CREATIVE WRITING AND AI

Full disclosure first: we're a small independent team that makes an AI poem tool, so we're hardly neutral! But we'd agree with a lot of what's been said here.

In our experience AI is decent at the shape of a poem (rhyme, rhythm, four tidy verses) and poor at the heart of it. The heart comes from details only you know: that Grandad always hums while he makes the tea, that your granddaughter names every snail in the garden. Without those, you get a greeting-card verse that could be about anyone.

So if anyone does try an AI tool for a birthday poem, our honest advice is:
1. Give it two or three very specific details, not adjectives.
2. Treat what comes out as a rough draft.
3. Keep the lines that sound like the person and rewrite the rest in your own words.

The poem the grandchildren keep in a drawer will be the one with your fingerprints on it.

I go to a History group which is attached to my local U3A. There are 10 of us and we decide on a subject to learn more about and divide it into slices so that we can all share in presenting 'our' piece.
We are just coming to the end of The Crusades and I had to present the 5th Crusade. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing about it. My daughter, who uses AI asked if I wanted AI to make some changes to what I had written. Not really but I let her have her way and she handed me AI's version. I am no Alan Bennett but I much preferred my version to AI's effort so I took my own work along to read out at our meeting. I wouldn't want to use it in future. It seems like cheating in a way.

I would not touch AI with a bargepole.
It is dishonest.

One thing AIs are good at is assisting to fill in benefits forms. They know all the regulations.

A relative asked me to help with a supersession of her legacy benefit for DLA. This is where you tell the DWP your condition has deteriorated and seek a higher award. She obviously had medical evidence but struggled with the big boxes on the form where t asks you to give a detailed explanation. You can type in a lot of stuff to the AI and it will produce a nice neat paragraph for you to copy into the box.

Even with the help of the AI it took a lot of time and was very stressful. because my relative lives in another city. However she was subsequently awarded got top level care and mobility which makes a significant difference to her benefit.

Unfortunately it was a question of no good deed goes unpunished. She then contacted me to say she had "volunteered" me to help her neighbour. Yeah, right.

I told her that my base charge for tutoring students is £80 pa and I would need a deposit of £XXX. The deposit is not a guarantee of success but for the hours I expected to put in.

Strangely things have now gone silent.......

Quoting a price is a very effective method to end the conversation when people attempt to take advantage.

Sorry to anyone who thought I was reporting them. I was trying to report multiple scam threads early this morning and clearly didn’t do a very good job. I have reported my report on this thread.
Not sure what happened there - maybe I was half asleep 🫣

Reported

I write a lot, but recently have had a very disappointing experience with a proofreader. I think she may have used AI and some of her corrections were in part funny, but also completely incorrect and indeed senseless.
It has taken me quite some time to put myself back in the book.

That's what I'm getting at, really. There is little to choose between different forms of help with writing and research - it's not necessarily 'worthier' to spend hours finding out about something that Google will bring up in seconds, and I'm not convinced that it's more ethical to pay someone to proofread than to get ChatGPT to do it free.

When I say I'm not convinced, that doesn't mean I'm 100% certain, though - just that I'm not convinced. I think we are in a stage where opinions are forming about these things, and maybe in 10 years or so views will be different.

There is a very old, very romantic idea of authorship as being the lone genius communing with their muse, producing art from some ineffable inner spark. It’s a lovely myth, but it’s still a myth. The reality of writing has always involved tools, collaboration, influence, and scaffolding. When using an assistant to expand your own ideas this fits squarely into that long tradition.

The soul of the work comes from the human who decides what matters. The AI only elaborates. You hand off the heavy lifting of expansion, just as writers have always done with research assistants, editors, or even co-authors.

Thankfully I no longer have to write academic texts, mark exams or essays- distinguishing what has been produced by AI would be mostly impossible.
I lead a U3A Writing for Pleasure group and we discuss AI and the amazing things it can do but we admit to it's use if we have included anything other than correcting grammar and spelling. I did notice one of our group who seems to be leaning on AI for emotional support (!) produced a very strange piece of work one month. I opened a discussion about AI and the next month her normal style had returned.

The issue that bothers me is human talent, skill and expertise being sidelined, as in 'you're fired', surplus to requirements.

Yes, I don’t want to be operated on by someone who passed their course using AI instead of learning the ropes, but I struggle to see the difference between paying someone to proofread and getting a computer to do it. There are grey areas between the extremes, but I don’t think any of it is straightforward.

Outside an on-the-spot activity or exam there’s always been a problem with someone else- more adult, experienced or knowledgeable- doing the work.

I know for a fact a friend did all the work for her daughters first class degree thesis and took the online exam with her.

We need much more rigorous face to face testing if what students have submitted as their own work.

As fiction I suspect theirs plenty of AI generated stuff out there. But is that any different to the hacks who’ll produce you a quick novel on a popular theme in a few days?

AI will do that too. The question is where the line should be drawn. I don’t know the answer, incidentally- I have supervised countless dissertations, however, and there is often a noticeable difference between those who have had assistance (parents, tutors, AI), yet some forms of help are seen as acceptable and others as cheating, and I wonder how fair that is. I’m sure it is the same in schools. Some of the paste eggs made by 4 year olds in my children’s primary were quite remarkable, for instance, and later it was interesting to see how friends’ knowledge of the subjects taken by their offspring at A level had improved.

If the human designs the plot, characters and situation and they employ an AI to improve their spelling, grammar and punctuation are they not simply using the AI as a silent assistant? Rather than having a copy editor tidy up the text?

This is more r less what I do with my students. I am not an expert in the subject of their thesis. I just help them make it fit for presentation to an academic audience.

Publishers fight very shy of AI, and I understand that, just as I understand why universities don't want students using AI; but I don't see a huge difference between students using AI to polish things and employing tutors to do the same thing, or writers getting feedback from writing workshops or employing mentors to read their work and comment. In some ways AI doing those things is democratising, as it's free or very cheap to access, and tutors/mentors/workshops cost money.

Where I do see a difference is in the creation of what is passed off as original writing, whether that is academic or fictional/poetic. That is where AI has limitations, as it is not a non-thinking robot. It is a computer that scrapes the internet for phrases and plots that is in its memory because humans have put them there, deliberately or accidentally. It will write poems 'in the style of X', come up with plot lines for stories based on others it 'knows', and write dissertations and essays which can get students degrees. If people take those things and pretend it is their own writing it is obtaining money by deception, and if enough people stop learning how to do it themselves, AI won't have enough original sources to work from - it will ultimately be the author of its own demise.

The scary thing was that the AI writing was in my style. If I had sat longer and thought about the piece and developed the characters it could easily have come out like that. It took words and phrases out of my head as if by magic. Or perhaps because I interact with the AI on a daily basis it has become familiar with the way I write when I am in literary style - which is nothing like the way I write in chat forums.

I ran a short story I had worked on through it. It was a true and deeply emotional experience. It changed scarcely a word of it. I asked it why and it said there was nothing else to build on. The story was already complete.

I am not an author but I do use co-pilot a lot and I have been amazed at what it is able to do. It obviously does take inspiration from what you write but it does make mistakes. Mine started writing a story for me but I told it to stop. Human beings write based on their own experiences and ideas. Robots don't. Anything it writes feels second-hand. It cheapens the human experience.
I must admit I feel sure it isn't purely AI...I'm sure there is a certain amount of input from a human. 'Give your little furry vandals a headbutt from me'.....would a robot say something like that?