BoM/TWS Message Forum

It was interesting re-reading this message thread and the discussion about AI.

I've been playing about with a (paid) AI text generator for a couple of days and its been an odd experience. I ultimately managed to wrangle a decent 20,000 word story out of it over the course of a day (a magical girl corruption story, by the way). By decent I mean I'm happy with the story structure, but the prose is definately a bit janky in places and it would benefit from an editorial pass to improve the writing and remove any wierd description discrepancies that I missed.

But, first thing, is it my story? Thematically it's something I would write. Very similar, in fact to some of my TBoM & TWS chapters. But the AI wrote the words. And I borrowed the setting description from another user too. I just made the prompts and directions to get it to tell my story.

Second thing: Ive paid some memory to get a ok quality story. Now, compared to going into a bookstore and buying a book, it's shitty value. I think I've maybe paid maybe something like 1/5th of the cost of a hardback novel. And the novel I'm reading now is a) much longer and b) much better written. But I figure it would have taken me about two to three week at two or three hours a day to write this much myself. So the amount I've paid is way, way, way less than I earn for actually working my job for that amount of time. I guess that's good value?

Third thing, it was a bit of a fight with the AI to get it to write what I wanted. Sometimes I would have to write several paragraphs of instructions to get what I wanted and sometimes a single one sentence prompt worked. I kinda think they must have trained it with Raymond Chandler, since it seemed determined to follow his advice "When stumped, have a man come through a door with a gun". Figuratively anyway. So it gave a lot of really dumb suggestions that I had to weed out, but every so often it would come up with something brilliant and I'd go "Actually, I'll build around that"

Even then, I'd still have to edit the generated text a little from time to time. Either to fix continuity errors or add foreshadowing and the like. But I can do that because I'm a kind of ok writer I hope.

Which brings me, rather long windedly, to my conclusion: AI is only really useful for doing things that I can do anyway. I can use AI to write a story, because I understand how to write a story. But I wouldn't get great results from AI generating a picture because I can't fix the picture to make it exactly the way I want. But an actual artist could.