Writing in the Age of GenAI
The Language Learning Models of today are capable of doing a lot. How well? That’s what we’re trying to find out here. This blogpost is for the creative writers who want to preserve their voice as they experiment with AI tools and their uses. The purpose is not to find ways for AI to be your process, but to find out if it’s worth incorporating it into your process.
For those who wish to learn more about my approach and attitude towards AI and creative writing, take a look through my introductory post.
Incorporating ChatGPT into the Creative Writing Process: Line by Line
ChatGPT needs no introduction, exploding onto the scene in 2023 and gaining a massive amount of users since. It is a Language Learning Model capable of producing novel responses from a well constructed prompt. For more insight into how to structure a prompt with ChatGPT, my previous blogpost outlines a step-by-step process for iterative prompting.
I advocate for an approach where you write freely and use ChatGPT at any point of major friction, building on the precedence of successful writers like Vauhini Vara. A line, whether it is a complete sentence or not, is defined here as a complete thought. By going line by line, writers must still put their own thoughts forward, building up on them block by block to ultimately construct their own pieces. ChatGPT is then simply a tool to assist the writer along the way.
ChatGPT 3.5 is the current openly available version at the time of this post, and it is the version that will be used for the exercises below.
Exercise 1: Expanding On a Base Line
A common use of Generative AI is unsurprisingly to have them generate new content off a prompt. Here, we looking to see how effective ChatGPT is at taking an idea and running with it. In your process, this may be at a point where you know that more can be added but your brain just isn’t . Instead of coming back to it later, perhaps consider seeing what can be done with a chatbot buddy.
Here is a sentence begging to be expanded upon:
“A magnetic mold covers the room, pulsing.”
General guidelines for prompts:
- put the Chatbot into a role (“Act as a science fiction writer”)
- provide a structure for the output (rephrase the following sentence… five different ways )
- be even more specific (“…who is focused on evocative language”, “expanding on it to emphasize the horrific and unknown”)
- provide a line for the Chatbot to work off of (“A magnetic mold covers the room, pulsing.”)
As demonstrated, you can also include multiple parts to the prompt.
I prompted for “evocative language” to test how ChatGPT deals with a looser objective. I will also prompt for “adding another clause and an additional sentence of description” to test how ChatGPT deals with a more concrete objective.
See the results for yourselves.
Evocative Rephrasings:
ChatGPT has a tendency to lean into abstractions in an effort to draw a figurative image. What’s interesting in reading through these however is that it does explore different versions of the magnetic mold, characterizing them in different ways. Many of these outputs aren’t ideal as they have clashing similes and metaphors, but in your case it may be a case of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Expansive Rephrasings:
ChatGPT offers a variety of different ideas here. Although it does not add an additional sentence as requested, each output has multiple additional clauses that cumulatively build upon one another to paint a detailed picture. I notice that it ends its descriptions very similarly when it comes to structure.
Exercise 2: Modifying Existing Lines
There is also the scenario where you want an editor. You already have an idea and you want to make sure that it’s conveyed effectively. It does not have to be a sentence you see as needing work either. I wrote this sentence during a writing activity as year ago, and believe that it stands strong by itself already. However, maybe I want to see if there is another way to phrase it that comes off stronger. The components for success are there, but for better or worse we often are a bit fixed in our styles and preferences. Language Learning Models may prove useful in breaking those subconscious tendencies when the occasion calls for it.
Here is a sentence that could potentially be stronger rephrased:
“There’s restrictions, guidelines painted on the pavement and suspended on wires twenty-two feet in the air that tell us not to get ahead of ourselves, to consider others in our momentum.”
The Guidelines are the same as above. Here I focused on preserving the meaning of the sentence and then on preserving the structure.
Stylized Rephrasings:
Here is a situation where ChatGPT’s inability to grasp theme hurts it. In not grasping the core idea and being more interpretive in its rewritings, ChatGPT uses somewhat analogous descriptors for each part of the sentence, but the original meaning of the sentence is completely muddled when these descriptors are recombined. It’s hard to tell from some of these outputs that the sentence is about traffic.
Preserving Syntax and Diction:
Here ChatGPT does an admirable job of reordering clauses and breaking up/combining clauses. The meaning is preserved since it is not trying to reinterpret the sentence. See if any of the sentences below read better than the original!
Takeaways
ChatGPT is capable of generating novel variations, although the outputs don’t stand particularly well on their own. You will likely have to pick out what you think works from a large selection, which can help at points where you are completely stuck in your writing or when you just need to get something down in a draft to move on.
Shortcomings however are that it fails at reinterpreting an already complete vision. A caveat is that with enough prompting you may be able to overcome that, but I would argue that at that point it’s no longer practical to use in most cases for the sheer amount of effort it would take.
Curious about how other LLM Chatbots measure up? Consider looking through these other blogposts where I go through the same exercises with the exact same prompts:
- How Claude Can Shape Your Creative Writing Line by Line
- How CoPilot’s Creative Writing Voice Handles Creative Writing Line by Line