This week: The Bunny on the Moon Edited by: Kit  
More Newsletters By This Editor 
 
1. About this Newsletter
2. A Word from our Sponsor
3. Letter from the Editor
4. Editor's Picks
5. A Word from Writing.Com
6. Ask & Answer
7. Removal instructions
Have you found AI helpful for creative inspiration? As AI becomes more widespread, so grows its use in more creative fields.
This week's Action/Adventure Newsletter shares some of my findings so far.
Kit |
I have written about AI before – it’s a hot topic right now. From digital assistants to the creative arts, there’s disagreement about its usefulness – some praise AI’s convenience; others, not so much.
I’ll readily confess that before these last few days I hadn’t made much use of AI myself. A year or so ago I had a bit of a play-around with an image creator. There were more fingers than usual and, when I tried to make images of cats, tails where there oughtn’t be. Some of the results were plain bizarre. It was a fun experiment, but not something I returned to afterwards. Still, time has passed and I figured that if I was to comment on AI I should give it a proper try. Which is what I did for this Newsletter.
My first experiment was with ChatGPT – I asked it for an image to go with a silly little poem I’d written about a mouse and an elephant gazing up at the bunny on the moon. That is how I learned that you have to be very direct in what you ask AI to do – whilst most people would understand that the bunny on the moon refers to the dark markings on the near side of the moon, AI did not. The result was a cute enough image, but not quite what I’d expected!
I’m not a visual artist, however. I’m a writer, and I wanted to explore ChatGPT’s poetic side. I gave it some prompts that I’d already written poems for myself, to see what direction it would take. I learned that:
 ChatGPT does not tend towards brevity.
This means that there’s a lot of unnecessary filler. A poet should make every word count; ChatGPT definitely does not.
It likes em-dashes without spaces.
There was some interesting enough imagery, but most of it fell flat.
There was also a lot of repetition in the wording, both within a poem and between poems.
The rhymes in rhyming poetry often felt clichéd and sometimes completely nonsensical.
When given instructions for a specific form – meter, syllable count, rhyming scheme – it only partly followed these instructions.
On the whole, the poems were bland. I felt no true emotion reading them.
I don’t know about other creative AI programs as I ran out of patience after this, but if ChatGPT’s skills are representative of AI poetry I think that us human poets are safe for now. AI’s got a ways yet to go.
Some of these findings match what are clearly AI posts on social media platforms such as Reddit. Posts asking the reader to give their opinion on a conundrum that isn’t much of a conundrum to any reasonable human being. ‘Am I bad if I want my partner to pick up their socks even if I work a full-time job and do all the housework? Some of my family and friends agree with me; others say that I shouldn’t ask for so much.’ These posts all follow the same pattern – opinions are divided no matter the situation, often with family and friends phoning the poster to share their thoughts. There are the same em-dashes, and parts of text “randomly placed between quotation marks”. You learn to recognise them after a while. It’s a bit harder with poetry, but there is a pattern there, too, and now that I know some of the similarities it will be interesting if I can spot them in the future.
I moved on to character.ai, which I’d heard is a place where you can interact with chat bots to spark ideas. I had never interacted with a chat bot before, outside of customer service and, admittedly, was uncertain how to go about it. It’s a strange feeling, chatting with someone who’s not human but is doing its very best to pretend to be. My opinion is that it is trying too hard. Here, too, brevity is not its strength, and it doesn’t interact in the natural, flowing way that humans do. It’s too formal, too try-hard at a sincerity that it cannot feel.
Could it be of any use to try out one’s ideas on? Potentially. If you’re stuck in a story you could test it out, see if it ends up in a direction of your liking, or if another direction would suit better. Then again, every interaction you have feeds it information. That means that if you try out ideas for a piece you’d like to publish one day, you’ve just fed it to a bot. That is something to keep in mind. The same goes, obviously, for one’s personal data.
All in all, I am not sold on AI. At least, not at this moment in time. I know that I have not explored everything that AI has to offer – not by far – but I’ll stick to my own writing, in my own style, and learn from my successes and failures in my own way.
This doesn’t mean that others might not have found uses for AI that work for them. If you have, I would be interested in hearing about it. No matter my thoughts at this point, it is clear that AI is here to stay. Perhaps I’ll take a greater liking to it, one day.
Kit
|
Some items you may enjoy:
Some contests and activities to inspire you:
And don't forget:
|
Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!
https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form
The Action/Adventure Newsletter Team welcomes any and all questions, suggestions, thoughts and feedback, so please don't hesitate to write in! 
Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Action/Adventure Newsletter Team
|
To stop receiving this newsletter, click here for your newsletter subscription list. Simply uncheck the box next to any newsletter(s) you wish to cancel and then click to "Submit Changes". You can edit your subscriptions at any time.
|
Action/Adventure: June 18, 2025 Issue [#13188]
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
