I Tried Again to Write with AI. It Went Better This Time.

Hey everyone! Mary here, and you might recall that last time I was on here, I was lamenting that, in a fit of writer's block, I tried to get the machines to write my book for me, and it didn't go well. Basically, I was totally blocked on a book, and I tried to get ChatGPT to generate some plot ideas and an intro paragraph and... yeah. It was terrible. 

Well, since then, I've gotten write's block again (hooray!). This time, it was on my Brave New Girls short story, which I almost considered not writing altogether, that's how blocked I was (hey, I can just edit the thing, right?). I had the bones for a plot there, I was just completely blanking on details (it probably didn't help that I was doing this amid a whirlwind of other activities too). 

So, once again in desperation, I turned to ChatGPT. Hey, they say the machines are coming for my job? Fine, machine, you do the work.

But since I had the bones of a plot already — girl in a solarpunk future enters a centuries-old lab full of booby traps to retrieve a rare plant developed by a long-dead eccentric scientist — I was actually able to get something out of the AI this time.

First, the simple stuff. What the hell is this girl named? Usually, I scan baby name lists. This time, I described the character and asked ChatGPT to give me a bunch of names. Who knows if the description did anything, but after hitting "regenerate" a few times, I settled on Amara. Maybe this is just a lazier version of browsing Behind the Name.

Then, it got a little more complicated. What makes this plant special? What's a plot twist I could throw in? Who's her partner in this adventure, since I didn't want her talking to herself the whole time?

This is where the machine fell apart, though it was rather amusing seeing the cockamamie ideas it came up with (Amara has a mechanical arm, and the machine was REALLY obsessed with it... half the plots it generated had something to do with the arm, like the plant being somehow connected, or her partner really wanting to study it, or... it was weird). 

But amid the trash I was able to pick out a few things that worked. Who is her partner? Oh, ChatGPT gave me a lot of wackadoodle suggestions, but I liked the one where it was a kid who got in trouble for studying illegal plants. How does she meet him? Amid other things, ChatGPT suggested a hackathon. Perfect. And as a not-hackathoner, I asked it to give me some ideas for what could actually be going on at this event. What makes the plant special? ChatGPT kept insisting it was sentient, but finally I came up with a reason all on my own by rejecting all the machine's idea (it's a superfood, essentially, that could put Big Agriculture out of business). What about a twist? Okay, that one I was on my own for. 

These are all questions I would probably have typed, in some form or another, into a search engine before. Which is what AI will probably wind up being used for a lot, plus generating copy (which, mind you, is different from writing... think about all those functional words that litter your surroundings that say things like "scan here to access our resources" or whatever, or boring filler articles for "content marketing" that say exactly nothing).

I've heard it said that copy-generating AIs can be thought of like calculators. You still have to do the real math, with the fancy formulas and whatnot, but the machine can crunch the numbers for you (maybe that's why super high-level math doesn't have numbers at all).

An AI by design can't come up with original ideas. It can only regurgitate what's out there, and sometimes that can be helpful. And when it's not, well, it's good for a laugh.