my roommate is letting chatgpt write her book
no really like the WHOLE book
Allow me a moment to provide you a few morsels of context to this situation.
For the last 2 years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at plotting and writing my very first novel
Besides my fiancé and best friend, I’ve told no one about this
My roommate doesn’t read books, but she does read fanfiction (still counts, I have no beef there), and a few months back she mentioned that she’d been prompting ChatGPT to write her some “fanfiction” to read whenever she couldn’t find anything online that suited her tastes
In the 3 years I’ve lived with her, my roommate has never previously expressed an interest in writing anything more involved than a text message
So you can imagine my surprise, when, on a bright Saturday morning I waltzed into our kitchen to see her and her husband sitting at the breakfast bar, staring at a lengthy Word document on her laptop. Jokingly, I asked if they were reading an old high school essay. My jaw nearly hit the floor at her response.
“No, so, you know how I was getting ChatGPT to write me fanfiction? I thought to myself, why don’t I use it to make up my own characters and world and storyline and create something new?”
Ladies and gentlemen, the woman (me) was too stunned to speak.
Luckily my fiancé took the reins on that conversation and steered it elsewhere. But I spent the day reeling about this, and eventually went back to her to get some details on what the fuck was going on here.
I asked her about the process of getting AI to write this story for her. To my understanding, she gives ChatGPT prompts for the characters, world, general storyline, etc. and it spits out a fully generated chapter for her. She reads this, and then - if necessary - replies with a request to tweak it as she sees fit. Less romance, make the dialogue funnier, what have you. Once she’s happy with the response, she copies and pastes the chapter into a Word document. Repeat ad infinitum.
Now, this is but one thing of thousands that I’ve had to hold my tongue about since moving into this house (those with roommates will relate), so no, I haven’t expressed to her my extreme distaste for this practice. I may not ever. But it catalytically spurred a flurry of thoughts and emotions surrounding AI and art that I didn’t expect to feel so strongly, and now I’m attempting to sort those out.
I use ChatGPT nearly every day in my corporate job. To teach me coding languages, to write queries, to solve data and reporting problems - so why does it wound me on a deeply personal level to hear that someone is using it to write?
Well, for one, I think as writers we have a certain level of fear that AI could be better than us at our own craft. If not today, then perhaps someday in the future. It was this fear and curiosity that drove me to read the first chapter of her generated story, and here are the things I reluctantly discovered ChatGPT did well:
It’s faster.
In the first day or so, my roommate generated 15,000 words. I don’t know about you, but that’s far more than I could write in a day, even if writing was my full-time job. Obviously, this was a slap in the face to the 50K words I’ve laboriously added to my WIP in a year’s time.
Grammar, spelling and vocabulary are a non-issue.
Of course, AI executes the tedious part of writing flawlessly. It does not need to pore over the structure of a sentence, the cadence of a paragraph, or spend time scouring the web for the perfect adjective.
It laughs in the face of writer’s block.
You don’t really need to be imaginative if ChatGPT is writing for you. Hit a lull in your plot? Don’t know where to go next? My roommate said when this happens, she asks the bot to give her a few different ideas on where to take the story. Then she simply picks her favourite pre-packaged option, and continues on her merry way.
Overall, the generated story reads decently.
I’m serious - it’s not horrible. Debatably better than some things I’ve read by real humans. Definitely better than most corporate emails I receive.
But here’s the thing, here’s why it hurts me to watch someone let AI don the “writer’s cap” and do the heavy lifting for them: what’s gained in efficiency and precision does not make up for what’s lost in imagination, sentiment, or soul.
There is an intrinsic humanness to all art that I don’t think AI can (yet) replicate. Every writer has a unique voice, a personal perspective that they bring to the table. Real people can create such thorough, well-rounded storylines, complete with clever foreshadowing and dizzying plot twists - something ChatGPT would never be able to backtrack and do, at least in the very linear way my roommate is using it.
And doesn’t some of the deliciousness of any final product stem from the knowledge that there was an effort made to conjure it into being? Something sacrificed (time, energy, money, sleep, sanity, etc.) in the name of authentic creation? Replacing that effort with AI abolishes the entire experience of being a writer.
Sure, it’s a hell of a lot more work to coax ideas from the recesses of your mind. To learn when to use a comma or a semicolon. To type, word-by-word, a hundred pages of text, and then edit it, and then scrap more than half of it and start over again. It’s hard. It requires discipline, and perseverance, and courage. You may wish more than anything that you could fast-forward to a final draft. But it is the very process of it all that makes your final draft the thing that it is: a work of art.
When I told a good friend about this incident with my roommate, he reassured me with this eloquent response:
“I don’t think anything could beat someone actually putting their soul into something, like, u have emotions when ur writing and ur putting them into it. AI is so soulless. Plus the enjoyment of you actually doing it is def part of the journey.”
And I think that short text message actually sums up everything I’m trying to say here and now.
But please don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning any and all use of AI when it comes to writing. As with all things, there must be a healthy balance. When it comes to certain niche world-building problems, for example, I’ve found ChatGPT to be helpful. I’ve used it to help me brainstorm ideas for fake words that are inspired by certain languages, but don’t actually translate to anything - a task that would have taken me eons if I wanted to be thorough with it. I’ve used it to help me find character names with a certain vibe, or that begin with certain letters. Hell, I should probably ask it to teach me when to use a semicolon. But these things do not take away from the integrity of my work any more than Google or phoning a friend would. I hope you can also recognize the plain difference.
(However, I’m aware we could debate over where to actually draw the line indefinitely.)
At the end of the day, though, would I trade the experience of being a writer for the ease, the speed, the accuracy of AI?
Of course not. If the answer was yes, I might’ve jumped for joy at my roommate’s discovery, excited that my days of being a tortured artist had finally come to an end, and I’d be typing my prompts into a chat box right now.
Instead, here I am. Writing this post as a reminder that AI cannot do what you do. Human art, your art, is invaluable, and there will always be a place for it in our world. Keep creating. Every challenge you face, and overcome, is precisely what makes it worth doing.
Thanks for reading <3
- Olivia
* Also just a DISCLAIMER about the aforementioned roommate: I have absolutely no idea what she intends to do with this bot-written book. It’s a very real possibility that she does not plan on posting it online or publishing it in any way, and that this is all purely for personal entertainment. Debatably a waste of processing power, but that’s a different discussion altogether. Okay, now I’m done!
The idea of using AI for fanfiction hurt me. Moments like that are for realizing you need to be the change you want to see and write the fanfiction yourself. Like you said, AI is soulless. Sure it can come up with decent enough work, but why read something no one was bothered to write, ya know?
Is she using the bot as a ghostwriter or as a collaborator? It sounds like she started out using it as a ghostwriter and then got involved in actually revising what it wrote. Whether she realizes it or not, she is learning to become a writer. She was already a reader or watcher of stories. That is why she was looking for fanfiction in the first place. So, now, she is learning that the quality of what the bot writes is not as satisfying as she would like. Welcome to the world of writing.
I do have a tendency to look at the glass half full, and when it comes to technology, I am curious how we will use it. I have my own issues with celebrities claiming to write books that are penned by someone unknown to us, so I won't be surprised if ghostwriters start getting concerned about bots taking over their jobs. Who knows, they may be interviewing the celeb and then writing prompts to create a story that sounds like the celeb wrote it.
We writers are feeling the impact of the DIY reader, the way bakers argued that a cake mix isn't a real homemade cake. Someday, your roomie may come to you and ask you to read a passage or chapter and give her advice on how to make it better. At that point, you will decide if you want to help create a real writer or not.The lesson for all of us is this. If we don't do our best, someone might create their own version of our story and be perfectly content reading that instead.