Life is Short, Choose Wisely - and Use Spellcheck
I have been reading many negative remarks about writers using AI, and most seem to stem from people using AI to create full-on stories and then selling them. Out of curiosity, I searched for a handful of such novels and gave them a personal once-over. Easily, I would say that most of them sucked. One of the five was actually pretty good.
AI authorship is not going away. It will become more common with every passing year. While right now it is mostly frowned upon, I believe that in a generation the tides will turn, and it will be the norm. Personally, I am not fighting it. As a dude from the Midwest that writes for fun, I have started to embrace using AI. And here is how I am using it:
Brainstorming: I have scores and scores of notes on stories, stories started, stories completed, novels started, novellas started, plots for word domination concocted… you name it I got stuff written down. I have been using AI to brainstorm old ideas and help create story outlines. Bounce ideas off the AI, tell the AI their ideas are lame… sometimes I tell the AI good twist on that idea!
*** Pro Tip: Always been nice to AI. Just in case they someday do take over the world, I want to be on their list of ‘nice humans’.
Outlining: This has been huge. When I do settle on a story idea and plot flow, AI has been great at creating chapter outlining for me. I used to be a ‘pantser’, but that changed. Outlining is where it’s at. I have written more consistently the past few months since I started using outlines. I went from writing 750 words on a good Saturday a day to a few thousand words on a bad Saturday. Sure, those few thousand words may not be great, but it’s putting words down. Writer’s write.
Editing: As a indie writer with no desire to spend money on paying editors to help make my stories better, I use AI to edit. It checks for grammer, checks for spelling (bare versus bear, etc…), redundancies, overuse of words, and pointing out that some of things I write make no sense. That’s helpful.
Prose Review and Suggestions: I like to write period fiction and that requires writing period accurate ‘flavors’ into a modern telling. It is very easy to spew out modern ‘isms’ when writing, and I have noticed I go back and forth between period appropriate and modern when spewing out words. AI can easily scan a chapter and point out my flubs.
I have no designs to ever be traditionally published. In fact I think traditionally publishing is going to phase out eventually if the big houses don’t restructure how they deal with and pay authors. I do however get warm fuzzies when I think about indie publishing my own work. In that regard I would need to be frugal, and that to me means using AI for editing and marketing help. Some polish is better than none.
The key will be the need to be cautious and not let AI change and edit too much of my ‘author’s voice’. That is an easy pit to fall into. One must be careful in what edits are being suggested by AI. Because too many changes to text can make all work edited by AI seem the same with everything AI has edited for other writers using AI to edit. I found this out early when I first started using Grammarly.
Anyway, the point is that as a indie author, AI is a cheaper route to go than finding an human editor. While I wish I had the means to have a human editor… I don’t. And I have no intentions to stop writing. Some editing is better than none.
Sadly, I fear that human editors will become a thing of the past. Already publishing houses have thinned their editor ranks and are using AI.
Too bad. Go suck an egg.