AI In Writing - An Experiment

These days, AI is everywhere. As I type, I can easily find four buttons on the Wix editor offering to have Astro generate an image, give me ideas, answer my questions, and even finish this post for me. On Google Docs, Gemini offers to format documents and expand on points. Grammarly wants to rewrite my sentences. Amazon's Rufus will tell you the next thing you need. Canva advertises image generation, color scheme creation, and text modification.

Some love these new innovations, but more and more people are cautious and scared of AI. We've fantasized for decades about how AI could take over the world - but these stories have never been as plausible as they are now.

As the daughter of a software engineer, I have never been as scared of AI as everyone around me. It isn't that I particularly like it, I just understand its many limitations. But as I began to see it in more and more places, trying to help me with everything from picking music to writing a blog post, I began to get more wary of it.

I think that, as young authors and artists growing up in a world where AI is around every corner and growing, we should learn how to use it. It is made to work for us, and if we can learn how to use it responsibly, we can eliminate the possibility of finding ourselves working for it. I think of like the lions at the zoo. We keep them caged because everyone is safer that way, but we still give them a little room to roam because it helps us to better experience God's world.

So I set out to do just that. I created an account with ChatGPT to see what exactly it could do, how well it could do it, and what was too far. I'll categorize my findings by rating them: what is okay and what isn't, out of 5?

5/5 - Search Engine

I have absolutely no problem with using AI as a search engine (morally). Of course, some authors have sworn to never use AI in their writing, however small the use, which I respect completely. And of course, it isn't always reliable and makes a ton of mistakes. But the reason I think it's so helpful is that it has the capability to tailor answers to what you need. For a story I was writing, I needed to know a few things about basketball. But I didn't have to scour the internet reading through blog posts and coaching websites just to write one line. Some fact-checking never hurts, but a process that normally would've taken half an hour hardly took five minutes.

Of course, for more important research that might take up a substantial part of the story (such as worldbuilding research), I still use more reliable engines and sources to gather information myself. But for little things here and there, I find it very useful.

4/5 - Lists

The next thing I found AI good for was lists. Similar to lists of setting ideas or character quirks on Pinterest, AI could give me a list of whatever I asked for. It was faster and easier than pulling one up on Pinterest, and there isn't much difference morally, so I'm still pretty sure this is okay. My only thought is that no one knows where the ideas came from, and if they're extremely original ideas from someone else, it can be a little off to use them. Or people don't get the credit they deserve (even just in the form of social media popularity) for the work they put into helping other writers. But like I said, as long as you're still doing the writing, it's about the same as Pinterest ideas.

3/5 - Plot Points

This is where I got into the much grayer area of AI in writing. If you brainstorm with a friend and come up with a great plot point, that isn't cheating at all. So why does it feel so much different when it's AI and not a real person? When I thought hard about that question, I really only became more conflicted. Finally, I brought the question to the fantastic group of young writers I'm friends with on The Habit, my online writing community. They brought many thoughts and points of view, and along with contributing to the discussion, they helped me sort out my own thoughts.

What I've decided is that if you've used AI to help with plot points, such as giving it two things that happen in your story and asking it what could go in between, the story is still very much yours. When the engine gives you a bland scene idea or a blank setting, it isn't writing for you. You still make it yours. However, there are reasons to avoid this, as well. When you brainstorm with a friend, a lot more of your creativity is involved. Also, you ensure that the idea isn't coming from some iconic scene everyone will think you're copying, or something similar. But one of my very favorite points on this subject was the following from my friend Cosette:

"Writing is isolating. It's hard to get out of our heads and interact with the real world sometimes. And AI seems to give us a solution to that: interact with something almost human, but not human enough to make us socially uncomfortable, and have the conversations and brainstorming sessions we wish we could have with other people. After all, what's the difference between getting ideas from things people have put into technology vs getting an idea from something a person said directly to us? The difference is that it could lead to further isolation. I wouldn't have nearly the writing community I did if I didn't bounce my ideas off of you guys and see what your ideas were. As human beings, I respect your opinions and plot ideas way more than any AI program. And it's made it so that writing isn't an isolated journey anymore."

You can read her spectacular blog post on AI in writing here.

So, to summarize what I think is the grayest area: using AI to fill in plot points is not a vile, horrible thing to do, and it doesn't mean you're losing your story. But you don't know your sources, and you're losing one of the best social and creative aspects of writing.

2/5 - Editing

I don't think editing with AI is completely wrong, either. Depending on how you do it, it can be fine. But there are three problems. First of all, sometimes it will try to fix issues for you. Rather than saying "this sentence doesn't flow well, think about rewriting it," like a person might, it might say, "this sentence doesn't flow well, write it this way instead." Again, you don't know where it's getting what it's "writing". It could be a sentence straight from another author's book.

Second, it gets confused very easily. Unless it's specifically trained to fix grammar or structure, like Grammarly, it probably makes a lot of errors. Even Grammarly contradicts itself sometimes, not seeing what you mean by a sentence or thinking it's meant to be in British English.

And last but absolutely not least, putting your writing into an AI engine can train it to write for others, copying your style and voice. And all of a sudden you're on the opposite end of getting pieces of your writing stolen without knowing it.

1/5 - Writing

It doesn't take much thought to know that the completely dark area of AI in writing is having AI write for you. It isn't the writing part that's bad (AI has tried to write for me before, and although it isn't good at physical space or appearances, it's not horrible), but rather claiming that it's yours. You didn't write it, and like I mentioned before, you don't know where it's coming from. It could be copied and pasted from a book you've never read. Either way, it isn't yours, and you can't make it so.

I use AI for research periodically and lists if I'm really stuck. In my research, I did have it fill in a plot point, but I won't do that again, as it crosses my personal boundaries. The most writing I've ever let an AI engine read is maybe two paragraphs, because I think it's dangerous. It has written scenes for me, but I've since told it not to, and I've never claimed that that writing was mine or showed it to anyone as if it was.

Using AI in your writing process isn't blatantly wrong. It is a part of today's world, and using it responsibly isn't bad. In fact, it can help you write better if used in the right way. But don't let it steal the creative and social aspects of writing. At the end of the day, it's up to you. How much will you let it do for you before you think it's too far?