Many of my stories touch on this subject, with a fair amount of strong, predictive opinions about where I think such things are heading with AI, but I wanted to make clear what my approach is to the use of AI with regard to my writing.
Not a single word of the content of my story writing is generated by AI.
That said, I have used ChatGPT to refine my own suggestions for back cover blurb. Turns out there is an art or skill to the production of bite-sized teasers enticing the reader to take a risk with an unknown reader. That is marketing. As I have previously mentioned elsewhere, marketing is not my thing. Borrowing from the well-worn wisdom that is to write for yourself, and worry about other people reading it afterwards, I didn’t start down the route of learning to get my words out there until I was half done with my fourth novel.
Early versions of the covers for ROGUE and REBEL were brilliantly created by a friend of mine, Bruno Martins, but when he could no longer produce covers for me, I did go through a period of trying to get ChatGPT to generated heads and shoulders of the main characters. None of these were ever made public and remain a curious attempt to visualise something that, as it turned out, everyone had imagined in very different ways: the ultraviolet glow of a chimeras skin. By trying to draw it (or more accurately, scripting a relatively stupid AI to draw it) I was ruining the entire beauty of the written word and the unique interaction it has with the imagination of individuals.
Fortunately, a friend knew a friend, and he remade more modern and less literal interpretation of the books in The Many and The Few saga: Martin from Awesome15.com.
Lastly, proof-reading. My wife has a copy of Grammarly, and I did attempt to use it on ROGUE and REBEL, mostly with a view to help to learn the skill of proof-reading. Generally, though, it was a disaster. Half of the time, Grammarly was either wrong or would cycle through suggestions only to return to the start again. I stopped using it after that. I may in the future give books a run through to help me spot any mistakes I missed doing the job by hand. Reading aloud is a great test BTW.
I’m not against these tools per se, indeed, there is a massive move to use AI in my software engineering day job, which can be very helpful as a tool, but I wouldn’t rely on it to write code without vetting every line. AI are just tools, for me at least.
What I will never do, I promise you this, is get AI to write a single word of my stories, only to pass it off as my own work. I will not use AI to do research on my behalf. I will not use AI to form any part of the creative process at all.
We will all be swimming in diluted AI output all too soon enough and I refuse to contribute to that.