It’s been a while since I posted about BryceGPT. That’s not because I haven’t been working on it. Appendicitis and the ensuing yuck certainly derailed me some, but I’m back at it now.
For the past week or two, my big focus has been on using it as a tool to write a short story sequel to Vodnik. I had some friends help make a more refined version of BryceGPT that’s focused on just recreating the voice of that book. The goal is to have the short story be 100% AI-generated, though, and that’s making things much more complicated. Instead of just having AI make a rough draft that I then edit directly, I have to slice up that rough draft and tell it what edits I want it to make. That takes much longer.
Through the process, I’m noticing a number of things about me and writing. The biggest one is that I enjoy the process of writing itself. Coming up with what words to say and how to say them. In other words, I don’t just want to have written books. I want to actually write them myself. That’s a big, distinct difference. Take getting paid out of it. Imagine you have a hobby. Say . . . stamp collecting. And imagine you discover AI can just go through all the online stores to find the stamps you don’t have, buy them, organize them, and then sell others when the prices go up. In other words, what if AI could do all the collecting for you?
Why in the world would you want it to? Hobbies are all about doing things we enjoy. Why offload that to a computer? You might end up with the same collection, but you would have none of the joy of the hobby. It would be the same with playing the piano. Yes, you can buy a digital player piano, and it can play songs for you, but is that anything in the same zip code as playing the piano yourself?
Nope. So it shouldn’t be surprising writing is the same way.
Which leads to the next question: would I use AI to write at all? And for that, my answer isn’t as clear. AI is fantastic at coming up with a list of ideas. Looking for sensory details? Ask AI to make some suggestions. It does a wonderful job. It’s also very good at getting words on paper that you can then edit. Editing is like writing, though it’s a bit of a different beast.
As I’ve used AI to write my story, it has gone about two to three times faster for the first draft. That’s a huge difference. At the same time, the quality of that first draft is significantly worse. Some of that is because I’m not actually in the thick of it, working to create the prose, which means I don’t take it quite as seriously. Instead of finding just the right way to say it, AI finds a way to say it, and that seems good enough in the moment. So I’ve had to take more care reading over that first draft and changing it to be something I’m happy with, even though it’s already tailored to write the same way I do.
I definitely think I will be incorporating AI into my writing regimen. I want to explore using it to write a book. I could see myself keeping two projects going at once: writing a book the old-fashioned way, and writing a different book with AI. As I use the tools more, I think the process will streamline itself. Of course, for any of that to matter, stories written by AI need to be copyrightable. If they’re not, then you can’t sell them. If you can’t sell them, then suddenly you’re just having AI play the piano for you instead of doing it yourself.
Definitely an interesting time to be alive . . .