ChatGPT your way past writer's block

[LaRascasse]

So after much banging my head against the wall of writer's block, I'm turning to ChatGPT to help me through a critical scene or two.

It won't be much help, given that it stays clear of adult content, but I'll take what I can get. Hopefully, I can come up with some good prompts which I can then word it properly so it fits into my story.

Is anybody else trying this? AI definitely has a future as a writing aid.

 

[Demiurging]

I've been using NovelAI myself for the same reason, and bonus it doesn't shy away from pornography in any way.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Ok, so I've played around a lot with chatGPT, and I actually just submitted a story where, at the end, I state that a very small part of my story was written by chatGPT, which is true, and also seeing how the damn thing knew exactly how to write the scene after I fed it some prompts, was unnerving. Its not perfect. Its not imaginative. What it spits out is entirely predictable, so, in my view, falls short of a fundamental tenet of great storytelling (which is to be unpredictable). But, as a research assistant, it is incredibly useful. My take is, like it or not, this will soon be ubiquitous.

Recently I read that ChatGPT 4 will contain an order of magnitude as many nodes as ChatGPT 3 (the current version). I don't know what that means, I just hope we're keeping it away from the nuclear codes.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I can understand the appeal, but the mere idea of an 'AI' which isn't really an 'AI' writing stories or parts of stories makes me shudder. Why would you want such generic text, or maybe even something that the 'AI' would likely borrow from the petabytes of literature that is out there. I am just guessing about the latter, as I have no idea how its algorithms actually work. But I feel that the whole concept is so far removed from the idea of art that I cringe at the mere mention of it. I don't know, maybe that's just me

 

[Demiurging]

I can understand the appeal, but the mere idea of an 'AI' which isn't really an 'AI' writing stories or parts of stories makes me shudder. Why would you want such generic text, or maybe even something that the 'AI' would likely borrow from the petabytes of literature that is out there. I am just guessing about the latter, as I have no idea how its algorithms actually work. But I feel that the whole concept is so far removed from the idea of art that I cringe at the mere mention of it. I don't know, maybe that's just me

There's a touch more to it than just putting in a prompt and letting the AI write your story for you. I've tried several times and the exact thing you're describing happens.
What you do is you write a little and let the AI go off for a few sentences, maybe as much as a paragraph, and you go in and correct details like plot and the general direction, diction. It really is a good tool if all you're looking for is a way to spur yourself on when you hit a snag.
Just like any AI software right now, there is still a human element in the guidance; it's a tool and not a perfect solution.

We're not quite on the cusp of being replaced yet.

 

[XerXesXu]

I typed into NovelAI:

COULD you, WOULD you, ON the BEACH?

COULD you, WOULD you, WRITHE a LEACH?

COULD you, WOULD you, KISS a SUCKer?

Do MOLLUSCS cause YOUR arse to PUCKer?

Then TELL your STORY, TENTacle FUCKer

I now have a 1,538-word story (I ran out of ink, and was asked to register ) beginning:

'FIND out WHICH one is TRUE and which is FALSE!

It's TIME for TRUTH or DARE!

You're at the beach. You came with your mother. The ocean is visible through the clear blue sky above. A small sand dune borders the shoreline on the west. There’s a large oak tree on the southeast side of the dunes. It looks like it might be dying from lack of sunlight, but it still stands tall with its broad branches stretching across the sands like an umbrella.

A beach blanket lies scattered about the sand near the dune where you’d lain in the sun with your mother. An empty bucket can be seen at the edge of the water. Several other items of jetsam are nearby. There is also your wooden bucket near the sand dune.'

I note two things 1. the story is about tentacle porn - something I would never write 2. It's written in 2nd Person PoV, something I would never have attempted to write.

I'm impressed.

It's a tool, I'll certainly use it as a tool.

Tomorrow, I have a WIP with which I can seriously experiment.

 

[Voboy]

If AI is writing your story, then it is not your story.

It’s only yours if YOU are writing it.

 

[XerXesXu]

If AI is writing your story, then it is not your story.

It’s only yours if YOU are writing it.

Another great divide opens up between the personnel on Lit's AH. Those who care and those who don't. Tomorrow I'll type in some classic elevator pitches, just to see what results. I believe the ability to write a good elevator pitch is the mark of a good writer.

 

[nice90sguy]

GPT is stirring up shit in the world of education. A good thing too, I say. Something similar happened in math education a while back, when electronic calculators appeared. They'll first ban it, then allow it again, after they've redefined what "education" means.

I HIGHLY recommend anyone who's interested in the philosophical ramifications of ChatGPT to read Alan Turing's short, totally non-technical paper from 1950, (wherein he describes "The Imitation Game" a.k.a "The Turing Test"):

A link for the hard of googling:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_article.pdf

 

[Voboy]

Another great divide opens up between the personnel on Lit's AH. Those who care and those who don't. Tomorrow I'll type in some classic elevator pitches, just to see what results. I believe the ability to write a good elevator pitch is the mark of a good writer.

It’s only a divide if you want it to be a divide.

I‘d think my statement was simple common sense. Either the words are yours, or they're not.

 

[TadOverdon]

What I've found when playing with these gadgets is that they don't usually create a scene with emotional conflict. If two people in a scene are supposed to discuss a subject, they will discuss it in detail and with a lot of back-and-forth but no interesting personal points of view that they appear to be invested in. In essence, they don't want anything very badly.

 

[nice90sguy]

It’s only a divide if you want it to be a divide.

I‘d think my statement was simple common sense. Either the words are yours, or they're not.

A moment's thought will show that neither is completely true. Words are ALWAYS shared -- it's the essence of language. People almost never coin a word, and rarely do they coin a phrase.

If I start my story "Once upon a time," who's words am I using? Everyone who's ever heard a fairytale.

 

[Voboy]

A moment's thought will show that neither is completely true. Words are ALWAYS shared -- it's the essence of language. People almost never coin a word, and rarely do they coin a phrase.

If I start my story "Once upon a time," who's words am I using? Everyone who's ever heard a fairytale.

Sigh.

Again. If AI is writing your story, then the story belongs to the AI. Not to you.

 

[nice90sguy]

What I've found when playing with these gadgets is that they don't usually create a scene with emotional conflict. If two people in a scene are supposed to discuss a subject, they will discuss it in detail and with a lot of back-and-forth but no interesting personal points of view that they appear to be invested in. In essence, they don't want anything very badly.

That's the heart of the issue with ChatGPT. IT doesn't really give a shit about anything except sounding sensible, and that lack of purposefulness ends up creating motiveless characters.

 

[TadOverdon]

Part of the current debate around AI has to do with the fact that nothing "belongs to the AI." This is where copyright issues and concerns come into play.

There's a GAN site called thispersondoesnotexist.com that people might be familiar with. So, it generates photorealistic portraits using datasets of real photographs. It seemed pretty amazing at first, but lately attention has been focused on how closely its generated images sometimes are to the dataset images.

It goes through its mindless process without awareness of the degree to which it's mimicking its source data, however random and unlikely that mimicry might be.

So the odds may be against it producing an exact copy of a photo, but producing something almost identical happens more frequently.

What I'm getting at is the possibility that a narrative AI might produce plagiaristically similar prose without the user of the program detecting it.

 

[nice90sguy]

Sigh.

Again. If AI is writing your story, then the story belongs to the AI. Not to you.

I do get what you're saying, but I'm not sure if you get what I'm saying. First off, nothing "belongs" to an AI. It's a tool for producing text. Secondly, you could say something similar about the smart grammar and style tools that have appeared in word processors.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You're at the beach. You came with your mother. The ocean is visible through the clear blue sky above. A small sand dune borders the shoreline on the west. There’s a large oak tree on the southeast side of the dunes. It looks like it might be dying from lack of sunlight, but it still stands tall with its broad branches stretching across the sands like an umbrella.

A beach blanket lies scattered about the sand near the dune where you’d lain in the sun with your mother. An empty bucket can be seen at the edge of the water. Several other items of jetsam are nearby. There is also your wooden bucket near the sand dune.'

That's a nonsensical collection of random phrases joined together, with no rhyme nor reason. There's no spatial awareness, for a start - how on earth does one see the sea through the sky? And it doesn't know much about oak trees! Forest, dipstick, forest, not a bloody sand dune!

If folk think this is even remotely useful for writing fiction, I'd say cope with your writer's block some other way, because surely, this would only make it worse.

 

[Voboy]

I do get what you're saying, but I'm not sure if you get what I'm saying. First off, nothing "belongs" to an AI. It's a tool for producing text. Secondly, you could say something similar about the smart grammar and style tools that have appeared in word processors.

Yep. I don’t use those, either.

I enjoy writing. It’s fun and exhilarating. I can’t grasp why people want to let a machine do it.

 

[TadOverdon]

I absolutely rely upon grammar and spelling checkers to backstop me while proofing and editing.

 

[nice90sguy]

Yep. I don’t use those, either.

That's bordering on Amish!

I enjoy writing. It’s fun and exhilarating. I can’t grasp why people want to let a machine do it.

Me neither, but I'm also aware of the debates around music sampling (not my thing) that when on in the 90's. It took me a while, but I have to admit that some creative stuff grew out of it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've occasionally drawn tarot cards when I needed a nudge for a story. As described, sounds like this use of GPT is pretty much a high-tech version of the same technique. From a "creative writing" POV, I'm relaxed about it; anybody wanting to use it to write a good story will still need to put in a lot of their own work.

(If anybody wants ethical concerns about this tool, forget questions of creative purity and go read up on how it's trained to recognise objectionable content - basically a digital spin on the old business of shipping toxic waste to Africa.)

You're at the beach. You came with your mother. The ocean is visible through the clear blue sky above. A small sand dune borders the shoreline on the west. There’s a large oak tree on the southeast side of the dunes. It looks like it might be dying from lack of sunlight, but it still stands tall with its broad branches stretching across the sands like an umbrella.

A beach blanket lies scattered about the sand near the dune where you’d lain in the sun with your mother. An empty bucket can be seen at the edge of the water. Several other items of jetsam are nearby. There is also your wooden bucket near the sand dune.'

I note two things 1. the story is about tentacle porn - something I would never write 2. It's written in 2nd Person PoV, something I would never have attempted to write.

Interesting. The style of the response there reminds me VERY much of old-school text adventure games. A list of items that one might be able to pick up or interact with: the bucket (two buckets?), the blanket, the tree. Compass directions. A bunch of disjoint sentences that can easily be regenerated according to the current game state - if the blanket is here, include the blanket sentence, otherwise don't.

I don't think that's a coincidence. Your prompt suggests second person, and games of that kind account for a lot of the second-person material that would likely be in a training corpus.

That example also hints at the limitations of GPT. (NovelAI also runs on GPT.) Why is the ocean is above the sky? How can a single blanket be "scattered about the sand"? If the oak tree was able to grow large, and if the beach is still sunny, why is the oak tree "dying from lack of sunlight"? (A Doylean answer: very likely because darkness was a common story element in those old text games. In particular, in the Zork series, adventurers who couldn't find a light source were liable to be eaten by a grue.) One could spin an interesting story explaining what's happened to the ocean and the oak tree, but GPT isn't going to be able to provide answers.

There's also the location of the oak tree as "on the southeast side" of something which is apparently on the west of the protagonist - not the most helpful way to locate it relative to that protagonist!

One concern there is that without being very familiar with the source material, it's hard to know just how close it might be to copying a story that already exists. I can see that the style is at the least a pastiche of interactive text games, but I can't tell whether it's drawing on one in particular. The less material it has to work from (e.g. in second person) the bigger the risk that it might draw from a single source to a degree that might be considered plagiarism. [edit: I see TadOverdon raised this same issue.]

 

[TadOverdon]

When we talk about "writers' influences," we're talking about something parallel to "training datasets."

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sigh.

Again. If AI is writing your story, then the story belongs to the AI. Not to you.

We've had similar debates before, minus the AI context.

Almost all fiction includes content that is not the author's creation. Whether I'm writing a story set in the city where I live, or a period piece drawing on sources written by historians, or fanfic drawing on somebody else's fictional setting, there will be elements there that I didn't invent. If I'm writing in a particular genre, I will very likely be leaning on certain conventions that I also didn't create.

I don't see that as a problem, as long as the writer is also introducing their own creativity into the process, and not attempting to pass off somebody else's work as their own. GPT is nowhere near autonomous enough to write a long story of any interest without a great deal of creative input from the user. (As discussed, the risk of plagiarism from other human authors is a harder question.)

 

[XerXesXu]

It’s only a divide if you want it to be a divide.

I‘d think my statement was simple common sense. Either the words are yours, or they're not.

There's a train coming down the track very fast. You'll either be on board shouting 'Full steam ahead,' or on the tracks tut-tuting. Do you speak from experience of using AI, or are you offering an uninformed opinion? Readers will want to take that into account.

 

[XerXesXu]

That's a nonsensical collection of random phrases joined together, with no rhyme nor reason. There's no spatial awareness, for a start - how on earth does one see the sea through the sky? And it doesn't know much about oak trees! Forest, dipstick, forest, not a bloody sand dune!

If folk think this is even remotely useful for writing fiction, I'd say cope with your writer's block some other way, because surely, this would only make it worse.

Like the product of human intelligence, it takes a lot of tarting up to make it acceptable. To criticise it on that ground is absurd. Did you expect AI to be better than human intelligence? I noticed it even mimics human stupidity accurately. You'll recall some people think 2nd Person PoV is narrated in the second person. It mimics that, though intelligent humans know it's narrated in the third person, there's no 2nd person narration, only 1st and 3rd.

I'm in a PoV I wouldn't otherwise use, writing an absurd story I wouldn't be tempted to write, and I've now got to the point where the couple are getting engaged. She can't introduce it to her friends, but they're going snorkeling on Sunday and it'll introduce her to his friends. He's promised her the gang bang of a lifetime.

I can't wait for Sunday. Any wrinkles are easily ironed out.

In my view, that's an experiment worth pursuing. It's not just a tool, it's a toy, it has a lot of play value, and will only get better.