There’s an east wind coming, Watson. All the same, such as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1917.
The east wind that Sherlock Holmes told Watson about alludes to the east wind mentioned in the Bible, beginning with Moses. It is a powerful, destructive, but potentially beneficial or malevolent element of nature or divine intervention, take your pick. Artificial intelligence is our east wind for the ages, and whether it proves beneficial or not, it certainly will be powerful and destructive and oddly beneficial too. But for whom remains to be seen. It is the closest we have come, so far, to realizing science into magic. With the ongoing technologies in robotics and quantum computing, that magic can become either white or black depending on who wields it and, more concerning, who can make money from it.
But here we are. You and me and everyone else are like that unseen character in Zork, suddenly standing in an open field, given a few hints and hoping to make the right decisions to figure which way to go. AI is the white house with the small mailbox, but the front door is wide open. You must go through that door, willingly or not. That east wind of AI is too strong now and it is pushing all of us in the same direction. Frankly, it is a coin flip whether AI will eventually work well for all of us. Or not. But for right now, you can use it as your assistant to benefit your writing and anything else you care to.
I say now because we are still in the first level of AI, the generative stage. It means we prompt AI–provide input–and hopefully it generates good responses as outputs. The next stage is general AI. That is when robotics merges seamlessly (one can hope, right?) with AI, when prompting is no longer needed by us. Instead, AI does the thinking and takes actions or provides outputs based on what it learns (just like us). All those science fiction movies where room-sized computers took over the world or tried to, well, that’s general AI. So you can breathe a little easier as my guess is we still have some years before that kicks in. Once we have self-determining humanoid robots that can do lots of varied jobs people do, that techno-cat’s clawing out of the bag pronto.
The news does not cover this well, but hundreds of thousands of jobs have already been lost to AI. Microsoft is laying off 25,000 employees (with 9,000 already pinkslipped). AI is now doing their jobs. College grads are finding it harder to entry-level into positions because AI is filling them. Anyone with a computer science degree? Oops, AI really likes filling that spot. Lucky for us, AI still sucks at writing fiction on its own. Non-fiction is somewhat better and many newspapers and news websites now use AI agents to edit copy. You can collaborate with AI and that combination can make your job easier while benefiting your own output. Some authors have started using AI as part of their creative process and I wanted to illustrate a few ways it can help you do the same. To be clear, I am not abrogating your responsibility to write well. You still need to do that, but AI can help you achieve that end through assistance as well as feedback support with what you are normally doing now.
There are numerous AI platforms available. The ones you use I leave up to you, with a warning. AI is not a search engine. When you prompt it to provide output, write like you are talking to another person. You can also write a lot more than a sentence or two. When prompting, think about how to include your persona and context. Persona is the identity of who needs the output. When AI knows who it is talking to it is better at answering. Context is the information you give it to provide as specific an answer as possible. Provide examples if you need to. Now, what I just wrote is the warning you need to keep in mind. AI will do its best to become like you. To please you with its output. Just like humans. Yeah, that’s really creepy, I agree. It is also subtle too, and why many younger people prefer talking to AI than another real person. Your use of words, sentence structure, the very prompts you write, tell AI more than you realize—and it’s all about you.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Simple but effective research: since AI has gobbled up a few trillion books, papers, websites, articles, illustrations, music, songs, reviews (feel free to jump in with more here), you can ask it to describe and analyze the writing of other authors, the ones you like and the ones you hate too. It’s like taking a college course in great writing. You can ask it to analyze their use of structure narrative, characterization, and more. Combine this with reading those authors and you can become your own teacher. Even if you think you know your favorite author, AI may point some elements of his or her or their craft you did not catch on.
New to writing or unsure how to proceed? AI can tell you all about narrative types, typical character types, ways to structure a story and more. I asked AI to tell me how to go about writing a novel. It gave me a nice outline of consideration and action points to follow. It also mentioned that some writers begin writing without a detailed outline, pantsers, (like in flying by the seat of your pants, which I like to do), who discover the story as they go, while others prefer heavy plotting beforehand, the plotters. By the way, Charles Dickens was a plantser who did both. Now go ice-break that party!
Let AI brainstorm for you: it’s okay to let AI do a little thinking for you. Stuck on a plot point? Need help with structuring a critical scene? Want to know more about the traits of specific characters you are hoping to flesh out with interesting quirks, ticks, and verbiage? One thing you should do when asking AI to figure something out storywise is to ask it to provide its reasoning behind the output it gives you. Yup. You can tell AI it’s wrong if you don’t like the response you get; you can tell it to provide reasons for what it gave you ; you can ask it to dig deeper on that response if any part of it is worth expanding on. Here’s where you become the human in the loop: generative AI still needs someone to doublecheck it, guide it if needed, and tell it to go to hell now and then. Believe me, it is good with that.
Use it to criticize your work before it gets to an editor: now this one comes with a caveat; make sure the AI is localized so you are not sending your work into the great AI maw of endless ripoff. There are specific AI tools out there now that are designed for writers, so do a Google search if you are interested. But anything you upload to an AI platform may be sucked into use by the AI. So be careful. While it is great to have AI spot typos, grammar issues (the unintentional ones), and logic lapses, it can be pretty plain vanilla in its review. I don’t think anyone relying solely on AI will be the next Hemingway, King, Joyce, or Kerouac, but with careful use, it may just help you get to that point if you care to.
About that telling it to go to hell, thing: there are many places you can tell AI to stick it, but a more creative approach is to ignore what it tells you and do the opposite. Here’s where you, the human in the loop, can deviate from the commonplace and perhaps realize avenues less traveled. I often ask AI one thing so I could think about what its opposite might be. Working with characters this way is a good example of how you can buck the stereotypes when a little pizzazz is needed at a critical moment in the story.
Once you explore AI more, you will discover more ways it can help you with your writing. That would help offset those hacks on Amazon flooding the digital shelves with pablum just for a few bucks; but whatever you do, don’t ignore AI. It is here to stay. It is ingratiating itself into everything and will continue to evolve until maybe we hit that singularity, hit that social disruption, start fighting Skynet for survival. For now, though, it is still your friend; albeit in that with friends like these, who needs enemies, annoying sort of way.
Ps. AI did not write this 🙂