I'm sorry, I would respond, in my head, to that prompt, but I'm a professional writer. I don't need to have an algorithm create my message or convey it in a different tone. I know what I'm doing.
For our customer documentation authoring tool, we incorporated a plugin tool that used AI to analyse our writing to ensure that we were following our company's style guidelines. I never used the tool. I was my team's editor and I knew the style guidelines cold.
So, the thought of using AI at work seemed preposterous. Maybe, that made me a bit of a dinosaur but I still produced high-quality documentation. Year after year, my peers and bosses praised my work, so I was doing something right.
The idea of using AI for my fiction just didn't make any sense. How could an algorithm be as creative as a human? I imagine that any work of fiction that was generated by AI would be dry, boring. I mean, I had tried describing a scene in order for Chat GPT to create the cover art for the novel I'm now working on and it couldn't get anything right.
It didn't seem to understand what lying face-down in a body of water looked like: how would it know how to craft a well-conceived story?
I'm more than 30 pages into my murder mystery and I'm more organized than I've ever been for a novel. I have a spreadsheet that contains the names of the characters and their roles, and how they fit into the story. Some of the people, such as the killer and some of the witnesses and suspects, are on the spreadsheet but haven't even appeared in the story.
I have a clear idea for the motive and the circumstances that lead up to the murder, and I came up with them on my own. I used no artificial intelligence to produce my plot.
But there are aspects of this story for which I have no knowledge beyond what I've seen in televised crime dramas or have read in murder mysteries I've read over the decades. I'm taking wild-ass guesses or I'm just glossing over some sections, such as the coroner's autopsy findings.
There are a lot of moving parts around the discovery of the body and identifying the victim, and while I've made some decent notes around certain things, I'm not a detective. I don't know proper procedures.
So, for the first time, yesterday, I turned to ChatGPT for help. For other stories, I've relied on Google searches to give me some answers, so I decided I'd let ChatGPT be my search engine.
I described how the victim's body was found. I provided the identity and career of the dead person, with people who know her (I've previously stated that the victim is a woman, so there's no surprise there). I did not state that the person found floating in the water was a murder victim: I simply said it was a dead body. When I typed in this information, I asked the AI tool for the first order of operations on the side of the police.
The tool churned for a few seconds before listing all sorts of tasks that the police and pathologists would perform. It gave details of what clues would be followed to determine if the death was an accident or homicide. It suggested who would be interviewed, and how the body would be identified.
AI gave me a framework in which I could fill in details.
As soon as I had this information, I started thinking: was this story mine? Was I letting an algorithm be a part of the creative process?
The answer is a resounding no. AI isn't telling me what to write. It isn't giving me insight into the characters or suggesting any twists to the plot. (I've had enough people do that when I've indicated that I'm writing a crime novel.) AI has simply listed a number of tasks that an investigating team wound undertake to help determine the identity of the victim and how she would have ended up in the river.
I'm not cheating.
AI isn't writing my book but I think I'll use it like an assistant, as it should be. AI should never do the heavy lifting when it comes to being creative.
For me, ChatGPT will be the new Google search, without me having to wade through what is useful and what is just taking up my time.
Time I can be using, writing.
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