ChatGPT For World Building?

[1MerryWriter]

(2/3)

To be clear, I am not against a writer using AI in any way they see fit. I do not use it when I write creatively but I have been testing it more and more to receive critique and to bounce ideas off of. For someone with my background it is a "godsend" (or is this "humansend"?). Before I share one more point of view, I should briefly introduce myself and I guess I will head on over to the intro thread and do it there too.
I am not a native English speaker, I am from India but I don't live there anymore. I used to be an academic and I was on track to get a Ph.D. (climate science, urban planning) in the pre-covid world. The pandemic caused a fair bit of havoc in my life and over the last three years I moved to Europe, worked a bit harder than I thought I would have to; to get into an MBA program and I am looking to become a published creative writer (possibly traditionally published). I have not made the call on whether the first book attempt will be a historic / medieval / magical fantasy or a sci-fi fantasy. I enjoy reading and writing both and I have published a bit of an 'urban fantasy' short story in my native language. Other than that I have about seven academic publications related to my previous field of research, mostly as a co-author, all in English. Some in reputed journals and as chapters in books but that does not mean much if you know what academia is really like. It is more about who you know than what you write or what you have worked on. No shade on anyone I worked with, it is just the way of the world. This is also where I started to ghostwrite research and non-fiction (naturally pre-AI). I have earned at least some of my keep this way but this is again not saying much because it was in India where writing an academic paper in English can be an ordeal and I am one of the few privileged enough to have been given access to a higher standard of education than most kids my age at the time and place where I was.

Back on topic
If someone prompts lets say ChatGPT for "Write an article on/ Outline for a chapter / Outline for book" etc. and goes in what is a straightforward approach to using AI, they are going to generate terribly cliched and pretty much stale output. There are better prompts and oddly enough it takes about as much work as maybe researching and writing a book, to find out what kind of prompts people are using and why they work. Only thing is, once an interested person learns what is needed in a prompt, they can easily fit that template into any non-fiction writing task and get an outline. Once again, on Medium and elsewhere there are writers with over 100k followers sharing "glimpses" into how to use AI correctly.

Why do I know this?
As mentioned, I need critical feedback on my drafts (three of them at various stages) and I am not yet at a point in my life where I can put it in front of an editor without thinking that I am wasting their time. So I use the next best thing for now - AI. All kinds out there. ChatGPT, Bard, Co-Pilot are the more popular ones that I can name. A place that I sometimes work for has access to a couple more proprietary ones that I am currently given free reign of.
It is clear as day. I am not as good as the output that someone who prompts AI well can create. Quite a lot of the writers I used to read and write with both in the academic and the SEO / blogging circles have the same feeling. There is a new competitor in town and they are legion. The hustlebro hivemind gold rush of AI writing on Youtube / Tiktok (or any other platform with mindshare) has not yet really taken off. It is at its early stages where the more polished influencer is currently getting the views. There will be the flood of better quality books at some point and not necessarily by someone who can actually hold a conversation about that topic for more than 15 minutes.

I am not saying that a good writer is going to be pushed out but a good writer is going to have to cross one more hurdle and it might necessitate some help from AI tools for many to even consider making an effort. (End of 2/3)

 

[1MerryWriter]

(3/3)

Non-fiction isn’t academia, like just straight facts collated together - it’s opinions and an individual voice. If anything it would be harder for AI to replicate that, unless the prompt it ‘do it in the style of…’ and then obviously it’s just copying. Well it’s all copying.

Agreed. Non-fiction is different from simply listing research into cohesive paragraphs and listing references. That is the trouble, it is mostly the voice of a writer. There are people prompting AI to edit a piece of article to read like it was written by Neil Strauss. The output is far better than you would expect. Well I can't claim that - it was much better than I expected. Especially if you could pick up some excerpts of the 'target authors' writing and feed it prior to prompting. Now it is obviously unethical and arguably illegal to feed a section or an entire book by "name of author" to your preferred AI but that doesn't stop anyone from doing it. You don't have to take my word for it. You could try it with the free version of your an AI assitant of your choice, if you are so inclined.
You might agree that I have a style in my writing. Seeing that this response alone has droned on for a bit, I will at least claim that I have some kind of a voice. I put in my writing - this and anything else I have on the backburner and any other stuff that I have written recently or random bit from my chat messages (those are this long too, sometimes). In mere minutes, I can read stuff written by me on any topic that I please. The more technical stuff that I can feed to the bot, the better. So lets say I had to material about "Diets for people with gluten intolerance" and I want it to become a "free ebook" on "My experience of overcoming gluten intolerance", the ETA is a week, if not a couple of days - provided I know the prompt and have the material on hand. If I don't have the material, well most AI bots that are connected to the internet can get the basic material for me. If I bother to spend 30 minutes looking for a bit more stuff and if I have a bit less scruples about copyrights than the next person, I may be prompting myself the next NYT bestseller.

This is a generic topic but if you want to write a self-help book on relationships or financial advice, you do not need to have a craft or a voice as such. You could co-opt the voices of a hundred bloggers and make your own voice. Nobody will know.

This is why I am sure that it won't take a decade for AI to be better than the majority at fiction writing. AI can already mimic human 'voice'.

Reuters now has a content sharing agreement with OpenAI. NY Times is suing OpenAI for infringement but they'll probably settle for another content sharing agreement. Google already has your content, the stuff that you remember and also do not remember. Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter/X are not far behind. There was this 83 page paper (that I have not read yet) by a group of scientists at MIT about how AI writes better marketing copy than experts at a fraction of the cost but the silver lining is that people prefer human content over AI content when told that they stuff they actually liked was AI. There is another paper about how professional writers who were asked to use AI, wrote stuff that is 18% better (in quality) than their average output and were 40% more productive. I haven't read this one either because it is behind a paywall. I got access to the first one through my network and I will be reading it and I am working on accessing the second paper because there is a line in it that intrigues me.

The abstract of the paper says "Workers exposed to ChatGPT during the experiment were 2 times as likely to report using it in their real job 2 weeks after the experiment and 1.6 times as likely 2 months after the experiment."

It was an anonymous experiment, again quoting from the abstract "In a preregistered online experiment, we assigned occupation-specific, incentivized writing tasks to 453 college-educated professionals and randomly exposed half of them to ChatGPT."
This is one of the better ways to actually do a paper on such a topic since no one has any intrinsic motivation to lie one way or the other. The people who used it, find it useful and return to it. People who are not used to AI writing are going to get used to AI writing, it is going to gain a lot more acceptance than it has and it is going to become the backbone for a good bunch of non-fiction content (if it isn't already). A writer with a unique voice will do better and a writer with a unique voice, subject knowledge and enough know how to prompt AI will ("middleman to AI") will definitely do the best. At least that is how it is going to be for non-fiction unless there are rules that make it mandatory for people to disclose any AI tool use. Enforcement will be another headache but I am just throwing out my thoughts.
I don't want to use AI for my creative writing. I don't want to use AI for any non-fiction either but in theory, someone who was 18% worse off than me in terms of writing quality is now as good as I am if I don't use AI. Someone who used to be 2% better than me is now 20% better. I am going to have to live with that knowledge and see what I do with it. As far as fiction is concerned, the only limit for an AI will be how market forces. Does Disney want an AI of its own or is Netflix getting one? Will Youtube have 'content creators' and 'content' all made by AI? What is Amazon doing at this point? They already have an AI that can mimic your actual voice provided you speak a few lines of dialogue with its bot. Who knows whats up next?

I am not fear-mongering or AI-hating. Like I said I was privileged child for my time and place and I grew up with science fiction and fantasy in multiple languages. Isaac Asimov's visions for AI have been my dreams as a kid. I love what it can do today but I also see that I am already near obsolete in my 'prime earning years' as a worker and as someone with at least a bit of passion for creative writing.

I created an account on this forum and read through this thread because I was hunting for people's experiences with AI in creative and fictional writing. I see that as each day passes people are finding more ways to get creative with AI. That is the basis for my current view.

 

[pmmg]

To be clear, I am not against a writer using AI in any way they see fit.

Well, I am against anyone using AI and then presenting it to me as 'Their' writing. If you want the credit, be the reason.

 

[Ned Marcus]

If someone prompts lets say ChatGPT for "Write an article on/ Outline for a chapter / Outline for book" etc. and goes in what is a straightforward approach to using AI, they are going to generate terribly cliched and pretty much stale output. There are better prompts and oddly enough it takes about as much work as maybe researching and writing a book, to find out what kind of prompts people are using and why they work. Only thing is, once an interested person learns what is needed in a prompt, they can easily fit that template into any non-fiction writing task and get an outline. Once again, on Medium and elsewhere there are writers with over 100k followers sharing "glimpses" into how to use AI correctly.

It's true that basic prompts lead to the worst writing. I've taken a short course on how to prompt AI, and I've read many articles. With more sophisticated prompting the result is much better, but it still seems cliched to me. I accept that it's better than nonfiction written by people who have absolutely no talent for writing.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I had 2 interesting thoughts reading through this.

The first is that research has shown several times that training creative AI on AI generated content results in chaos. For rule based AI, with a clear win/lose outcome this isn't the case. It's how Google trained their Go AI. Simply have it play a lot of games against itself. It's a very fast and efficient way of training an AI. However, this doesn't work for images or texts, simply because there's no way to easily determine what a good outcome is and what isn't. This means that some human input into the system will always be needed (using the current technologies, where there is nothing actually intelligent about AI).

A result of this then is that AI, even for non-fiction, is able to put out similar content. However it's very hard for it to create something new, unless you give it an aweful lot of input. So I could easily write a non-fiction book about a weightloss method if I simply want to steal from a handful of other methods. But when coming up with a completely new method, AI would be a lot less useful when writing it.

The second is that length matters. AI in its current form is at its core just a good guess machine. It guesses what the next word is (based on all the other words it has learned). And it's pretty good at that. It's why it's capable of creating a coherent 500-1000 word short story. The issue is though that it's still just guessing. And with each guess, the uncertainty increases. You don't see this in the short term. However, the longer your piece becomes, the larger that uncertainty becomes and the more it becomes noticable. In a short story, no one will blink an eye at a walk-on character who looks like they should belong in the larger tale but only show up once. In a novel though, it's the sort of thing that confuses people. In a short story there aren't enough words to create a bunch of plot-hooks that need to be resolved as the story progresses. In a novel there most certainly are.

These are the things that distinguish a bad from a good writer. And they're also inevitable issues with a guessing machine. Being right 99% of the time means that in a 100k novel, 1000 words will be the wrong ones.

 

[1MerryWriter]

Well, I am against anyone using AI and then presenting it to me as 'Their' writing. If you want the credit, be the reason.

Someone who was written something with parts taken from AI output should disclose it.

Many do not agree with that statement and even more do not care. For me, it is a loss of ability, knowledge and sometimes the exhilaration of that experience of finishing something all on my own that makes me avoid AI generated stuff for my writing.

It is a fact that more and more people are using AI for every bit of writing including CVs and cover letters and more and more recruiters are using AI to analyze applications and letters for keywords that 'fit' with their job description.

I accept that it's better than nonfiction written by people who have absolutely no talent for writing.

Irony is that people without a lot of talent have sold like hotcakes in the past. Now, it is as if someone attached a pair of nitrous oxide boosters to that category.

The second is that length matters. AI in its current form is at its core just a good guess machine. It guesses what the next word is (based on all the other words it has learned).

The length issue is probably why someone needs to prompt AI properly if they want to make good non-fiction. Formulaic non-fiction is now possible but what I am trying to understand is how far away AI of today is from creating fiction by the numbers.

For creative fiction, I am guessing that there is a level of babysitting where something passable can be produced with AI. I am not particularly interested in figuring that out and I imagine that working out the prompting for this alone would take as much effort as imagining scenes, characters, settings and putting those thoughts down in order. At that point a person choosing to use AI is better off just writing.

I was intrigued by the original post and subsequent discussion about how to 'prompt' AI for such things. I tested out some Custom GPTs and realized that paying members do have access to 'character creation' GPTs and 'world building' GPTs. It is entirely possible for someone who has the experience of being a game master or has written fanfiction, to string together enough characters and worlds / settings to tell a coherent story.

It would be a lot of work and possibly mind-numbing for someone who actually likes to be original and imaginative.

If one does not fall into that category and can actually do the work it might produce something for them. I am not sure that if such a Frankenstein's monster of a novel might be considered good by anyone or if it might sell but this only a few steps away from reliably producing formula genre fiction. Even with the current level of something like Bard or ChatGPT it is possible to reliably create terribly undercooked novellas. That is my conclusion - though I have not tested it first hand.

I will keep testing as and when I can, if nothing else, I can now pick out turns of phrase and certain paragraph structures that ChatGPT and Bard produce in abundance. I am in a position where I need to be able to tell the difference.

 

[Finchbearer]

I just can’t fathom why some are so eager to see AI produce ‘novels’, or why as humans we are so keen on seeing ourselves be made obsolete by the very machines we’ve created. When you essentially start replacing human creativity then you’re basically advocating wiping out the very thing that makes us human. I’m not saying collaboration can’t take place, but there’s a big difference between that and removing the human part of the creative process.

 

[1MerryWriter]

I just can’t fathom why some are so eager to see AI produce ‘novels’, or why as humans we are so keen on seeing ourselves be made obsolete by the very machines we’ve created. When you essentially start replacing human creativity then you’re basically advocating wiping out the very thing that makes us human. I’m not saying collaboration can’t take place, but there’s a big difference between that and removing the human part of the creative process.

Just in case I gave the wrong impression, I am definitely not eager to see AI replace creative work. I also have a naive belief that the value of real creative work cannot be pushed out by any AI.

For the kind of work I used to do a few years ago, AI is basically a termination letter. I am learning to live with the new reality though. It is a bit of 'Keep calm and carry on' and a bit of 'Know thyself to know your enemy'.

 

[Finchbearer]

Oh, no that’s not the impression I got…it was more a reaction to the conversation in general.

 

[CupofJoe]

In some [probably all] Universities the Academics know that some students will use AI to write essays.
The response is basically to let them and make them cite the AI as a source and what prompts they used.
It is then up to the student to take what the AI has given them, into their own words.
An academic can then use the same prompts and plagiarisms tools to check how original the essay may be and how much is a straight cut and paste.

 

[Finchbearer]

In some [probably all] Universities the Academics know that some students will use AI to write essays.
The response is basically to let them and make them cite the AI as a source and what prompts they used.
It is then up to the student to take what the AI has given them, into their own words.
An academic can then use the same prompts and plagiarisms tools to check how original the essay may be and how much is a straight cut and paste.

I am positive that on my old degree AI will be a hot topic and probably some really interesting collabs are taking place.

 

[pmmg]

Someone who was written something with parts taken from AI output should disclose it.

Many do not agree with that statement and even more do not care. For me, it is a loss of ability, knowledge and sometimes the exhilaration of that experience of finishing something all on my own that makes me avoid AI generated stuff for my writing.

This is always about personal integrity. I take the position that people should have some.

I've no doubt that AI will eventually become good enough that we cant tell, and that many will use it, and pass it off as their own.

That is not what the human spirit is about. I am not on this world to marvel at AI, and create nothing of my own.

For many, I will never know. The challenge on us is to have personal standards that are worth having.

It is a fact that more and more people are using AI for every bit of writing including CVs and cover letters and more and more recruiters are using AI to analyze applications and letters for keywords that 'fit' with their job description.

I am not sure that I care about AI in these instances. I care more about creative writing, and maybe even non-fiction... AI can only know what is out there to know. If its not been digitized yet, I don't think it can. So...if you are adding new content, using AI works against that.

Maybe AI will get to the point where it can create new content, such that it can figure out things vexing to our mathematicians or such. I suspect there will always be things about the human struggle it cannot know, because its still in the heads of those who experienced it.

AI, BTW, has already been shown to present stuff that is not true. If it gets to a point where we give it our trust, how will we know when it does?

I just can’t fathom why some are so eager to see AI produce ‘novels’, or why as humans we are so keen on seeing ourselves be made obsolete by the very machines we’ve created. When you essentially start replacing human creativity then you’re basically advocating wiping out the very thing that makes us human. I’m not saying collaboration can’t take place, but there’s a big difference between that and removing the human part of the creative process.

I have wondered this myself...even here, in a creative community.

But...I cannot beat that AI is here, and only going to get better. Its another pandora's box type thing. You cant put it back. For many, it is adapt or fall behind. What can you do? AI is something we will all have in our lives to some extent or another. At times I feel I may be the last hold out still trying to produce things by hand, but...I will go to my grave calling you a fraud if you use it to make your book, and then pretend you did not.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I just can’t fathom why some are so eager to see AI produce ‘novels’, or why as humans we are so keen on seeing ourselves be made obsolete by the very machines we’ve created.

Writing a novel is a lot of work, it takes a lot of practice to get a decent result, and there's a lot of boring parts to it. If someone is only interested in creating an outline, thinking up the story, but not the fiddly bits of putting the actual words on the page, then they can see AI as a good solution for that. There is a very romantic view attached to being a writer. You just sit around all day, looking at your beautiful garden, while you contemplate life as you wait for your muse to show up. That sort of thing. People want that but they at some point run into the fact that they can't actually write. So they turn to AI. Also, plenty of people would love to have written a novel. They have this great, amazing idea, that just has to be turned into a story. It's why big name authors get a lot of letters asking them to collaborate on this wonderful story idea. Again these people think the idea is the most work, so they now just want the story. Enter AI.

As for being made obsolete, I very much doubt it. We've had plenty of similarly big or bigger revolutions, and so far they've only created more, if different, jobs. Assuming this time will be different is dangerous.

For the moment though, most money with AI and fiction is made by giving a course on how to write books using AI. It's not at the point where it's capable of actually producing good quality fiction. It is however a great tool for formulaic stuff like CV's and cover letters. They were always bullshit letters where you make up some weird reasons on why you'd be amazing for the job and how you always wanted to be a telemarketeer ever since you were a little kid. Giving that to AI is a blessing.

 

[Finchbearer]

it's capable of actually producing good quality fiction. It is however a great tool for formulaic stuff like CV's and cover letters. They were always bullshit letters where you make up some weird reasons on why you'd be amazing for the job and how you always wanted to be a telemarketeer ever since you were a little kid. Giving that to AI is a blessing.

Maybe. Why do I want this job? ‘Well you see I don’t want to starve and become destitute, and no it’s not because I care about your customers, they’re a bunch of ****’

I agree that people are lazy, yes, there will always be lazy people aiming to make a quick buck. It’s kind of along the lines of, you can’t look at your beautiful garden without tending to it, without learning the basics of seed sowing and soil improvement, without spending a few seasons working out what you enjoy planting, and eventually you can sit and watch it grow, mature and be beautiful. Some people want to just pay a gardener to do everything for them because they don’t have a single green finger, nor the patience. I get it.

 

[1MerryWriter]

Some people want to just pay a gardener to do everything for them because they don’t have a single green finger, nor the patience.

I feel like this is it. A lack of patience. There is also probably a bit of a learning curve that an aspiring writer imagines that they are going to have to do.
Then they come up on things like Rothfuss' style of paragraph construction and flow or how Tolkien used different tones and language construction for different magical races - or some equivalent thereof in their preferred genre. Then they are also faced with the realities of what might sell and what might gain critical acclaim and somewhere along the way, the basic idea of writing a story or even putting a few thoughts on a page / screen becomes a scary endeavor.

One has to go through a phase of serious self-criticism, prepare the mind to accept rejections and critique and really spend the hours in a chair working out the more banal facets of the art form. It really takes patience.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

They might also be using AI to come up with assignments... it would help explain some of poor English some of my daughter's profs use, heh heh.

In some [probably all] Universities the Academics know that some students will use AI to write essays.
The response is basically to let them and make them cite the AI as a source and what prompts they used.
It is then up to the student to take what the AI has given them, into their own words.
An academic can then use the same prompts and plagiarisms tools to check how original the essay may be and how much is a straight cut and paste.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

What is Rothfuss' style of paragraph construction?. I can't read him, he bores the shit out of me, but I'd be curious.

I feel like this is it. A lack of patience. There is also probably a bit of a learning curve that an aspiring writer imagines that they are going to have to do.
Then they come up on things like Rothfuss' style of paragraph construction and flow or how Tolkien used different tones and language construction for different magical races - or some equivalent thereof in their preferred genre. Then they are also faced with the realities of what might sell and what might gain critical acclaim and somewhere along the way, the basic idea of writing a story or even putting a few thoughts on a page / screen becomes a scary endeavor.

One has to go through a phase of serious self-criticism, prepare the mind to accept rejections and critique and really spend the hours in a chair working out the more banal facets of the art form. It really takes patience.

 

[CupofJoe]

They might also be using AI to come up with assignments... it would help explain some of poor English some of my daughter's profs use, heh heh.

The seminars on that are already planned!

 

[Fyri]

The seminars on that are already planned!

Yeah, I signed up for a seminar called "Using AI in the classroom" which basically looked like this concept, helping teachers come up with assignments. Unfortunately things came up and I was unable to attend. I was curious to see what they had to say!

Granted, teachers are overworked and underpaid as is. AI is just another tool for them. It all depends on how the user uses it.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I no longer prescribe to the overworked and underpaid notion. In some places and situations, this may be true, but it is far from universal. Except, of course, almost everybody tends to think they are underpaid and overworked. The only person I ever met who said they were underworked and overpaid was a prof. And he might've been drunk.

Yeah, I signed up for a seminar called "Using AI in the classroom" which basically looked like this concept, helping teachers come up with assignments. Unfortunately things came up and I was unable to attend. I was curious to see what they had to say!

Granted, teachers are overworked and underpaid as is. AI is just another tool for them. It all depends on how the user uses it.