AVERIL ROBERTSON

I work as a technical writer and knowledge manager for a global tech company. The advent of generative AI has fundamentally changed a lot for us as a business – that is the nature of technology. For a couple of days after ChatGPT (which uses OpenAI) arrived, those of us who write for a living were scared. How can we demonstrate our worth, when so many people believe this tool can do it just as well? 

Through thorough testing, we soon learned that, while it can assist with certain things, it is far from a ‘writer’. It – very convincingly – lies. Sorry, “hallucinates”. It uses more words than are needed to be clear. Occasionally, it fills in gaps that save me hours of research to learn about a new topic. Mostly, I spend more time fixing its output than it would have taken me to simply do it myself. All in all, it’s probably not what we all feared it might be. But that’s the non-fiction world. What about fiction? 

I’ve been listening to the Not Quite Write podcast, and they talk from time to time in various episodes about the impact of AI on writing. Episode 5 focuses strongly on AI – I highly recommend it for gaining a deeper understanding of the potential impact of AI on fiction. In the bonus longlist episode from August 2023, they talk briefly (from 1:04) about running stories through a checker to detect if perhaps AI had been used, and found the results to be bunk. The reason? AI has learnt from us, so it, um … it sounds like us. This means that it is highly unlikely to come up with a truly beautiful and original sentence. It is unlikely to nail cadence. It is not going to create a character with the depths that only a human mind can imagine. 

For me, the upshot is that, while AI could maybe spark an idea, it simply cannot be a good writer. It relies too heavily on recognisable language patterns that it repeats, on tropes that have been overdone, to ever produce a good piece of fiction writing. Want proof? Take the criteria of Furious Fiction August 2023 and plug them into ChatGPT. The result, I can guarantee it, is rife with cliches, laden with adjectives, and delivers a wonderfully ridiculous moral at the end. It is truly awful writing.

Use it for a laugh. Use it to tickle at an idea in the back of your mind. Then, write from your heart and your mind. It will be a thousand times better.