A.I. for Writers: Useful Tool or Just a "Tool"

Is A.I. as efficient or effective as it is touted to be? Let's ask the writers!

Have you found it helpful, too much to make it useful, or just a waste of time (potential theft issues aside)? 

Alan J. Porter: I’ve worked on AI platform development in my day job and often write about it and always happy to help educate writers to see beyond the hype.

Brian K Morris: I've used ChatGBT a little and frankly, it reassures me that I'm a better writer than I thought I was. Their text is drier than 077's martinis.

I used an AI to write the back cover copy of my newest novel. I gave it the elements I wanted to see, then told it that the words were going on the back of a paperback. Then I added another element in two subsequent rounds, then gave it a quick edit so it sounded like me.

It helped to unstick my thinking in terms of a complex scenario I'd constructed. It looked at the material in a different way than I did, which was good. Three drafts later, in addition to a final polish by myself, it was ready for prime time. I'd never use it to write my stories, though.

R Alan Siler: I recently wrote a review in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet. I've never written a sonnet before, so I used ChatGPT to generate some ideas for me -- some specifically about the thing I was reviewing and some on the more general theme I was going for. None of them were that great (and some of them were structuraly wrong), but it helped me figure out ways to structure my review/sonnet. So what I wrote was 100% me, but the AI was a shortcut to help me get there. I'm sure I would have eventually arrived at approximately the same point regardless, but the AI gave me a map that helped me not wander aimlessly for quite as long.

Jenny Reed: I have not used it and see no reason to. I can write without help, thanks.

However, my housemate, who has always wanted to write stories but believes she is bad at it, has embraced ChatGPT as the way to realize her dreams. It seems to me that she spends way more time explaining what she wants and then tweaking the result to make it nice than she would to just write the thing, but she seems to think she gets a better result than she is capable of without the crutch.

Do note that I said she tweaks it afterwards. And by tweaks, I mean, she extensively edits it. She is apparently capable of editing a start until it's actually decent, but doesn't feel capable of creating from scratch. I guess we all have our mental blocks.