Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Writing of Novels
I won’t let my students use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in my Creative Writing class and I won’t use it myself.
It’s technically possible to use GAI to “create” something that looks like literature, i.e., an essay, a poem, or story. And a would-be writer can create a prompt and ask (tell?) Chat-GPT to write a novel chapter based on that prompt; Chat-GPT will happily comply. The writer can then doctor up the result as he or she likes, can make it idiosyncratic, if you will, to the writer’s general style and mood, and then repeat the process for another chapter.
There are many objections to such use of GAI, not the least of which is the likelihood of plagiarism. The GAI after all is only looking at other things that have already been published. While no novelist or poet writes in a vacuum – all previously-written literature is presumable at the writer’s disposal – and where many themes take life in multitudes of novels and poems – e.g. boy meets girl, boy loses girl, etc. – it’s dishonest to steal what GAI scours from the internet and posit the output as one’s own. That in itself should be enough of a deterrent.
Of course, there are also GAI’s hallucinations to contend with. Something written originally as fantasy could well be construed by GAI as reflecting the real world and reported back as such. What true writer would want a mishmash of the truth and the unreal created by a machine?
There are two more important reasons.
First, the output of GAI when asked to produce a piece of literature is insipid at best. There’s no spark of originality, no risk-taking, no innovation. GAI doesn’t even get to the level of Cliff Notes. A so-called writer would resort to using GAI only if he or she wants to be boring and repetitive.
Second, using GAI in this way takes all the fun out of writing. If you’re going to let a machine do the work of writing, if you’re going to take all the surprise and discovery out of writing, why bother?
So, if you read anything I’ve published, please be assured: it’s my own work.