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The lack of discussion of a middle ground is a product of how genAI is right now. 1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete

The lack of discussion of a middle ground is a product of how genAI is right now. 1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. 2) the ideal middle path results in a work where there are no “tells” that genAI was involved, because the “tells” are just blatant flaws anyone with the skill and taste to follow a “middle path” of AI usage would have fixed in post anyway. So the genAI question won’t come up at all unless your goal was to make A Point instead of a work.

mindcrime 2y ago
1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. That's probably a fair point. And I might have missed that because I don't really use any "Gen AI tools" that are purpose specific, besides Github Copilot and that's for code, not prose. And in that context, Copilot (at least the way I use it, which is rarely using the "chat" feature) is generally generating small snippets for me, not large, complex structures. And in my mind, I imagine using something like Gemini or ChatGPT in a similar way. I guess I assume if I were using one of those tools to help me write prose, I'd be using it break "writer's block" with a prompt like > given everything that has happened so far, what might the character Suzy do here? or just asking it to clean up grammar for me > Can you rewrite this chunk so it sounds neater and maybe is slightly reminiscent of Dean Koontz or something like that. A GenAI tool that allows you to input a single prompt and get a complete novel or something like that would be of no interest to me whatsoever and probably wouldn't even come across my radar (or wouldn't register any attention if it did).
- nopelynopington 2y ago
  I attempted to use ChatGPT and other tools as a middle ground for my writing, but even asking it to format a few paragraphs and add missing dialog tags often ends with the story being altered entirely. Using AI as a reader to give feedback is maybe safer, but even then it's going to make your writing more generic. LLMs work by giving the most likely next word, and the illusion here for a writer is that the LLM is a helpful partner that is thinking about the story you've written, but really all it's doing is pushing it to be more mainstream and closer to existing works. It also has a tendency to want to resolve and wrap up a narrative, and can lead to bad suggestions that seem reasonable but push you towards a character dead end

mindcrime 2y ago

1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. That's probably a fair point. And I might have missed that because I don't really use any "Gen AI tools" that are purpose specific, besides Github Copilot and that's for code, not prose. And in that context, Copilot (at least the way I use it, which is rarely using the "chat" feature) is generally generating small snippets for me, not large, complex structures. And in my mind, I imagine using something like Gemini or ChatGPT in a similar way. I guess I assume if I were using one of those tools to help me write prose, I'd be using it break "writer's block" with a prompt like > given everything that has happened so far, what might the character Suzy do here? or just asking it to clean up grammar for me > Can you rewrite this chunk so it sounds neater and maybe is slightly reminiscent of Dean Koontz or something like that. A GenAI tool that allows you to input a single prompt and get a complete novel or something like that would be of no interest to me whatsoever and probably wouldn't even come across my radar (or wouldn't register any attention if it did).

nopelynopington 2y ago
I attempted to use ChatGPT and other tools as a middle ground for my writing, but even asking it to format a few paragraphs and add missing dialog tags often ends with the story being altered entirely. Using AI as a reader to give feedback is maybe safer, but even then it's going to make your writing more generic. LLMs work by giving the most likely next word, and the illusion here for a writer is that the LLM is a helpful partner that is thinking about the story you've written, but really all it's doing is pushing it to be more mainstream and closer to existing works. It also has a tendency to want to resolve and wrap up a narrative, and can lead to bad suggestions that seem reasonable but push you towards a character dead end