Welcome back readers to Writers 101! In today's article, we shall be taking a look at the very infamous Artificial Intelligence!

This article is a special edition that we have created in lieu of the rising debates about using Artificial Intelligence or also known as AI in writing. While most people think of it as a very helpful writing tool, some have come to the conclusion that it is absolutely unethical.

Like any topic, everything has its pros and cons. Today's feature will be taking a closer look and explaining both its advantages and disadvantages and teach you appropriate ways of using AI to develop and help you in your journey of writing without taking away the positive originality that solely belongs to you.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the field of science that involves building machines that can learn, reason, and act in ways that would normally require human intelligence. AI works by combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms. This allows the software to learn automatically from patterns or features in the data.

Both ChatGPT and AI are technologies that use artifical intelligence to generate text, but they are used for different purposes and have different capabilities. So what are their differences?

ChatGPT – The latest chat-bot created by OpenAI, focused on AI writing text and had de-throned Google Bard. ChatGPT is trained with a larger dataset than general AI (Large Language Models), which could make it less reliable as it could be more prone to misinformation. Usually, ChatGPT is better used for research and answering schoolwork. GPT-3.5 is free but imperfect, as it is trained on human-created data up to 2022, it often fails to comprehend nuances. GPT-4 is a better model with greater accuracy and features, but requires a subscription fee.

AI – Applications using AI are more general and one can perform various tasks, hence allowing for a larger range of features and flexibility. AI applications are better for summaries and lists.

Other AI models include Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. To find out their differences, you can read the link in the comments.

What are the benefits of using AI?

Multitude of ideas for writing: Hitting writers block is common, AI can often help one in juggling different ideas, give us different routes in which a story can progress, and help developing the areas where we hit a wall.

Self-reviews on our own writing: AI can give us a review and analysis of the what we have written. It can show where a writer needs to improve and what are their strong points. For example if we write a blurb and post it in ChatGPT, we can command it to provide us a metric on parameters such as grammar and punctuation, flow, character, emotions, etc., which we want a review on. ChatGPT will give a detailed review over those points, along with suggestions on where we can improve. This is to be noted that, you have to mention the areas of your writing you wish to work on as AI is not smart enough to understand that. If not, then AI will do what it's best at; providing a generic text. But of course, you can often find reviewers in Wattpad using AI to write reviews. However, this is only helpful when someone uses AI as a quick review of their own story. Using it to review other's stories... well, there should be some consideration whether a traditional reviewer or a third party reader should provide a personel review instead of using AI as it is still not sophisticated enough to be able to focus on aspects such as plot development.

It can help to map/project character development: While character development is often something a writer should come up with on their own, AI can help figure out what can be a character's potential journey towards positive or negative development. By no means AI can help a writer write that, but it can provide knowledge or ideas about how we can go about it. For example, you give off a list of information about a character in your story to ChatGPT and ask how ChatGPT can improve them into a better person, or turn them into a villain, provide examples of plot barriers, give examples of emotional turning points, or perhaps suggest ideas on a character's environmental changes, etc.

A highly Powerful research Tool: Notice how we capitalise certain letters 👀 AI can provide facts such as location details, population details, without much hassle, while in Google we may have to read a couple of sites in order to get the information we need. AI definitely revolutionizes the way we can search online, GPT-4 (paid) and GPT-3.5 is capable of providing consolidated information faster than Gemini (upgraded version of Bard) and Copilot (Bing). However, that also depends on the key words typed in the search bar and how we go about searching for information on these platforms. From the above three points, the most bespoke power of AI is its ability to run simulations by feeding it the data we want and asking it to provide us possible scenarios for our ideation. It is a combination of all these benefits that made AI such a game-changing tool in writing. AI has a powerful database consisting of the works of other authors out there, and it may seem unethical for us to have free access to them, however, if we can use AI correctly, it is a fantastic source of inspiration for writing. Of course, that does not mean that we should RELY ON AI FOR IDEAS. Rather this meant that we can use AI to explore how other writers execute popular cliches or tropes, and consider how we wish to write our own unique plot during its planning phase.

It can help to improve formal tone: Another popular use of AI is its ability to re-phrase sentences and teach us how we can use a wide range of vocabulary in our writing or to help our tone of writing to be more formal. This will help greatly if you want to write a book in a Historical Fiction setting, or if you are looking to draft a business proposal.

It can help us to write!: Or does it really? AI can also help in worldbuilding, simulations, it even writes out text. But can it really help us to write? No, stories are ideas which we have build in our minds. No matter how much we use AI, it can't give us the the world we intend to create. A story is a cumulation of ideas, plots, emotions, characters, writing style, and pace. All of this varies from writer to writer. Each story is unique to the writer but any passage written by AI is generic and nullifies the uniqueness a story has to offer.

Why are we so obssessed over AI?

AI has the potential to revolutionize the whole writing journey. In fact, it already has. The great obsession over AI stems from the heated debate over ethical concerns and the hope of what it could achieve!

It's not a secret that the AI model needs to be trained, and for that to happen, some data is required, so where does the data come from? Existing sources of other writers' works! The books of big time authors are used as data, and in turn you get an immaculately written essay. That is why the authenticity of AI works are challenged and the real question is: does making use of AI to write your book make you a writer?

Some of you will deny the obvious truth— and that is if you ask AI to help write your book, then you're not a writer but a Copy-and-Paste Expert.

The ethicality of using AI to write books – Is it morally right to claim whatever that has been written by AI as yours? No! Let's be really clear about one thing here. Writers put to life their ideas, imaginations and thoughts through black and white words. It's not just a skill, it's an art. Using AI to write your book will firstly lead to possible plagiarism, and secondly gives you a false belief that you're a writer.

The potential of AI and an author's dream to stardom – Every author dreams of achieving their writing goals be it completing a book or getting their works recognised/published. Throw in AI, it's hard to resist the temptation of using a shortcut to achieve what could otherwise take years. But it is also exactly this that can cripple an author. Many novice writers have this misconception that writing books is easy and that getting recognised is just a matter of time. Unfortunately, the path to becoming a successfully published author isn't so straightforward like that!

Is AI the solution to everything? Short answer is No!

Why AI can never replace traditional writing?

There are a lot of people who would argue otherwise, but here are some reasons why we think AI cannot replace traditional writing:

It ruins the emotional narration
Taking a closer look at works written by AI, one will realize that it seems a little iffy. If you ever get the chance to read a Wattpad book written by AI, which are getting plenty now, you will see that the writing style contain lots of descriptive verbs and adjectives which makes the writing sound mellifluous. But no matter how much you read on, it seems something was missing from the novel... and that's because the depth of emotions are not there! Works written by AI are overly formal and don't show how we humans function emotionally.

It won't pan out the way you want it to be
Another thing about AI written works, is that it doesn't pan out the way you want it to be written. The plot goes in a roundabout way, it doesn't get straight to the point or maybe there's no plot at all. Having a logical progressive plot is a skill many good authors manage to accomplish and that itself isn't an easy feat. The reason lies in the fact that AI remains a tool and not a writer. The plot of a story stems from the author's imagination so AI cannot narrate it exactly as it is straight from your mind.

AI can't help you to improve your writing skills if you rely on it to write.
As much as this is debatable, if a person, as a novice author, has been plugging in what they hope they can write into AI to generate sentences before proceeding the "Copy and Paste", then it will be something they can never be able to write. As hard as this may sound, the truth is that people rely on AI to write because they don't have confidence over the language or they don't possess what it takes to face possible rejection when they put their work out there. If you are using AI for a couple parts of your story, the good news is perhaps you may be using AI in the right way. However, if you were truly ever serious about writing, despite your writer's rut, you won't resort to this path.

It cannot replicate an author's unique voice
It may be rudimentary now, and many could see the possibility of AI advancing to the point where it may replace authors. However, there is one thing AI can never imitate, and that is your own unique voice as a writer.

Your credibility can take the fall
And to the final point, when a writer's fanbase figure out that their favourite writer has been using AI to help write their stories for them, their credibility as a writer takes a fall. The admiration and respect of your readers would be lost because anyone can use AI to write a book or create fictional worlds, but not anyone could do so from scratch and work their best to develop their stories into something others love. Some readers read the work of an author because of their credibility as a writer, and their passion and dedication in their art.

In the end, it is to be kept in mind that AI and every individual writer out here, like you and I, are a different entities. AI is a powerful tool, and a double-edged sword. Remember that not all information given by ChatGPT/AI is reliable and accurate, so we have to do our due diligence to cross check our references. What we wish to achieve when writing a story can never be done by AI, it will do us well to remember it only serves as a tool. How and when to use AI must be judged by us, and we should give it good consideration. Writing is an art, while AI can inspire you, it should never be used to do the writing for you.

Written by:

SardonicBeauty

devianmisfit

Evelynfrost23

Special contributors:

LadyInLostYearn