It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group!
The awesome co-hosts for the September 3 posting of the IWSG are Kim Lajevardi, Natalie Aguirre, Nancy Gideon, and Diedre Knight!
This month's question is topical to say the least:
What are your thoughts on using AI, such as GPChat, Raptor, and others with your writing? Would you use it for research, story bible, or creating outlines\beats?
To be honest, I'm not a fan of any of these AI "tools" in terms of my creative work. I have used them professionally to do things like creating a generic Health and Safety plan or NDA agreement or to shorten text to fit into a funding application's required word limit, but not for anything creative.
I feel like AI is the opposite of creative. You punch in prompts, and it spits stuff out that's a mash up of words and ideas it scrapes from all the media it's been fed in training. Media that most of us haven't given permission for the companies to use as AI training. Which I object to.
The few times I have experimented with Chat GPT, I didn't think what it did was actually much good either. Even those very templated, generic things I asked it to do weren't amazing and required a fair amount of massaging and re-writing before they were of any use to me. And if something that generic needed that amount of work, why would I outsource any of my creative work to it?
Apart from anything else. I write because I love to write. I love discovering the story and uncovering characters' various layers as they move through it. I don't want a computer to write for me. I don't need a computer to give me ideas - I have more ideas for books than I have years left to live!
In the future, I may consider using AI for marketing purposes, but I'm not even sure about that. I'm not great at book marketing - and if you saw my royalty statements, you'd agree with me - but at least anything I do is genuinely from me and my own voice.
Maybe I'm just old-school, but I'm not going to be jumping on that AI bandwagon anytime soon.
But I'm interested to hear what everyone else thinks. Do you use AI in your writing work? And if so, how?
