please share your journey with AI. I use AutoCrit. It's not a prose generator. It uses AI to analyze your story and suggests improvements like a developmental editor.
Couldn't you do the same thing with Chat GPT?
@@DeusExMachina50 I'm not that knowledgeable. I bet it's possible but I don't have the knowledge. Not yet any way.
@@s.l.perrin5424 Yeah, I just checked with Chat GPT and you can upload your book to have it do a developmental edit.
The other consideration is reader fatigue.
I've noticed an author who has put out multiple series in a matter of months. Clearly AI, no apologies about it and good for her. They look, sound, read awesome! She's on social media, doing ads, all the things to sell and create engagement. However, she gets few likes, and even less reviews on Amazon. I don't mind trying her books, but my point is, my tbr is already overwhelmed as it is. AI and AI non-assisted authors can generate as many quality books as they want, but I can only consume so much. Sadly, same goes for my wallet. But believe me, if read as fast as AI and I didn't need to eat, I'd buy all the books!!