AI Art and Writing as a tool

[dreamland0516]

This thread is about the advances in AI and for us to share its usefulness as a tool, tips and techniques. I have found the advances in AI useful as a mega-thesaurus, and to cure writers block. It also has helped me visualize my stories using mainly Midjourney. For instance, you all will recognize some scenes from Legend of Vanguardia I hope. I am only sharing three of my favorites because these are huge and I wish I knew how to make them smaller lol. 

[waxesnostalgic]

Those are beautiful and interesting, and definitely bring up the same vibes as your story.

I've seen a lot of discussion from artists on AI and how they feel their work is being stolen. So I think it's useful for what you say, to bring inspiration and clarity to your ideas, but it's also a little frightening to wonder if AI will be able to replicate writing fiction just as well someday soon.

I did see an article where a teacher had her high school students write a plan using an AI program (I think Chat GP) and then graded them on how well they revised it to be intelligible. XD I thought that was an interesting thought about using AI as well.

[dreamland0516]

So - my agent made us take down any synopsis from our books from our website. Editors have that same fear that you have. But there will always be limitations to what AI can do. And even when it gets better at a specific kind of art, we are still decades away from AI actually understanding what it is doing. What I mean by this requires something of an essay, or a good youtube video lol

But the publishing industry is reacting - and even the writers strike involves AI disputes. So we will need to be armed with understanding.

youtu.be/l7tWoPk25yU

[Meredith]

After seeing this post I downloaded Chat GPT to see what it could do with novel writing. I could see a lot of uses for it, but I was surprised at how bad it was at writing prose.

It is good for:

1. Generating summaries (blurbs) of a fictitious novel based on a brief description. It often expands that blurb with extra details, particularly if you request more details (such as “Name all the characters mentioned.”) This can be helpful for brainstorming incomplete ideas you have, or for generating a fake novel for a character to see while browsing a bookstore or something. It has a tendency for flowery language.

2. Generating brief descriptions of potential side/background characters. Tends toward the cliche.

Thought it can be very good at these things, it sometimes makes mistakes.

It’s not too bad at:

1. Expanding characters given a brief description. It can give some good direction for character flaws and backstory. It has a tendency for happy or cliche things. (Many orphans…) It tends to pick more positive “flaws” for characters.

It’s terrible at:

Generating prose or chapters. It has a tendency for characters to think about what is going to happen (even when they wouldn’t know) when it generates a chapter from a plot summary. Prose written by Chat GPT could pass as the writing of an over enthusiastic high schooler submitting a creative writing assignment for the first time. That’s at best. At worst it makes illogical connections that no human would ever come up with. It avoids conflict which makes for boring fiction. Characters state what they are thinking and villains are easily swayed by a single sentence from the hero.

So right now I’m not afraid for the AI takeover. I do think AI might eventually learn to write mediocre genre fiction on it’s own (which would be quite an accomplishment). I can’t really see it able to make the connections necessary for something like a great work of literature.

Chat GPT tends towards the cliche and flowery, and usually goes with the safest option. It occasionally generates unusual things, but you kind of have to press it to do so by giving it strange input.

I’m considering trying out an art generator to make some images of characters. I’ve never had good luck making them in the Sims, though it should technically be a good method of designing character appearance. I could see myself uses Chat GPT as a limited writing aid (I got it to generate a detailed description of somewhat cliche classic shoujo manga for a character to obsess over that I’ll probably use if I write that book).

(When I submit plots based on my own work I tend to change things up to something similar and change the names, so Chat GPT won’t pick up on my work. Though considering how bad it is at making connections sometimes I probably don’t need to worry much).

[dreamland0516]

Yeah - and ChatGPT you have to keep in mind is just the most famous one covered in media - there are other models that can do better, but every single one of them is limited by:

1. Bias - every AI model inherits some sort of bias depending on the programmer (s) - the details on this are fascinating.
2. The subject of what is considered "not safe for work" is problematic for AI. You will never get even the most Tame Romance novel, and something on the level of steamy of Nora Roberts or higher is right out. AI developers are terrified of any sort of outcry or being accused of porn - so a lot of very basic human intimacy gets outlawed. Even just trying to describe your character taking a shower will produce weird results. Some AI systems, like Character.AI (A free one to use) beta.character.ai/ are built to role play with characters or AI versions of celebrities, but the experience is laughable at this point because of all the filters placed on conversation. And since these models learn from a user base, the bots can turn violent or aggressive. As usual our society is way more afraid of sex than violence.

The artwork is fun - and useful once you understand the limitations. I found I had to fork over the subscription to midjourney to get any good at it, but you do get to play around for free in a limited capacity.