“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”
– Neil Gaiman
Creative Writing and Collaboration
Creative writing. It was my first extracurricular in university, back when I had this astounding ambition to be a published author. I hadn’t even written my first novel yet but the ideas were flowing, as were the words, up until a point. I would catch myself looping, glossing over vital elements or lost in the reverie of my ideas whenever I set aside time to write, but I only realized that in contrasting my experiences with other fellow writers’. My time at the UGA Creative Writing Club broke my out of myself, and it was wonderful. Over three years later I’ve since been to several dozens of creative writing workshops and been around many happy, anxious, and inspirational peers.
In my experience though a lot of aspiring writers (or people who like the idea of writing as we often joke), struggle even with a shared community and a support structure. Writing takes effort, and just as the possibilities are endless so are the issues that beset us at every stage of the process.
Writers in the Age of Generative AI
My Purpose is to provide an informative, casual space where readers and I explore approaches, possibilities, and limitations associated with using LLM’s during the creative writing process.
This blog is geared towards inquisitive writers: those who write for fun, who see the value in writing as a means of self expression and as a celebration of their creativity, but haven’t written off the potential of LLM’s like ChatGPT.
I can imagine writers who consider themselves stylists or are authors might get something out of it as well alongside those from the AI crowd that have always been interested. It’s a popular dream to have a book published one day. It’s wonderful if this new technology can help people achieve those dreams.
To those more focused on generating content, there are many other resources for those who are looking to improve their content and workflow through the use of GenAI, but the focus here is to seek out ways to facilitate our own creativity. I want a real, undisputable sense of ownership to remain over in our works even as we try out this new tech.
These blog posts will be formatted in a way that gently invites exploration. It’s not so much meant to be instructive as it is to be a source of reference, reflection, and inspiration. I’ll be diving into specific limit cases of what GenAI can do for us when we’re:
- stuck in ideation
- unhappy with our style
- unsure how our writing is coming across
And although it feels a bit silly, I’ll be trying to treat AI as a collaborator. After all, as solitary as writing is when you’re transferring words to the page from your mind’s eye, in my experience creative writing becomes a lot more fun and fulfilling when you’re not completely in your own head about it all the time. The social connections with other people is invaluable, but there’s no doubt that at least some of those functions can be fulfilled in a pinch when you’re alone in your room and need some immediate input.
ChatGPT is the popular LLM right now alongside competitors like Google’s Bard but there are other AI (including GenAI) writing tools. They are numerous and oftentimes there are many that are geared specifically towards creative writing. The appeal of these more general models though is that we can potentially tweak them to work with us on what we want!
Alright, so there’s a lot of tools and a lot of ways to use them. What are the processes then? What are the skills that need to be developed, the techniques that we as writers need to have in order to get what we want (for the writing and for ourselves).
Here are some lines of potential lines of inquiry to get us started:
What do we want our relationship as writers with AI to look like?
What AI tools were already around for writers before ChatGPT?
AI Experiment: How ChatGPT handles emulating authorial style
I hope to address some of these directly in further blog posts but I’m also open to other topics and ideas. Just let me know !