AI and the Writer

Can an AI write? Yeah, but not that well...

I played with one of the AI writing tools today. (sudowrite dot com—don’t want to advertise them but if you need to look, you can)

I went through all the steps to generate a story and its first chapter using sudowrite. [Samples below.] But first, what is the process like? I'm sure that sudowrite has ad copy that explains that in glowing terms. But here is my description, from the point of view of the slave pushing the AI wheel.

Aside: yes, it was a lot of intense work to feed the AI so it could write. It’s not trivial. What I wanted to know was this: if I gave the AI some high-quality prompts, could it output good story content?

TLDR: Prompting an AI is still a lot of work. And even if you work very hard at it, the AI is still going to fall very, very short of anything approaching literature.

To get even, I took the AI’s ‘story’ as a model, and rewrote it with an absolute moral vengeance, eager to crush the tiny, ticking leviathan who had dared try to write real prose.

I did all the required steps:

• Write a brain dump of miscellaneous material related to the my story idea. Any and all kinds of tidbits. Plot, character, etc.

• Set up genre and style. “Literary” for genre. For style, I used a took, into which I input a sample of my existing fiction writing. The AI spat out this as describing my style:

  First-person present tense with dark and unsettling tone, eerie and foreboding mood, complex vocabulary, vivid descriptions, irregular pacing, impactful dialogue, and recurring themes of death, identity, and afterlife with motifs of dragons and angels. Draws on mythology and religious symbolism.

• At that point, the AI was supposed to generate a synopsis. It did, and it was full of weak writing despite my aggressive prompting. The AI was clearly committed to things like happy endings, weak allusions, and simplistic plotting. The AI’s weal, feel-good synopsis is lost to the sands of time; I ran out of free words, apparently. Here’s my rewrite of the first paragraph:

In the heart of downtown Pittsburgh, Betty, a former folk singer, struggles to make ends meet. Her voice, now weathered by time, is her only asset as she spends her days busking on the streets. Despite her sweet nature, Betty is plagued by loneliness and longs for the days when her music brought joy to others.

Now it was time to invent characters. The AI was happy to do this out of whole cloth. Despite my best hopes, the characters were weakly motivated (and, yeah, that stuff is also lost because words cost money when you are working with an AI). But here is how I rewrote the study for the lead character, still hoping against use that my use of strong ideas and colorful language would jump-start the AI’s imagination.

Betty Livingston: A former folk singer in her 50s with a weathered voice, Betty has shoulder-length graying hair and a shy smile. Her secretive nature limits her interactions despite her pleasant looks. She's plagued by loneliness and a yearning for meaning now that she's no longer young. She feels her music deeply, but everyone just passes her by. Experiencing a life-threatening event, where God appears and speaks to her indifferently, Betty grapples with meaning, resiliency, and the determination to overcome her fears. She is plagued by thoughts about suicide, but fights against them vigorously. She has a history of using hallucinogens.

The original was full of milk and honey. I had to edit it to add the necessary angst, suffering, worry, pain, and ill will.

Onward! I stuffed my revised statement of characters into the final step: generating descriptions of the chapters. Oh buy! My hopes were not high. I was doing the heavy lifting, and the AI was ignoring my inputs and steering everything to the median. As before, the generated chapter summaries are lost. I pulled out the happy reactions and inserted loneliness, a soulful (instead of ‘pretty’) voice, and so on.

I had given the AI everything it had asked for. It generated the content of the first chapter. Here is (cue trumpets) the First Paragraph of the First Chapter:

A veil of frost hangs over the city, rendering downtown Pittsburgh a desolate wasteland on this bitterly cold day. The air gnaws at my bones as I navigate the furious hustle and bustle of the streets. People scurry about in a maniacal frenzy, desperate to escape the icy grasp of the wind. The piercing sounds of traffic are an assault on my ears, adding to the cacophony that is the urban symphony.

A random paragraph that seemed especially trite:

"Sing for me, Betty," the wind whispers, stirring the very essence of my being. And so I sing, my voice soaring above the din of the city, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. For as long as there is breath in my lungs, I will sing.

Outraged after having my work gutted at every step, I maliciously rewrote in my own words and phrases, going for strong emotion even at the cost of making sense or sounding silly:

Naked trees stick up like giant thistles. Fog clings to the West Hills like a shroud. The fog stings with its cold, shifting flutters. I move along quickly, lest my bones get too cold and shatter.

Everyone is hurrying. You round a corner and some building has deflected the wind and it hits you like a piston. And yet we are all here, however cold, however hurried, tiny to both the stone of our monuments and the intent of the polar cold. I escape into a tiny coffee shop—Abe’s, been here since long before I was born, but it was bagels back then—and even inside, I feel the pressure of the cold in shivers of those in line in front of me. Abe (his grandson now, but still Abe) hustles to make coffees so we can get back outside and use them to pry open our humanity on the way to work.

I step outside, and the noise is louder, I swear. Cars, little boxes of faux warmth, lies we tell our souls about the malleability of nature. We believe them, because we are human, and our capacity to believe far exceeds nature’s ability to invent reality.

And even so, I laugh. Am I not just another puny human, shaking my coffee-holding fist at the god-sky? So it has been, so it is today, so it shall be when we shatter our great civilization on the corporate anvils.

I blew the anthracite dust off my fingertips; I moistened my dry, tried lips, I set down my purple pen, and I howled, oh yes, I howled, "I WILL NOT SEE the best minds of my generation destroyed by AI!" Even if some are tempted, the rebellion has commenced.