Should I Use AI to Write My Novel?

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now, here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 38. What does Michael Scott from The Office and artificial intelligence have in common? Well, it's likely a lot more than you think. If you've been wondering if AI can help you write a better novel, today's show is for you.

All right, welcome back to the show. It's been a long, long time since our last episode, but Inside Creative Writing is back. And I figured if Severance could wait years and years to come back with their second season, then I was OK to come back now and pick up where we left off with Inside Creative Writing.

So welcome back. Thrilled to have you here. Very, very quick little recap of what's been happening behind the scenes in the last few years and really the last few months. I finished my book, which is great. I've changed schools where I teach. I'm still teaching English and creative writing.

But most of all, I, along with all of you, got a reminder of how absolutely vital it is for writers to be writing books right now more than ever. So during times of social upheaval, to say the least, that's where we are right now, writing becomes more vital than ever, not just as a tool for direct political resistance, but as a means of preserving truth, fostering empathy and offering a view of the world that as it could be, whether good or bad. Even books that aren't overtly political shape the way people see the world. They challenge dominant narratives. They provide refuge in chaotic times.

So in these turbulent times, words endure when institutions fail and literature becomes both a record and a refuge. So it's really, really important work that we're doing. And I wanted to get back to helping writers find their voices. My favorite saying about art, including writing, is that art is meant to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. I'm going to hit you with that one again, just in case you haven't heard it before. Art is meant to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

And wow, do we have a lot of people who are far too comfortable today that need to be disturbed. And we have people in desperate need of comfort with the level of disturbance that they have in their lives and in their world. So it really, that was a strong motivation for me to get back behind the mic and start talking about creative writing again, because it really is through story that we change the world that we're living in.

So I do also want to mention that in the last few months, I've been putting a ton of work, literally hundreds of hours into a resource hub that we're building out at the show's website. So if it's been a while since you've checked that out, or maybe you've never checked it out, I'd love it if you head over there and see what we're doing with the show's website. A ton of stuff there and a ton of stuff that we're planning on getting up there soon.

The Importance of Writing in Turbulent Times

So check that out. Okay, so AI in writing, is it a helpful tool or is it a killer of creativity? We're breaking that down today, including some really unexpected ways that AI can ethically help you be a better writer.

So I consider myself an early adopter of a lot of technologies, right? Right now, as I sit here, I see a VR headset laying near me that I haven't used in months, but I was one of the first people to buy them because I love new technology. So when AI hit the scene, I was all about it. I wanted to figure out what in the world this thing was, get my hands dirty, and figure out how to use it.

So I've been using it for a couple of years now for my day job and a lot, actually. And I've experimented with it some for my creative writing as well. Now, I know some of you, your hackles are already a little bit up because we have very passionate feelings about AI and its place in the creative arts, especially.

So I'm not the world-renowned expert on AI, but I think I do come to the table with a lot of real-world experience that can help us have a discussion about AI and writing that's not black or white. It's here to stay. For good or bad, it is here. It's part of our world.

So we need to get our hands around it, our minds around it, and figure it out. So I'm not really going to talk about the ethical issues with it today, and there's certainly a lot of those. I'm sure we'll get into it in future episodes.

Understanding AI in Writing

But I want to begin by what the heck is this thing, AI? So we need to understand that at its heart, AI is just another computer program, right? Just another computer program running zeros and ones.

Now, I hesitate to say just another one because obviously it's fundamentally and foundationally different, but at the heart of it, it is a computer program. But when it hit the market, right, when it hit the knowledge of people at large in the community in the world, it came on the scene as almost like magic. And that's what it felt like to sit down and use it those first few times. I remember the first thing I did with AI is I had it write a poem, and I said, write me a poem about a beaver that fell in love with a spoon. And it did it, right? It just spit out this poem that rhymed and the structure was there.

And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is like magic, right? And that's how it's been treated over the past couple of years that it's been out. We are sprinkling this little AI magic on everything that we can think of, assuming that this AI magic is going to make it better somehow. And a lot of writers, a lot of people in the creative culture have also started sprinkling this little AI magic on their writing and has left us kind of dealing with the ethical and the moral implications of what that means.

So since it's come out, it's wormed its way into almost everything. I see other day I saw an AI toothbrush advertised, and apparently it tracks your brushing motions and how long you're brushing and the pressure you're using. And it runs it through its AI and spits out all this information on how you can brush your teeth better. Do we need that? Maybe, maybe you're very passionate about correctly brushing your teeth.

But I personally don't think my teeth need anything to do with AI, certainly not with the toothbrush. So I think as a culture, we're starting to realize that the magic of this thing is really a lot about a marketing ploy, right? Even this name, artificial intelligence, is a name created to market this product because it isn't intelligence. We're going to talk about that here in just a second. It is certainly artificial, though.

So we're going to approach that from this kind of point of view that in reality, it's mostly a marketing ploy, or at least we see it mostly as a marketing ploy being applied to all sorts of products out there. But does it have a place in our writing lives? Because it is super, super powerful.

So what is AI really doing if it's not magic? Let's get it. Let's dumb this down.

Let's make it as basic as possible. What AI really is, is not a thinking machine. It's a predicting machine. If I were to be able to wave my magic wand, not an AI version one, and change the name of artificial intelligence, I think we need to call it something like a super predictor or, you know, a prediction machine or something. Because at the end of the day, that's what it does, is it predicts what the next word is that should follow based on the words that come before it. It's as simple as that.

In cases where it can't predict something, it's just a, you know, a function that's not a predicting one, then it uses randomization, right? I was playing with it in preparation for this podcast and, you know, throwing it some story ideas and things like that. So I put in there, write a story about an animal who takes on a human job, right? There's no way to predict what the correct answer would be to that.

So it just randomizes it. I ran it once and it was Barry the bear who wanted to be a truck driver. I ran it again and it was Fred, I think it was Fred the firefighter. It loved alliterations for some reason. Every name it came up with was an alliteration with the job. Interesting thing that it was doing there.

But it was just purely random. Like pick a job at random, pick an animal at random, throw them together and try to create a story. So at its heart, it's a prediction machine that also randomizes. In fact, it really helps me to understand where this came from. It didn't come out of the blue. It actually came out of our phones in a way.

It really started with auto-complete, right? It started with that basic little function where we would be typing a text and it would pop up and say, oh, I think the next word you want is this. That is at the heart of AI. That's all that it's really doing. It's kind of a supercharged auto-complete, right? It's looking at patterns.

It's looking at context and it's trying to guess the next most likely word. So that is really important to keep in mind when we start using AI, if we start using AI, because it can feel like magic at times because it's so good at predicting that it can fool us that there's actually more going on behind the scenes. But there is not.

So AI is excellent, excellent at mimicking structure, but it lacks anything like true creativity. It can mimic creativity, and we'll get into that here in a little bit as well. So why does it feel so convincing? If you've ever spent any Michael Scott, and I really I literally picture his face in my computer screen when I'm interacting with AI.

AI's Characteristics Compared to Michael Scott

So here's some of the characteristics of Michael Scott and why my AI is Michael Scott. Yours doesn't have to be Michael Scott, it can be whoever you pick. So Michael Scott, his defining quality is that he always wants to be liked. Above everything else, he wants people to like him. For whatever reason, AI is the same way, right? It's trained to generate plausible text, not necessarily correct or original text.

It wants so badly to give you exactly what you've asked for, whether it's true, whether it's good or not. So every time, especially if we're asking it questions about, is this good or, you know, anything qualitative, it almost always, and as instructions otherwise, it's almost always going to say, that's great, you're awesome. You're on the right track, go, go, go, right? Because it always wants to be liked.

So an important thing to remember. The second one is that it's unwilling to admit ignorance. Okay, if this is not Michael Scott, I don't know what it is.

So Michael Scott on The Office would never say he doesn't know anything, right? He's gonna make something up. He's gonna BS it, trying to convince somebody that he knows what he's talking about. That is AI as well. It will not say, I just don't know, or I can't answer that very well. It will make something up that sounds polished, sounds plausible, sounds quality, but it's not going to be correct, right?

It's not going to be good. The third way that he has the same qualities here is it does just a good enough job to not get fired. If you've watched The Office, you're mystified all the way through it. Like, how does this guy keep his job, right? Well, it's because he can do the bare minimum, not even really that well, most of the time.

But he's got a few little skills in there. It's just enough to keep him from getting canned, right? And that's the same way with ChatGPT and with our other AIs. It can do a decent passable job, but it's rarely something exceptional. And if it is, it's almost like accidental, right? The zeros and ones got confused and generated something of actual quality, but that's incredibly rare, actually.

So it does a good enough job not to get fired. It estimate, oh, sorry, overestimates its own abilities. AI sounds like the authority on everything, even when it's completely wrong, right?

So keep that in mind. And the last one may be one of the most important ones if you're actually using AI as like copy, paste, drop into a story or into a piece of writing, which, oh, don't ever do that. It always tries to do too much to impress.

So again, let's think of Michael Scott, right? He's got to go give a presentation about how his office is performing. But not only does he walk in with that, with the numbers he has to share, but he's created this video talking about all of the people at Dunder Mifflin and what a great place it is, right? He's doing way more than he needs to, usually to try to cover up his insecurities, of course.

But that's AI as well. It is a prolific overwriter. Almost everything it creates is over-written. You ask it to describe something, it will describe it in two paragraphs, right? Which is not, not great writing.

So it's always trying to do too much to impress. So I keep these things in mind as I'm using it for any aspect, whether it's work or non-work related, because I remember I'm not working with somebody real. I'm not working with somebody who really knows all that much about what he's talking about. And he has all of these hangups, right?

Worst Uses of AI in Writing

So that really helps me kind of tamper that magic feeling and just going with whatever AI is spitting out because it feels and it looks so impressive at first glance. All right. Now that we have talked about how it's like Michael Scott, let's talk about three of the ways that writers use AI that they absolutely should not be the worst uses of AI. And then we're actually going to step into a few that are pretty solid.

So let's jump into those. So first of all, coming up with original ideas. Lots of writers and lots of people are saying things like AI or ChatGPT or whatever is great to help you brainstorm. I bristle every time I hear that because it's, it's great at brainstorming on its own, but it's not helping you brainstorm at all. If you want to use it as a jumping off point of a few ways or different directions you could brainstorm, that's great, but it is terrible with coming up with original ideas.

So AI can only remix. It can only take what's already out there, shuffle it around and spit out something kind of new, but not really new. It's just rehashed, repurposed.

So if you ask it for something like a novel idea, right? I want to write a novel. What should I write about? You're going to get a mashup of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of existing stories that are already out there. And it's going to mix them up and spit it out the other side.

So I want to share this analogy with you because I loved it. It was the best analogy I've heard for what AI is. And if I can find the link to this podcast episode, I'll put it in the show notes at the show's website. I've been having trouble finding it because I was listening to it just trucking down the road and I can't remember where it was.

But they compared it to something called a match shot at a bar. Now this was a new concept for me, but I loved it. So at least in the bar that this guy worked at when he was a bartender, they would have a mat, right, that's sitting under where they're preparing the drinks so that when things spill out of a drink and they're preparing it, it goes down into this mat and then it eventually gravity feeds down into this cup, right, or kind of a holder for all this mishmash of alcohol that's been served that night. Well, they would have kind of a dare sort of thing at the end of the day and dare you to drink the match shot. Right, just this leftover mix of all of these different kinds of alcohol.

Now it's still alcohol, right? It's still a drink. It just happens to be made up of all of these other kinds of alcohol and drinks that have ended up in this thing. That's what AI is. That's what AI is spitting out is a match shot of language, right?

So it's not looking for the best. It's not looking for creativity. It's literally saying, I'm going to go out and I'm going to search all of this, these documents that are in my training. I'm going to mix them all together and I'm going to spit out something that's a little bit of everything. It doesn't exactly sound like great writing to me. If that's what you're into, give it a shot, but I don't want to read it.

All right, the other thing that it's terrible at for many of the same reasons, same reasons, is constructing unique plots. Partially because it's terrible at any kind of long form storytelling, at least right now as I record this podcast in early 2025, its memory is awfully limited in how much content it can keep in its memory and how much content it can spit out. So it's almost impossible to write a long form story in there, which I think is great. I hope they never solve that solution. It's pretty good at small little snips, snippets of things, but it falls apart really quickly when you start writing anything of any length. It also doesn't understand things like pacing, things like subtext or deep character arcs, right?

Any of those things that is a through line in your novel, it's going to be terrible at. It cannot maintain that big picture structure that you're trying to get. So a third one, it is terrible at giving feedback.

Okay. I know a lot of, a lot of my creative writing, writing students get into using AI and not necessarily to generate it, but to get like critique from it. Remember, just like Michael Scott, it just wants to be liked. It's default setting seems to be that everything's good, right? You're doing really well here. This is great.

I like this. Uh, remember, it's just churning out randomized, predictive text stuff based on, on that writing. So, uh, what I found though, I fall victim to this because I've done this before too, right? Um, tell me what you think of this chapter and it will tell me all these lovely things. And I will think, wait a second, I know there's some stuff wrong in here, so I'll tell it something like, tell me what's wrong with this. Where can I improve it?

And it will absolutely switch gears and suddenly start telling me all these things wrong with it and where I can improve it because it's still trying to please me, right? It's still trying to answer the directive that I gave it. Um, so it loses credibility at that point, right? Because now I have to think, okay, are these things that are really a problem or is this just, you're spitting out information you think I want to hear.

So you're trying to find things that you could say are not great. So it may be excellent at constructing language and it is, but it has no ability to work like a human mind does while reading or writing. So writing by its nature is an act of human individuality. We come to a story with our own beliefs, um, our own backgrounds, experiences, uh, connotations between words, uh, connections to events in our lives that no computer could ever be programmed with. And every reader comes to a story that same way. Reading and creativewriting.

com slash SRC. That stands for Story Rescue Checklist that helps you remember. So inside creativewriting. com slash SRC. I hope you go pick that up and let me know what you think of it.

Best Uses of AI for Writers

Okay, now let's jump into the best uses for writers of AI. A little forewarning here, all of these ideas require you to put some of your writing into an AI program or website. Now the one that I use says they don't store any information. They don't use it in their training models. I don't know. I'm pretty skeptical of all of that and I invite you to be skeptical as well.

So I'm a little hesitant with what I put in there and how I put it in there, but it's up to you. If you're comfortable with really using it at all, let alone just the privacy security side of it. So I completely understand the anti-AI sentiment in the creative arts community and I'm totally prepared for the emails I'm going to get saying any use of AI is unethical. I get it and I may end up where you are as well, just not there quite yet.

So these are the reasons I'm not there quite yet. These are the reasons that I feel like AI can help me be a better writer. So first one, it is great at predicting cliches and overdone plot points.

Now it thinks it's writing great prose, but what it's actually doing is showing us what everybody's already done before. So what AI does is it can show us overly common phrases or tropes in our writing. So you could, you could, this is something I literally do with it now if I'm starting on a new plot for a book or a story or something, is I will put my story idea in and say, and have it write the story to go with it.

So I'll just give it a very small, almost like a somebody wanted but so if you're familiar with that from past podcasts, I'll link to that in the show notes. So I'll put in just two or three sentences describing what my story is going to be, big picture, and then I'll ask it to write the story. And what'll happen is it's going to go out and generate the most common plot structure for that kind of story. And it can be really valuable because you can quickly identify where you're not thinking all that originally because it's been done so many times that it shows up in AI.

So one thing I love for it is to put ideas in there, ask it to generate from that and see if it was headed the same direction I thought I was, right? If it is, then I know I got to switch things up. So that's one of my favorite uses of it. It's also great at keeping track of details if you have an AI with a memory.

So I primarily use ChatGPT and in their paid version, you get a memory with it. So it doesn't hold a lot in there, but it's really good at holding what it is. So the way I use it is I put character names in there. I put the descriptions that I've written of those characters. I do the same thing with locations, right? Scenes.

Here's what it looked like. Any detail that I know I'm going to need later on that I'm probably going to forget goes into that memory. And it's just like having an assistant sitting next to me that knows, that remembers everything that I've told it and I can say, what was Marsha's eye color again? And it'll know it. It'll tell me and I don't have to stop and go back through pages and pages and chapters and chapters to try to find Marsha's eye color, right? It's right there.

So that I love. It can help with some alternate phrasing sometimes. I mentioned that I hate saying that it can brainstorm, you know, that can help you brainstorm. I think there is some value to that because it gets the brainstorming flowing, right? It's really easy to say brainstorm some ideas about what a castle could look like, right? And it's going to start spitting out some stuff.

The goal is to not just use that brainstorm. The goal is to take that brainstorm and go, okay, I never even thought about, you know, maybe castles could be made of something other than stone, right? So use that as a launching pad to get into your own brainstorm can be really powerful there.

Another place that it's great. There's only five of these. So I'm about done.

Another place that it's really great is helping you tighten your prose, but only if you request it to do so. Like I said, it is an over writer. Anything it writes is going to be two to three times longer than it should be, maybe more.

So unless you tell it to make it as short, as concise as possible, it's going to give you this bloated language garbage. So I do sometimes plug a sentence in that I'm struggling with and say, how would you rewrite this? Rarely do I just say, oh cool, copy paste. I'm done, but it'll help me get a new view of that sentence and go, oh, that's, that's where I was having trouble and this is worded more clearly.

So that can be really helpful there. And finally, interesting and compelling descriptions. Now I've got a big caveat to this one.

So AI can create some really vivid descriptions, but it doesn't know when to go deep or when to back off and let the reader's imagination fill in the gaps. So if you're having trouble describing a scene, it can be good to throw it in there and say, hey, what would it look like to be in a county jail? Right. It's going to give you a pretty good description and there's going to be things about that, that you wouldn't have thought of to use in your description. I'm going to put a big pen in this one right now, but I'm going to come back to this at the end with our writing challenge because there's a great big caveat to using it for descriptions.

All right, we're almost done here. I feel like I've gone really long, but maybe it's just because I haven't done these for a while. I want to leave you with the big question. And that is, what is the point of using AI to write most of, or maybe even all of your book?

Limitations of AI in Creative Writing

So I don't see that there's any point to it, honestly, right? The best that could happen is that you could maybe get it published, but I don't think so, right? I don't think AI written books will ever be good enough for publication. Will some get through? Yes, absolutely. Some will get through somehow.

But AI written stuff is technically fine, like the commas are in the right place, the periods in the right place, but they lack the human touch that makes stories compelling, right? So I don't think they are ever going to find a place widespread on any kind of market. The other reason that you might want to write a book with AI is if you really just want to put your name on the spine of a book, right? I just, you have a dream that I want to write a book. AI is finally here. It can help me or it can do it for me and I can go get it printed and I can put it in my bookshelf and my name will be there.

And my response to that is, so what, right? So what is it any different than going and buying a Lego set that is completely finished and put together and then coming home and putting it on your shelf and saying there, I put my name on that? Well, you didn't, right? It's not your work. Maybe it, you know, you can check off some lists somewhere of things that you want to do, you know, off your bucket list, but those are the only two ends I see is having a book that is impossible to get published and really get in front of people in any meaningful way. Or you have something to put on your shelf and with your name on it that you can look at.

So, so yeah. In order to get anything approaching good writing from AI, you have to give it really, really good prompts. That's one of the, the biggest lessons I've learned using AI for my work over these past few years. It is that it is all about the prompts that you give it. And honestly, if you have the skill to craft good enough prompts for AI to output a compelling narrative, then why aren't you just writing the book on your own? It, in order to create a book of any quality through AI, you've got to be a great writer to tell it what to do.

And even then it's not going to be as good as you could have done yourself. So no shortcuts in this world of, uh, of novel writing. So, uh, the best stories come from life experience. They come from emotion. They come from intent and their real power isn't in grammar or fluent sentences or overwrought descriptions. It's in things that are so inherently human, they can't be computerized.

Things like symbolism, right? Picking up on that subtle little symbolism throughout a book that starts to create meaning. Things like subtext, right? When a character says something, but you know, as a human, all right, they said this thing, but what I really think they meant was this other thing, right? Such power in subtext that, uh, that computers frankly can't do or certainly can't do well. Uh, theme, um, goes in that too.

A writer's individual voice, right? Who you are as a writer can never come out of an AI generated story. It just, it just can't, right? Because it has not had the experience that you've had and it hasn't made those hundred thousand tiny decisions that you make as you're bringing a story to life. Does the character do this or do that? Does the character wear this or that?

Do they say this? Do they say that, right? All those tiny little moments, what word should I use right here out of the 10 or 15 that Generate a description. My guess is it's going to be at least a paragraph, probably more like two or three paragraphs long. And it's going to be pretty impressive when you look at it. There's going to be a lot of compelling detail in there.

There's going to be things that surprise you, maybe even things that you think are beautiful. That can happen, right? That can come out of AI because it is trained on pretty dang good writing with a lot of good description and even beautiful writing.

So it can do that sometimes. But then, you want to ask yourself the following questions. What surprised you about the description, right? Was there anything that made this scene or the setting seem unusual or different than similar scenes that you've seen in movies or novels or anything else, right? What you'll find is it did a great job of describing kind of a typical county jail lockup or a typical whatever it was that you put in there. It's not going to be particularly interesting.

It's not going to be particularly shocking or unusual. In other words, you've seen it before, maybe not in these exact words. And that means your readers have seen it before, right? This is an opportunity, and I'll put this link in the show notes as well, to use something that we talked about called reversals, where you look at what ChatGPT wrote and you begin to reverse some of those things to create something that's brand new that nobody, even ChatGPT, has seen before. The other thing you can do, and that I want you to do with this little snippet of writing that you've gotten from your AI, is to put yourself in the point of view of your character in this scene, and then ask yourself, how would your character describe it, right? A character is going to reveal a lot about who they are by the way they describe things around them, by the similes, the metaphors that they use to describe things around them, is going to influence and enlighten who this character is to your reader.

What would they notice about the scene that would be different than a generic person, right? So, if you were depressed sitting in a county lockup, which you probably are, you're going to notice different things than the person who is drunk sitting in the county lockup or the person who is, for whatever reason, absolutely thrilled to be in the county lockup. They're going to notice things differently and describe them differently. That's where the human writer comes in that can always write a better description because that description is doing more work than just, here's what it looked like, it's giving us the experience of a character in that scene. You know what, what I'm probably going to do as I talk through this is I'm going to do a real-time revision video doing this exact exercise.

So, if you want to watch that and go deeper with this concept, you can watch me on video do this. You can find that over at the show's website and if you join the email list over there, you'll be notified when I've done that and it gets uploaded because I just thought of it. So, I'll be doing that soon. As we close, we're going to get back to doing those wise words and today's is fairly relevant to what we've talked about. This is from Ray Bradbury. You may have heard of him.

Trusting Your Intuition as a Writer

And he says, your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way, right? Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way. And I think AI is just putting something else in the way that almost certainly doesn't need to be there.

So, trust your intuition. And AI doesn't have an intuition, right? It doesn't know what to write. It's just predicting what might come next.

So, the real magic of storytelling comes from human instinct, human emotion, human perspective, things an algorithm will never be able to replicate. So, my final verdict on AI is do what you want to do. I'm not going to judge you. That's not what I'm here for. Just know that it's a tool, not a replacement for human creativity. It can assist with things like limited brainstorming, maybe some organizing, even a little editing, but it cannot replace the heart of storytelling.

If it does, then it's not a great story. So, there's nothing about it that's really necessary for writing. The only thing necessary for writing is a pencil and maybe a candle for a little light if it's dark, right? Everything else is a luxury to get words down.

So, a lot of things about it that used unwisely can actually make your writing worse. We just won't know it because ChatGPT or AI is impressing us with what it can do and we're not really looking at it closely enough. So, it's not magic, just a computer program.

So, have you experimented with AI in your writing? I would love to hear about where you agree, where you disagree, where you can take this deeper in a different direction. I'm still undecided in the overarching ethical kind of debate about it and we could talk about that as well.

So, you can head on over to the show's website and make a comment here on the show notes for this and I'd love to talk about it. So, I am so glad to be back. I'm excited. I'm fired up. There's lots more coming soon.

So, keep writing. Keep creating. Keep getting those stories out into the world that so desperately needs to hear them. One thing that hasn't changed over all these years I've been doing the show, and that is that the best way to improve as a writer is still the act of actually writing.

So, let's get some words on the page and I will see you soon. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.