the use of AI to sculpt your writing

[partyindoorz]

i never wrote anything in my life and English is my third language, for a long time i was obsessed with an indie game's lore and i wanted to write my own fanfiction
and like i said i have zero writing experience, so i gave Claude my braindump and it looked good for me, it didn't change anything i gave it and didn't add anything, all it did was fix what i gave it and used better vocabulary. i also love the way it paints the picture that i roughly described.
now my story is actually expanding further than i anticipated, at some point it stopped being fanfiction and its now its own thing
at first i didn't feel like a fraud bc it was fanfiction but now that my story is expanding i kind of feel like one

 

[Queshire]

I doubt you'll find much support for AI in a writing forum.

 

[Penpilot]

There's a phrase that gets brought up quite often in writing circles. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone gets inspired. Everyone has ideas. I have file on my computer that has dozens and dozens of story ideas. I'm pretty sure most writers have something similar, whether its a file on a computer or piles of notebooks with ideas all written by hand.

What a writer does is transform a collection of ideas into a story. Part of that transformation involves how a writer presents their story to the world, which very much involves their vocabulary and word choice.

If AI is doing the transformation of ideas into story and making the choices in presentation, it is doing the the work for you. You're not writing a story. You're creating prompts.

Now, does this make you a fraud? It depends. If you're trying to pass this off as you wrote this, then it's a lie and a deception, which is fraud. If you're upfront about AI doing the work, then there's no lie, so not a fraud.

You're free to use AI how you choose. You're free to share the results as you please, but you have to be honest to the readers and to yourself about the nature of what's being presented. To do otherwise by definition is fraud.

 

[Mad Swede]

What makes each author unique is their style of writing: the way they express themselves, the words and phrases they choose to use, the way they structure their story. This is something an AI-tool like Claude cannot reproduce, simply because of the way those tools are built. Tools like Claude use so-called large language models (LLMs) to produce text, and the text that is produced is very standardised or, put another way, the style of the text is not unique to the person creating the prompts.

If you're only writing fan fiction then using a tool like Claude may be OK, as long as you're honest and state that you have used Claude to do the writing.

But if you want to be serious about writing and produce your own work then you need to do the writing yourself without using a tool like Claude. My advice to you would then be to write in your own native (first) language. My first language is not English and I don't write my novels and short stories in English.

 

[Wrensul]

I’d also like to place in a gentle word of caution.

If that’s never your goal and you’re in this for fun, don’t let me scare you from your creativity however you handle it.

But, working for a publishing company (if small and niche, can’t speak for other companies), I’ve noticed our little manuscript committee bristle at the first sign of any AI manipulation.

Even with disclaimers that AI has only been an editor.

Even if we’re only suspicious of AI manipulation, no proof.

We turn down submissions.

AI manipulation is tough to parse and can be tough to copyright.

We have a few editors we are adamant in employing. And with my work I’ve even been instructed to keep an eye open. We will discuss and weed anything out that we don’t think is human.

Human patterns are delightfully harder to place. LLMs are, after all, making complex math choices from copied homework that tend to have the same results. Harder to get stylistic variety.

Math is math, right?

Just be sure about your intentions and be honest, as others have expressed. As a polyglot, you have a lot of power to play with if you’re dedicated!

 

[pmmg]

Thats cause you are. I will repeat. If i know you are using AI, i will not help you.

 

[The Dark One]

I used to have this fantasy (before I'd ever finished a ms) that I could just snap my fingers and a hard copy of my book would suddenly appear on the shelves.

Then years later, once I'd actually finished a draft novel for the first time, I was exhilarated ... absolutely joyous that I had completed a coherent story. And on reflection it occurred to me that the journey from inspiration to completion was the real reward. That novel never got published but I learnt so much about how to write a novel from that process. It was my third completed novel that was first published by which time I had become a writer.

People who use AI will never go through that wondrous transformation.

 

[skip.knox]

>now my story is actually expanding
Do you mean that Claude is doing the expanding, or that you are doing it?

>at first i didn't feel like a fraud bc it was fanfiction
This is odd. Do you mean that if it's fanfiction you don't actually have to be serious about the writing? Because lots of folks who write fanfiction are very passionate about it. IMO, it's fraud or not fraud regardless of the genre.

>i kind of feel like one
Do you feel like a fraud because Claude wrote the story and you did not? Or for some other reason?

 

[Karlin]

I had a friend actually say to me " I want to have written a novel, but don't want to actually sit down and write one". And, guess what? Now you can, with AI!
Except that- you won't really have written a novel.

so it goes.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

"Sculpting" any kind of writing with AI will just result in the literary equivalent of misshapen clay splattered all over the room, and the AI's "confident" assertion that the mess is a beautiful cup. I put that in quotations because AI cannot think, feel, or experience anything, and far too many people are anthropomorphising what are in essence data stealing and regurgitation machines that require ludicrous amounts of fresh water and electricity to run, while we're already confronted with a global climate crisis that will only get worse.

 

[skip.knox]

What if, as I believe is the case here, the individual uses AI at the front end--to create a sketch, an outline, or even a rough draft. Then the individual uses that as a starting point to rewrite, possibly several times? Will the result still be misshapen clay? Doesn't that belittle the effort put in by the human? I'm not really arguing here, but am trying to suss out the always complex relationship between human and machine.

BTW, I absolutely agree about the ludicrous amounts of water and electricity being consumed. Not so very far, I think, from ludicrous amounts of wood being consumed. In both cases, the demands of industry and modern society far outstrip the amount of resources used by an author to produce a book. Indeed, probably our non-authorial consumption via AI is greater than that used in production of a book, even if one used AI from brainstorming through production. But that discussion properly belongs elsewhere.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

AI has no use in creative spaces. Period.

 

[Mad Swede]

What if, as I believe is the case here, the individual uses AI at the front end--to create a sketch, an outline, or even a rough draft. Then the individual uses that as a starting point to rewrite, possibly several times? Will the result still be misshapen clay? Doesn't that belittle the effort put in by the human?

Not really. The creativity we authors put in to our stories starts with the outline. That's where we set out the story arcs, the plot, key events, the setting, the characters and their arcs. In doing that (whether we write the outline down or, like me, keep it in our heads) we apply our originality to the interpretation of the ideas and concepts we're using in the story. It isn't so much the idea or concept as it is how we develop these in our writing which makes us original and individual. That's when we get our themes and interpretations into the stories.

AI-tools cannot do this. Those tools cannot add originality and they cannot interpret ideas or concepts. They can't create the themes for you. As a writer you'll be stuck with trying to make a decent story out of a regurgitated piece of text. That's like making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. At which point you should be writing the story from scratch using some decent silk.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

AI is a lot like the One Ring. You think you can use it because your intentions are pure. But it was made from evil, it can only do evil. It cannot create. It can only corrupt.

 

[pmmg]

What if, as I believe is the case here, the individual uses AI at the front end--to create a sketch, an outline, or even a rough draft. Then the individual uses that as a starting point to rewrite, possibly several times?

What if butterflies didn't have wings?

If you are using AI, you are using AI.

I don't need to dig any further. If you want my advice? Dont.

Goldie's opinion of AI

 

[The Dark One]

And let's not forget that using AI is actually stealing from real authors whose works are being scraped for machine inspiration.

 

[skip.knox]

Well, I guess this means the OP is doomed, forever poisoned by the original sin of actually having used AI. There's no coming back from that. There's no un-thinking the thoughts that person has already thought. Pity all the poor creative writing students, for they have all touched the poison, at one time or another. They'll all need to go learn woodworking or some such.

Pity, too, the poor SF authors, who can never write about AI because they must necessarily use AI in order to know it thoroughly enough to write about it. No one can use MS word right now; likely, no one in the future will be able to use any sort of writing software because AI will be built into all of it.

Yes, I'm being a jerk about it. I do believe there is room for nuance in this discussion. In fact, nuance and a finer understanding is going to be extremely important as the whole world adjusts to a new reality.

 

[skip.knox]

And let's not forget that using AI is actually stealing from real authors whose works are being scraped for machine inspiration.

Speaking of nuance, AI is not actually doing the stealing. Corporations operated by human beings are doing the stealing. It would be entirely possible for the corporations running AI to have taken the time to contact each and every author and had the morality to pay ... *snort* *guffaw* .... hang on a second. Oh never mind.

By blaming AI rather than the money-hungry humans, we focus our outrage on the wrong target. On a target which in truth cannot be hit. But the corporations can, at least in theory. The populist movement against data centers is a good example of painting the correct target. Maybe, with enough pressure, we humans can find a way to generate AI tools without trashing the environment. Or maybe we all just scale back. And yes, I understand that shot is astronomically long. But if one wishes to stop the thief, it is necessary to identify the correct thief.

 

[pmmg]

Well, I guess this means the OP is doomed, forever poisoned by the original sin of actually having used AI.

No, you can repent and walk away from it. But you have a hole to undig yourself from.

Pity all the poor creative writing students

They weren't writing students. They were something else.

 

[The Dark One]

Speaking of nuance, AI is not actually doing the stealing. Corporations operated by human beings are doing the stealing. It would be entirely possible for the corporations running AI to have taken the time to contact each and every author and had the morality to pay ... *snort* *guffaw* .... hang on a second. Oh never mind.

By blaming AI rather than the money-hungry humans, we focus our outrage on the wrong target. On a target which in truth cannot be hit. But the corporations can, at least in theory. The populist movement against data centers is a good example of painting the correct target. Maybe, with enough pressure, we humans can find a way to generate AI tools without trashing the environment. Or maybe we all just scale back. And yes, I understand that shot is astronomically long. But if one wishes to stop the thief, it is necessary to identify the correct thief.

All of which is to trot out the old argument that there's nothing wrong with guns, it's the maniacs that misuse them which is the problem.

AI is just a tool and of course it's how it is used which is potentially the problem, but in a way it's worse than guns because guns don't appropriate the property of others in order to work.