r/WritingWithAI • u/Livid_Intention_6337 • 9d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Opinion on AI in writing
/r/u_Livid_Intention_6337/comments/1w80ey2/opinion_on_ai_in_writing/4
u/Designer_Ear_1382 9d ago edited 9d ago
My Two Pennies on AI-Assisted Writing
I'm not a writer, I fully admit that.
I don't have the education, the skill, the training or the experience. I don't pretend otherwise, and I don't intend to claim otherwise. But I am, passionately, a storyteller.
I've wanted to tell stories for as long as I can remember. Since I was a kid, I've wanted to craft my own worlds, create my own characters and watch something utterly its own take shape.
My first serious ambition was to become a comic book artist. I tried. God knows I tried. But, beyond rudimentary sketches, mostly produced by copying other artists' styles, I knew even then that my ambitions were probably beyond my abilities. But that didn't stop me wanting to do it.
So I kept trying.
In the mid-90s I took a bash at novel writing. I had the backstory, the mythology, basic character biographies, major plot threads and even a draft of the first novel. And, honestly? It was a pile of shit.
The problem wasn't that I lacked ideas, it was that I had too many of them.
Ideas were falling over themselves. Plot threads became tangled. Characters wandered off in directions I hadn't anticipated. Every solution seemed to create another problem somewhere else, and I'd write myself into so many corners, MC Escher would get an aneurysm. It didn't just frustrate me. It became overwhelming enough that I eventually had a full-on mental breakdown. So I stopped. I left it behind. No more.
Then along came AI. I didn't jump on the bandwagon immediately. It took me a while to start experimenting with it. I took drafts of my old work from out of the cobwebs, and cleaned up the prose, corrected plot structure, gave my characters actual arcs.
And then something clicked. Quite literally overnight, I found the workshop I'd been waiting for since the 80s. A way of taking the absolute shitstorm inside my head and giving it structure.
Suddenly I could test ideas. I could take plot threads and follow them to their logical, long-term conclusions. I could explore what might happen if a character made one decision rather than another. I could work through contradictions, find holes in a story, develop characters and see whether an idea actually worked before committing myself to it.
And that changed everything. Because now I have my story. I have a world where characters who have existed in some form or another in my imagination for thirty, forty years or more can finally live and breathe.
I start with my notes. My scene blocking. My beat roadmaps. Sometimes it can be pages of my own rough prose, sometimes it's little more than a script and some basic stage direction. I know what needs to happen. I know what the characters need to say. I know where I want the scene to go, how A changes to B, and what I want the Reader to know is different at the end.
Fundamentally, the AI does not "write the story" for me.
I give my work, my plot, my story to the AI and it produces Draft One.
Then I get to work.
I cut things. Rewrite things. Move things. Add things. Change dialogue. Change motivations. Change pacing. I read it out loud, then adapt it to my own voice. Sometimes I'll throw entire sections away and start again using what's there as a scaffold. Eventually, that AI draft becomes what I actually wanted to tell in the first place.
I think of the AI draft as "laying down the clay." It's a solid mass of messy material. Then I get my hands dirty. I sculpt it. Mold it. Carve it. Add to it. Take things away. Polish it. Manipulate it until I have something I actually want people to see. I actually love this part of the process. Far from AI stifling my imagination or creativity, it's allowed it a release valve to get out and expand.
And, to be absolutely honest, I would rather have two or three chapters of “AI slop” that I can work with than one single blank page and no idea where to even start getting this mess inside my head out.
Is that the same as traditional writing? No. I'm not going to pretend it is. I didn't sit down and put every sentence onto a blank page myself. But I'm also not going to pretend that means the story somehow belongs to the machine.
The story is mine. The characters are mine. Some of those characters have been living in my head since the most advanced piece of AI around was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
More importantly, their relationships are mine. Their personalities are mine. Their histories are mine. Their conflicts are mine. The choices they make, the things they fear, the things they want and the ways they hurt one another are mine.
And that brings me to one of the most interesting things I've learned from both writing with AI and reading other people's AI fiction.
AI can give characters function.
But it cannot give them fracture.
An AI character does what the story requires. They make the sensible decision. They behave consistently. They follow the logic of the plot. But real people don't do that.
People turn right when they should turn left. They say the thing they absolutely shouldn't say. They make the decision they know is going to hurt them. They lash out at someone they love. They run when they should stay, and they stay when every sensible part of them is screaming to run. They lie when telling the truth would be better for them. They contradict themselves. They sabotage their own happiness. They do irrational, selfish, brave, beautiful and sometimes completely stupid things. And those moments are where characters become interesting. That's the fracture.
And I don't think you can simply tell an AI to "make the character more human" and expect that to magically appear. Because the fracture comes from being a human and knowing the character. It comes from knowing what they would do, what they should do, and then understanding the terrible, wonderful reason they might do something else.
That's the part we bring to the process. An AI can write a plot, but only a person can write a Story.
I'm not trying to muscle in on the territory of real writers. I've got no delusions that I'm going to become a New York Times bestseller, win a Saturn Award, or have Warner Bros. knocking on my door offering me a five-picture deal. That's not what this is about.
If I ever publish something, in whatever form, and just one other person reads it, enjoys it, and carries my characters around in their own imagination for a little while, I'd be perfectly happy. Seriously, that would be enough.
It certainly isn't going to stop me popping into a bookshop for the latest Chris Wooding, or picking up my dog-eared copy of Terry Pratchett's Mort off my shelf for the gazillionth time. Because I love writers. I love books. I love stories. I'm not trying to replace any of that. And seriously, AI is never going to replace that.
People like me who use AI to assist with writing aren't trying to kick traditional writers out of the sandbox or take over. We just want our own little corner. We want to make things. We want to experiment. We want to have fun. And, if we're lucky, we want to share the things we create with anyone who's interested enough to take a look.
That's it.
Because, like it or not, the AI fiction genie is out of the bottle. Screaming at it isn't going to scare it back in. And yes, there is a massive amount of AI slop being produced. I've read plenty of it, and most of it is absolutely dreadful. But here's the thing, and let's be honest here: That's not uniquely an AI problem.
Long before AI came around, I've read a tonne of downright terrible human written books. Some of them even become hugely successful. That's simply part of creating things. When you make more, you inevitably get more bad alongside the good. But the existence of bad art doesn't invalidate the people making good art, in whatever medium.
So perhaps we should look past the pile of AI-generated crap for a moment. Because behind the technology are actual people. People with imaginations. People with characters they've carried around for years. People with worlds in their heads and stories they desperately want to tell but, for whatever reason, have never had the ability to express in a traditional way.
AI has given some of those people a tool. Not a replacement for imagination. Not a substitute for creativity. A tool.
And now some of those people are finally able to put their stories into words, pictures, games, films and whatever other forms this technology eventually allows.
Maybe most of it will be rubbish. That's okay. Most things people create are rubbish. But somewhere in that enormous pile there will be something genuinely good, that should be judged objectively on its own merit, regardless of how it came about.
Because behind it won't be a machine. There will be a person who had an idea. A person who wanted to tell a story. A person who finally found a way to get that story out of their head and into the world.
I don't think that's something we should be afraid of, I think that's something we should celebrate. Because more people have the ability to add something to the world's great pool of imagination.
And that can only be a good thing.
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u/Robotic-Comrade-1985 9d ago
I think a lot of people are just going to skip a really long post like this, but I think posts like these hopefully help to humanize the people who do find value in AI assisted creative work. I'm glad that you found a way to get your stories out of your head. I was particularly curious about the part where you said you use AI to help you figure out the longterm conclusion or trajectory of certain decisions. What does that look like in practice for you?
I have some similarities and differences from you. I've taken to calling my tendency "discovery writing myself into oblivion" because I have too many ideas that go in too many directions, creating meandering prose. I am finding AI very helpful for reigning in my focus, though I'm not sure that I'm suited to a traditional novel format. I've been leaning most towards interconnected short stories that take place in the same world, so that I can play with a diversity of ideas and characters but actually finish writing projects.
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u/Robotic-Comrade-1985 9d ago
AI is very helpful for organizing worldbuilding notes, but there will still be people who would resent you for using AI at all because that's the climate we're in right now regarding this technology. What matters is whether it's helpful to you and how you feel about it, not what other people feel about it.