Carlo Iacono has just published a thought-provoking essay about how the use of generative AI is changing the nature of writing. If a writer uses genAI as a writing assistant, at what point should this ‘writing’ be considered something else entirely?
Why write?
The arguments against using genAI for any of the process of writing fiction is strong.
Much depends on the reason you have for writing. Are you trying to express how you feel? Do you have stories in you that you want to get out? Are you using the act of writing to reflect on the world and your place in it? Do you just love reading fiction and want to understand better how stories work? It seems unlikely that employing a genAI chatbot to help you can help you in these cases.
That said, 45% of authors said they were using AI in a survey carried out earlier this year. I think it’s important to note that most of the writers surveyed self-publish. What are they using it for? The most popular reason is research. Others use it AI for marketing art or book cover art. More than half of those surveyed use it for editing, and another use is for narration (i.e. text to speech for audio books) and translation.
Augmentation or Abdication?
Few would argue that GenAI has now started to change what we think of as writing. In his essay, Iacono outlines two broad ways that writers who choose to use it are using it:
Augmentation. This is when writers use genAI as an assistant. A writer of sci-fi or fantasy may use it for world building. Someone writing historical fiction may check what they have written is historically accurate. As Iacono says “you direct the exploration. You verify the outputs. You synthesise the perspectives. You own the outcome.”
Abdication. When writers use genAI to do the actual writing. There are some writers who let chatbots churn out whole novels, which they then put their name on and self-publish. Many of the authors who do this edit the stories, changing aspects to make them their own. Occasionally, an author will be in such a hurry they do not even read what the AI writes, and they leave the prompt in the text of the book when they copy and paste it.
Where would you draw the line?
Look at some ways that writers of fiction are currently using genAI. Which do you consider augmentation and which abdication? Where would you draw the line?
Spell checker / grammar checker: Using a tool such as Grammarly to check your spelling and improve / change your grammar.
Outlining: asking ChatGPT to produce an outline for your story idea, based on the Save the Cat novel structure.
Analysis & augmentation: using Sudowrite to expand an outline for a story, adding character and scene descriptions and dialogue.
Writing the prose. Asking Claude to expand your outline, section by section, lightly editing this before compiling it into a story.
Critiquing. Uploading your manuscript to Google’s NotebookLM and asking the genAI if there are any plot holes or other inconsistencies in the text, or seeking advice on what you can do to improve the story.
These are just some of the ways writers are using genAI. I’m sure there are lots more.
I have experimented with all of these as I find it fascinating, but ultimately I don’t see the point of abdicating for any of my own stories. Much depends on a writer’s reasons for writing, I suppose. If someone is doing it for the money or to see their name on the cover of a book and doesn’t want to, or can’t write, then I can see why they would do it. Otherwise, why bother?
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