How to use AI tools like ChatGPT in your creative writing
Part 1 of a series of stories about the ethical use of AI, optimizing your creative writing using AI tools, and funny anecdotes about my interactions with AI
By Jayasree Menon
As ChatGPT churned words on the screen, at a dizzying pace, I sat there watching the unfolding drama in front of my eyes. Words, phrases, sentences. They flowed like a river, running into pages, casting an enchanting spell over me. I was not reading. Rather, a euphoric sensation passed through my skin, my eyes dazzled, and my rational mind surrendered.
No writer’s block for the first time in my life. I typed some prompts into the ChatGPT dialogue box and copied the content onto my Word document. For months I didn’t read it. When I finally started reading, I realized that the generated content contained beautiful words like the prose from the 20th century, but it lacked readability. I didn’t feel a connection to the content, unlike when I read something engaging from a human writer.
Can ChatGPT or similar AI tools write for you and replace a creative writer altogether? Perhaps it is possible in a distant future. Imagine AI growing a consciousness and has gone through some life experience. AI today is not ready to write for you or replace you, because it is generating content. This is altogether different from creative writing.
We cannot deny the possibility that AI can write very close to human writing very soon. It might become difficult to distinguish between machine writing and human writing. AI is evolving fast, and it is adapting to human ways of operating. The goal of AI developers is to make AI more humanlike in language processing and speaking naturally.
Here we are, facing this revolutionary possibility. What are our choices? Consider someone writing entirely with AI, and our poor editors are struggling with the question. Did AI write this or a human? When calculators, computers and machines have taken over most of the manual tasks, the primary concern was about job losses. However, today, this dilemma has taken a new turn. Why this ethical concern now?
AI has extraordinary potential unlike any other technology before it. This triggers our primal instincts, and we are concerned about being overtaken by a new “species.” This is my hypothesis. We have that primal fear lurking beneath our minds, even though we only have created AI, and it still requires human management.
What is the future of storytelling, then? If you are a professional writer, it is quite possible that someone who can proficiently use AI might replace you. For you and me with a passion for writing and perhaps like to earn from our writing, relying only on traditional methods might hinder our progress.
This series is to be continued as a weekly edition, and I intend to create a roadmap for creative writers. For laypersons like me, this would help a lot in using AI tools ethically to achieve optimal results maintaining their original storytelling.
Next week let us explore this topic about the ethical use of AI tools in your creative writing. Let me know in comments below.
