With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion!
On Monday I posted about some weekend experiments with A.I. and my skepticism of its usefulness for writing and editing.
But what about you? Have you been engaging with A.I.? What’s it useful for?
And do you think writers and editors will soon be out of a job?
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Art: Millstone in the Park of the Château Noir by Paul Cézanne
Avoid all forms of generative AI like the plague. It’s built on stolen work, it consumes a ton of energy when we as a planet need to be reducing our energy usage, it allows bad actors to easily generate content for malicious ends, it devalues the work of people who put genuine effort into their craft… I have no desire to engage with any of it.
I concur!
Hi Klimpaloon
Thanks for this tip off. I’d tried a few AI programs and weren’t impressed. Recently I learnt how to use Copilot and thought it was brilliant. It gave me answers immediately to questions I couldn’t find the answers over hours of internet search. This morning I wanted a clearer rewrite of something I’d written and thought Copilot did a brilliant job, so I used their rewrite. I hope I don’t find myself in a court battle over plagiarism. Your tip off has made me extremely cautious now.
I’m not using it at all, if I can avoid it. But it really is everywhere!
As far as persona use, I suppose it will happen, but it hasn’t yet. All I can think about is all the energy and water it uses. And I don’t ever know where I’d begin. I also wonder if I’ll be out of a job someday as a therapist. At least paid for by insurance.
I sure hope people will appreciate human writers and editors forever. Until the sun consumes us.
Hi abc
I too prefer to deal with real people. I wish AI technology wasn’t the only way I can get feedback on my writing. It is very dubious and I have many unanswered questions about it. I have contacted Nathan about placing a request for a writing buddy that I rewrote, onto his website. Perhaps this time I might get lucky.
I believe editors and Ms assessors will be out of a job in 5 years. Human writers will take longer.However, once the cult of Rationalism really kicks in and readers have gradually been persuaded that rational writing is best, I suspect certain kinds of writers will find it hard.
I used a free ai once – for an application that required language to be more homogenised than my natural voice – and it worked, I got what I needed. It was boring though, (the exercise and the letter) and I can’t see the point of using it for creative writing. If you can’t write without ‘help’, why bother? Authors are mostly paid pittance and ego boosts are easier earned elsewhere.
But I guess it’s like processed food – why bother mashing raw ingredients through machines, when you can just pluck vegetables from the garden (or the greengrocer shelf)?
Oh, but then you’d have to go through the ‘bother’ of cooking it yourself.
Yes, that would be the point dearie, eating flavours unique to that terroir.
AI companies employ ghost workers in “Digital South” countries, paying them pennies per scrubbed AI item. The workers are the engine for collecting and collating the data seen in generative AI sites. Also, due to input biases, generative AI is apt to tend racist, sexist, ageist, and more. It’s difficult to want to use products with such shady underpinnings.
Certain types of AI can be a great tool for doing research. I write Regency romance and needed to a particular thing about estate farming in the early 19th c. I asked Perplexity and it gave me answers I couldn’t have found on my own without spending a lot of time. And it gave me the references where it got its information so I could go read it myself.
I use it as a beta reader, sounding board, and for research. I use it the same way I would a writing forum or when engaging with peers. I don’t let it write for me, but it has proven very useful for getting quick feedback that I can prod and poke to help me refine my own writing.
I also read craft books, watch lectures and interviews, and do all the normal stuff an aspiring author would. AI is just a tool, and like any tool, it has limits.
Yes, I have many questions about the ethics of AI, but we are talking about issues that predate AI. AI has simply brought into laser focus concerns such as copyright and the environment, which plague modern tech.
Get this plague off my machine. I try, but it’s back the next day. Editors who have used it are the bane of my existence.
A resounding NO!
I will continue using the human touch throughout my Story.
However, I do see AI has been embedded into some of my (maybe all) apps like Word, Acrobat, Merriam-Webster’s, etc. Even my browsers have been infiltrated.
Maybe, when I’m finished with The Story, I might play with AI for a silly novel. (See, AI is sucking me into their trap.) Nevertheless, I consider that cheating. I don’t want to lose my touch forever.
I’d think, falling into the arms of AI will make your brain become lazy, unless you can use it wisely and have the willpower to turn it off. (I’m addicted to my TV, especially the cable news networks. Find it difficult to grab the remote and tap the “off” button. Those networks must be controlling our senses. (I swear there are subliminal messages or magnetic fields on the tube.) I find it best when the Madison Ads come on, to tap the “off” button quickly.
As with many of us dependent on a brewed cup of coffee or tea when we slide out of bed, so too, will a few…some…all…writers will become fully dependent on AI.
Wouldn’t the world of words and thoughts (good and bad) be controlled by just a few AI puppet masters? Heck, if it comes to that, they might burn all the “old” books as quickly as possible as in the film: Farenheit 451 and the Nazi book burnings in Germany and Austria during the 1930s.
Will some of us relive those times?
I’m using AI mostly to save myself time and trouble. The two areas where I use it most heavily are editing and marketing.
My favorite AI tool is NotebookLM. It’s the only tool I’ve encountered so far that is just hands-down awesome. It’s a LLM that is trained on the data I give it. So when I finish typing a chapter, I paste it into a notebook in NotebookLM, and later, when I can’t remember what the name of that coffee shop was, I can ask NotebookLM, “What was the name of the coffee shop Amy visited after the funeral?” And boom. There it is. Along with a summary of the place, and where in which chapters it’s mentioned. It has replaced all the spreadsheets and random documents that I use to record the trivial and logistical facts I need to keep track of to maintain consistency across a novel and a series.
It also has been helpful in editing. I recently got feedback from my editor (who I still contract with despite using AI) that the relationship between my protagonist and her mother changed dramatically between book 1 and book 2. I didn’t *quite* believe it was as bad as the editor was making it out to be, so I asked NotebookLM to summarize the relationship in book 1, and then summarize it in book 2, and lo and behold, the editor was right. But where the editor only mentioned this in her generalized comments, NotebookLM referenced every passage from which it drew its conclusions, allowing me to go straight to the passages causing the problem and fix them. Saved me a crap-tonne of time and frustration.
I’ve been experimenting with creating custom prompts to get AI to evaluate my manuscript. My editor is in no danger of losing me as a customer, even though she keeps hinting that she wants to retire. I find that AI is like that guy in a critique group (because it’s often [but not always] a guy) who knows every rule (whether he actually does or not) but is clueless on how, when, or why to apply the rules. Like that guy, the suggestions from AI are sometimes brilliant, sometimes rubbish, but mostly mediocre. Still, even the mediocre suggestions are valuable to me because even if I disagree with them, I still task myself to articulate why the AI is wrong in this instance. And when I’m honest with myself, I find that while the AI may not be *100%* right, I could, if I’m being honest with myself, actually do a better job with that passage. So it pushes me to do better.
And while I can get quick and reasonable feedback on the scene and chapter level, I have yet to get anything useful from a whole manuscript analysis. AI is currently terrible with big-picture items, context, nuance, subtlety, and is laughably terrible at understanding humor, especially hyperbole.
Regardless, I applied my custom prompts to every scene and chapter in a manuscript and sent it off to my editor with full disclosure. She got back to me and said it was hands-down the cleanest, tightest, easiest-to-read manuscript I’d ever sent her. But it suffered from some truly show-stopping big-picture items that AI completely missed. And the editor was of course, right.
So while AI can be a great supplement to the editorial process, right now, in its current state, I wouldn’t recommend it to new writers. One has to know enough about writing to tell when one is being handed bull and when one is being handed bronze. But the same could be said of any critique group. Though at least in a critique group, one gets the added benefit of exercising the critical thinking skills that come from critiquing the work of others.
Finally, I use AI a *lot* in marketing. I have no desire to have AI write fiction for me. But I’m happy to let it write sales copy for me so I can spend less time doing the crap I hate and spend more time doing the stuff I love, like writing fiction. AI does a mediocre job of writing sales copy, but it can write mediocre drivel in a fraction of the time it takes me to write something that is merely truly awful. Also, it has recently achieved the level where its images are good enough to use in ad creatives without being the butt of mockery. Sorry, artists, I’d *rather* license stock art from you, because the legal gray area around AI is a little concerning, but I can’t license the on-genre stock art you never made. AI, however, will make the image I need, but yet can’t find on stock art sites because I’m trying to find images that *stand out* instead of looking like… everything else on a stock art website.
AI has issues, for sure. But I’m old enough to remember typing my first short stories on an electric Smith Corona typewriter. I’m old enough to remember printing those stories on a dot-matrix computer (several years later, of course) and stuffing them into a manila envelope with an SASE and taking them to the post office to get metered. I’m not shedding a tear for the people who lost their jobs in the typewriter factories, or the ink ribbon factories, or the people who lost their jobs because I’m no longer buying printer paper by the case. I’m also old enough to remember how the internet looked in 1996. It was a glorious, exciting, ridiculous mess of solid walls of text laid over repeating backgrounds that made everything unreadable. Yet I remember logging on for the first time with my 33k baud modem on a computer running Windows 3.1 and thinking, “Wow. This is the future. Right here in front of me.”
That’s how I feel about AI. This is the 1996 of AI. In 30 years (probably less), the majority of us will feel that it is essential to modern life and those who object to it will be regarded the same way we regard the people who refuse to use the internet in 2025.
I was going to respond with my own list… but you pretty much summed up my views. I’ve found it especially helpful for creating chapter summaries. There’s nothing more boring or time-consuming than creating summaries of chapters you’ve already written–reducing rich, immersive prose to a few paragraphs of dull “this happened, that happened,” but it’s a necessary exercise and it’s great to assign it to AI. I’ve been using Gemini, but will definitely check out NotebookLM.
Other than one thing where I brainstormed a novel which was pretty lame but had a few good ideas, or grammar and spelling through ProWritingAid, I seldom used AI. I find it annoying when I working and it hallucinate to the point where I can’t use it for research, it won’t give me what I need or says that it can’t give it to me because it is (fill in blank with AI excuse.)
I find that it takes more time than I have to have it do anything for me. I’ve taken a couple of AI classes to get a feel for it and I’ll just skip AI for now.
I also discovered they used one of my books to train AI without my permission. I don’t know whether to feel flattered or angry about that.
I think AI can be helpful. It can help spark plotting ideas. It can draft a scene that the writer can then rewrite. Here’s an example. I asked Deepseek to give me a short dialog about motel art. I haven’t changed anything.
INT. MOTEL ROOM – NIGHT
JASON, mid-30s, tired from the road, tosses his bag on the bed. LENA, his girlfriend, stares at the garish painting above the dresser—a sad clown holding a wilting flower.
LENA
(deadpan)
Tell me this isn’t the saddest clown you’ve ever seen.
JASON
(shrugs)
I dunno. He’s trying his best.
LENA
His best? He looks like he just remembered he left the stove on. In hell.
JASON
(laughs)
Motel art’s a special breed. It’s not supposed to be good—it’s supposed to make you feel something.
LENA
(squints)
Yeah. Despair.
Beat. They both stare at the clown.
JASON
…Wanna take it with us?
LENA
(grinning)
Absolutely. Next stop, his nightmare.
They high-five. The clown judges them silently.
(FADE OUT.)