Will AI (ChatGPT) Kill the Writing Star?—by Susan J Bruce

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Back in the late 70s there was a hit single called Video Killed the Radio Star, a one-hit-wonder by The Buggles. It was the first song played when MTV debuted in 1981 and it’s about the concerns and mixed attitudes toward the use of 20th-century inventions and machines for the arts. 

 

Fast forward to 2023 and technology continues to grow exponentially—especially artificial intelligence (AI). 

 

From Siri to self-driving cars, AI technology is quickly becoming ubiquitous and changing the way we live and work. It’s not just making our lives easier but it’s also unlocking new frontiers in fields such as medicine, finance and space exploration.

 

It’s also impacting the arts.

 

One of those AI programs, ChatGPT, is currently generating a lot of discussion—inspiring conversations all over the internet. 

What is Chat GPT?

ChatGPT is a new language model program that has been trained on a large amount of text from the internet and beyond. It can generate words and ideas in a conversational tone about almost anything. 

 

I’m a copywriter as well as an author. We talked about it as a team at work and I’d seen some chatter about the program in various writing groups, so I thought I’d better check out what it could do. 

• Was ChatGPT going to put me out of a job? 
• Was it going to kill off my author career?

I decided to sign up to the free version of ChatGPT and have a play with the program! 

 

First impression? Wow! The conversational nature of the chatbot was scary-good. At times I felt as if I was talking to a real person.

 

Second impression? My job and writing career were safe—for now!

What ChatGPT can and can’t do 

When you sign up for ChatGPT, the site gives you some warnings about the program’s capabilities and limitations:

• It remembers what you said earlier in the conversation
• It allows you to give follow-up corrections       
• It’s trained to decline inappropriate requests (Not sure what that means, so I didn’t test it!)       
• It may occasionally give you incorrect information       
• It can sometimes produce harmful instructions or biased content       
• It has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021 (which is obviously when it was programmed)

It also isn’t private—anything you enter could be read by one of their technicians—so don’t give it any information that’s deeply personal or anything related to your security, online or otherwise.

 

I decided to check out the program’s abilities for myself.

ChatGPT writing experiments

Writing copy

To begin with, I decided to check out its copywriting capabilities. I asked ChatGPT to write an advertising blurb for my young adult novel, Running Scared. I gave it the book description and asked it to generate several responses. The first few were simply awful, but I gave it more information and it finally gave me this copy. It's still pretty iffy—I wouldn’t use it as is—but with time I could tweak this draft to come up with something I liked:

 

Experience the heart-wrenching and thrilling journey of Melinda in "Running Scared", the latest novel by Susan J. Bruce. When the boy she loves is hiding a dark secret, Melinda must confront her worst fears and uncover the truth. With themes of first-love, friendship, and bravery, this captivating story explores the power of standing up to bullies and the consequences of keeping secrets. Perfect for young adult readers who love stories filled with emotion and mystery, "Running Scared" will keep you hooked from beginning to end."

 

Verdict: Don’t rely on ChatGPT to write great copy, but it can be used to give you something you can work with and refine.

 

Writing poetry 

I then switched to poetry and asked it to write a ‘happy sonnet’. I reasoned that asking for both poetry and emotion would test its writing abilities. The result was four simple quatrains like this one:

A world of joy, a heart of gold, 

A smile that shines, a story told, 

Of happiness that overflows, 

And laughter that forever grows.

 

I then asked ChatGPT if it understood the structure of a sonnet. It said yes and explained the sonnet structure accurately and defined an English (Shakespearian) sonnet as having three quatrains and a rhyming couplet—all in iambic pentameter. I then asked the program to rewrite the poem according to its definition of an English sonnet.

 

Once again, it gave me four quatrains.

 

I explained that it wasn’t writing according to the rules it gave me and it apologised profusely (yes, really) and had another go. After several attempts, the best it came up with were three quatrains and two rhyming couplets. I gave up and moved on.

 

Here’s another example of inaccuracy that made me laugh: 

 

An amusing ChatGPT chat I found on reddit—used with permission

 

Verdict: Don’t ask ChatGPT to help you with your poetry (or other) homework! 😎

 

Things became more interesting when I asked it to help me with my novel.

Novel writing

I’m writing a mystery novel and I’m at a point where I need to thread subtle clues to the identity of murderer throughout the story. I gave ChatGPT a couple of paragraphs summarising my story and the character of the antagonist. I then asked for hints regarding how I could thread these clues throughout the narrative.

 

I won’t list them here because I don’t want you to know whodunit 😊, but it gave me some good suggestions. Then I asked the program how I could make my antagonist a more rounded character. Nothing it said was new, and I had to ask the right questions, but it was surprisingly helpful. I felt as if I was brainstorming with another author in my genre. 

 

I could have got this information from a Google search, but it would have taken a lot longer. I could also have chatted with an actual author friend, but we are all busy, right? 

 

Verdict: If you ask ChatGPT the right questions, it can be a useful tool in plotting your novel.

The emphasis here is on the word “tool”

I’m sure this program can do a lot more. When I asked Chat GPT to tell me how it could be useful for authors. This is what it said: 

 

ChatGPT is … an excellent tool for authors who are looking for feedback and suggestions on their writing. Simply provide your draft to ChatGPT and ask for suggestions, and it will respond with insightful suggestions and recommendations, tailored to your writing style and tone. This real-time interaction with an AI model offers an exciting new opportunity for writers to improve their craft and reach their audiences in new and engaging ways.

 

We already have AI tools that are used extensively in the writing world. Editing programs such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid are a form of AI, as are search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo.

 

If we see AI technology as a tool that can help writers create better work, faster, it can be an excellent resource. As long as we treat ChatGPT as a resource and not as a ghostwriter. 

 

The reality is that technology is developing exponentially. In a couple of years GPT3 (on which ChatGPT is based) will become GPT4, so AI isn’t going to go away anytime soon. It will only become more powerful. 

How do we respond?

I think in the future we’ll have three choices as authors: 

• Let programs like this do our writing for us (meh…)
• Ignore it completely
• Harness the technology like we do every other tool (computers and internet, anyone?) and use it to our advantage.  

Photo by Martin Shreder on Unsplash 

My vote is for the third option. I don’t think using an AI tool to write your whole work, or even significant sections of your book is a good idea, from either a craft or ethical perspective. But, like all technology, it can be a handy tool.  

If, like me, you’re the kind of person who likes to bounce ideas off someone to clarify your thoughts, but you don’t always have access to another writer right then, tech like this can be really helpful. It’s fun to play with and it can help you look at your story in a different way.

 

The good news is that even with further technological advances, I don’t believe ChatGPT will take over our roles as writers and authors anytime soon. 

 

Even if AI can one day generate commercially viable stories and books, these books will lack the human creative spark. And I sometimes wonder that if technology uses the internet as its source and AI works take over the internet, will all the information one day devolve into the literary version of grey goo? 

 

There has to be some safeguards. Somehow we need to make sure the dystopian future Roald Dall hypothesised in his book, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, doesn’t happen. In this story a man creates a machine that can write a prize-winning novel in about 15 minutes. More and more of the world’s writers must license their names to the machine—so killing human creativity.

 

As Christian writers (this is a CWD blog after all), whether we write for the Christian community or for mainstream audiences, we have a secret weapon: the Holy Spirit. It’s amazing to think that the God who brought this brilliant and beautiful world into being, also made us to be creators in his image. Our heavenly dad loves to help us make things.

 

I wouldn’t swap that for any AI 😊.

 

But back to that song I mentioned… 

Video didn’t kill the radio star—video and radio are two different media sources. Video music clips entertain by blasting both the visual and audio senses, while radio is a more intimate, invite-the-announcer-into-your-living-room kind of experience. 

 

I don’t think ChatGPT will kill the writing star, either. If AI can help us organise our thoughts and brainstorm ideas, that’s pretty cool. And if we harness the power of AI programs in the right way, it can help our star rise.

 

What about you? Do you think there’s a place for ChatGPT and other AI in an author’s toolbox? What do you think are the ethical issues of using AI?

 

Let’s talk in the comments!

 

Susan J Bruce is an author, artist and animal addict who writes mystery and suspense books—with heart. Susan is a former veterinarian and animals often run, jump, fly or crawl through her tales. Her writing group once challenged her to write a story without mentioning any animals—she failed! Susan’s first novel, Running Scared, was awarded the 2018 Caleb Prize for an unpublished manuscript and is currently available on your favourite online retailer books2read.com/u/3RLoLB. 

Visit Susan at www.susanjbruce.com.