“If You Write With AI, You're Not a Writer" And Other Lies 

Solid points. I'm a heavy plotter (my latest outline was just shy of 20k words) and this helps AI to produce a solid first draft for me (although I'd argue it's more a 2nd draft). Before AI, I'd avoid plotting too heavy ahead of time as new ideas always found me midway through drafting. Let me tell you, nothing is more frustrating than having to amend a detailed outline over and over again. Having published a dozen stories, this happened a lot. Sometimes, I'd let good ideas wither away as the pain to modify my outlines was too much. With AI, it can handle these shooting stars without breaking a sweat. I have rediscovered the joy for storytelling and quite frankly... I no longer care what other authors say. Entertaining readers is my priority.

I want to write but I suffer from dyslexia. I feel like I have amazing ideas, but it's incredibly difficult to bring my vision into the physical world. I'm currently experimenting with AI tools to compensate for my disability, and so far it's been a remarkable experience. I'm really glad these tools exist and I'm happy to have found this channel. Thank you!

I will NEVER let AI "write" my story. It is a TOOL and that is exactly how I utilize it my story writing. When I've been told that it really isn't "writing," I pretty much correct them and point out the bullet points that you mention in your video. There's ALOT of editing involved, and sometimes, the AI needs to be nudged back on track to stay true with the vision of your story. But I never forget that AI is just a tool and is only good as the author who wields it. Thank you for commenting on this topic!👍

Professional writers can afford one or several human editors to go through their work and spar for ideas. AI levels that playing field.

Since being diagnosed with a chronic illness, AI has helped me with my writing, especially plot development, and character/world building.

Ai is the orchestra, The human is the conductor.

This is perfect, Jason. I appreciate your video on this. I'm using Claude 3 and the scenes. That Claude does not want to help, write. I create the scenes and I go into a lot of detail with that. Apparently Claude is very sensitive towards those scenes. Since they are explicit.

Certainly! Here's the revised comment incorporating the full quote by Faulkner: "William Faulkner once lamented, 'I could just think so much faster than I could write. I got so desperate that I thought, well, I’ll try talking instead of writing. So I got a dictating machine. And I thought I could talk faster than I could write, but I discovered that I couldn’t even talk as fast as I could think, either.' This perfectly illustrates the timeless struggle of capturing rapid thoughts which is how I use Ai in my writing. This video discusses how AI in writing serves a similar function to Faulkner’s tape recorder, enhancing our ability to document ideas quickly without replacing the creative spirit. Like Faulkner’s use of technology, AI aids in the collaborative process of writing, extending our capabilities to match the speed of our thoughts. This comment was written by ChatGPT."

I used Claude and I had to edit to make it sound like me. I had to change words however, it did help me a lot. I am not the best in grammar because English is not my first language, But I can tell you one hell of a story.

I remember reading some books where the author said what don’t they used, what typewriter mode o they write their first draft, or what word processing software they used. AI is really just another tool that we can use smartly or dumbly. Just getting AI to generate a bunch of prose and then doing nothing with it before publishing is going to lead to a bad reading experience. Love your work.

At the moment I am trying to learn as much as possible about AI in many different fields. It was scary in the beginning, but now it seems clear that it is an amazing resource to improve creative and research quality in many industries. This will be a requirement for everyone in a very near future.

I went from good to GREAT because of AI and the ai writing community. ❤ I don’t even use it to write anymore I write myself and it acts as an editor for me 🥰

what is the best model to use in Novelcrafter for it to catch on and duplicate your own writing style?

My problem lately with trying to get AI's to write most of the story for me is 1. They just don't nail down how I write well enough. 2. I really enjoy writing it myself. Now what I do love about AI is the help that it hives me plotting out my books. I'm a pantser and I just kinda sit down and write whatever comes to me. Always have been. The problem with that is that I have never gotten very far into a book but with the help of Claude 3 I have been able to plot three books in a series that I have wanted to write for some time. Now I have a road map for the first three books and something to help keep me on track.

Great video with many thoughtful points.

I have been writing off and on since 2010. I have been published a few times. And yet, I still had a former friend and writer tell me I am a pretender and hack. He didn't care that I have been a writer and author longer than AI has been around. Not to mention, I still do some writing on my own with AI.

I did a story where AI did most of the writing And then I proceeded to take more time editing, revising and rewriting than if I had just written it from scratch. I don't feel guilty or anything, but I did wonder, at the time, if I should list ChatGPT as a co-author. In the end, I only mentioned it in the 'about' section of the story that I put at the end.

It's so good to see a RU-vidr say this in linkable video and not be tied back to me or the Pro-AI community other than their stance in not drinking the kool-aid Anti-AI 'activists' often guzzle without any research. Gives me hope for the future. I want to offer a little insight into why somebody might try to generate a whole story though: for the same reason somebody might post two pieces of transhumanism art and a plain render in a phone app and ask an Anti the question 'which of these is made by AI". To see them fall on their face and then try to make them understand all art is art. I once had the idea to publish a bunch of stories under sock accounts that were AI generated and see if any Anti AI would comment on them so I could have a good "aha" moment. I gave up though because as a dad you don't have much time to do that sort of spite/education project and also reason 2 is more fun Reason two: when writing a story it's hard to enjoy it. Much like debugging a game you get to where you have the 'oh I know what happens next' syndrome. Letting an AI turn your story into it's own allows you to brain storm and enjoy what comes next...most of the time lol

I love outlining and rivision. How do we use AI to help rewrite a first draft which is in need of a complete rewrite to even get started? There are so many pieces where I repeat myself; go too detailed or gaps in my writing. It's a mess!

Great video!

So if we use novel crafter and Sell the book on Amazon how to make sure that it's ai assisted and not generated? I think as long as it's not creating the actual chapters just adjusting your idea and you write all based in your words? Any ideas? Anyone?

I would like to write a novel or comic, manga maybe. I have many ideas in my head, but when I started looking up writing guides I went way too far down the rabbit hole of what to do and what not to do. At some point I realized that these video guides only hindered me because every single idea I had, has been done already, done better, or it is on some book critique's list of "don't you ever use these tropes". Might as well not write anything. Then my brother recommended me to try chatgpt to bounce some ideas I have on it. It also helped with my work as an English and History teacher. Then I found your channel. English is not my native language, so I fear that I will have trouble writing good prose because I lack the necessary vocabulary to express myself artistically. So I hope AI will help me with that. Anyway, thank you for your great help and I hope one day I will have a finished book.

I'm looking for a writing AI that is uncensored and there isn't any i've found, as soon as you ask for something sexual and violent they refuse. Any idea's?

I don't have an editor nor can I afford one.. so should I just enter the grave with my ideas like so many people before me? No, I have 5 Novella's planned and I will let AI assist with editing. It's not like I'm stealing ideas. All the chapters are mine I will only let chat GpT edit it.

I am using AI to edit. Just cause they way I wrote my poetry I didn't add any punctuation. I added punctuation, stanzas and corrections with AI. I wouldn't do much more with AI. I like my writing and I find AI has too much structure in it's poetry. It has taken 2 years to write 8 poetry books and edit them by myself. My struggle mostly with it is this. How tf do I find a publisher? Most 'companies' have tried to scam me. And most books that are self published will only sell a few copies.... At a dilemma AI can't help me with.

I outline, I draft out of my brain. I use Claude to make it better before I pay my developmental editor to tear it apart. Using AI helps but it’s still a lot of work to finish the manuscript.

Another point: most conventional wisdom even from titans like Brandon Sanderson pushes this idea of borrowing ideas or putting a new twist on an already established idea. Trad pub is literally flooded with retellings atm. Now all of a sudden, once AI is a thing people care about originality and soul lol. What a joke. Trust and believe, these tools are a dream for most writers. It's very likely most are secretly using them but virtue signalling to their audience in public. Cuz really, how would anyone know otherwise 😜

I'd love for AI to improve to the point where it can write entire books set in my imaginary worlds, using my imaginary characters. But we are still far from that. Using AI to do most of the work by just pushing the next button (hi Sudowrite) results in cringeworthy tragicomic stories you would never want to show outside the family. Still, I have seen this before: Because of tendonitis, I had to use speech recognition for years. I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the best tool at that time. My first review of it compared it to a drunk, homesick, foreign high school exchange student. My last review of it noted that it understood my Scandinavian accent better than a college-educated American would. This difference took perhaps a decade, but software evolves much faster now that we can use AI to improve our AI. I fully expect an AI to write a better book than some I have bought from Amazon, within 5 years or so. But we are very much not there yet, in spring 2024.

“I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.” - Björk

Great video. I feel Ai Is harmless if it is used like google but I am not for being lazy having Ai write my article because I am too lazy to write my own article.

i blame hollywood and sci-fi entertainment for 'AI skynet kill people bad' trope.

The way I see it is that AI is a tool, and people over-estimate what the tool is capable of. Its a calculator, all it can do is calculate. At a certain level at some point those calculations are just filling in averages. The amount of information in a prompt is FAR less than the information that is in the output. That information has to come from somewhere. And how does it get there? A computer crunching the numbers, and finding averages. What is the output? Average. No matter how good this technology gets, this will be true. It might be really impressive average content, that is extremely well formatted, but it will still be drawing from some kind of average. 1:30 one might say the only reason for this is because the AIs are still a new technology, and in the future this wont be the case. I disagree, this will always be the case. It will only become less so over time. Some might also say "well if youre going to edit it so much then why not just write from nothing?" Because, we have a tool now we can use to make that process easier. What is easier, getting materials and putting them together into a cohesive sculpture, or taking a block of marble, and carving the sculpture out of it? Neither, exactly. This is just essentially carving writing out of marble. 5:50 this is the part I doubt. Especially with AIs... political alignments... It may not be obvious from every single output, but it does sway the assumptions that the AI makes. Where it draws from averages, its training basically dictates what "average" is, and its average leans a little more progressive than I would like, so I dont expect it to move me.

I am non native english speaker who is familiar with pov and i have a idea about fictional universe but i am not sure about my vocabulary and weak descriptive writing knowledge what can Ai help me convert my idea to book.

Ignore the people that tell you that you aren’t a real writer. Look man I found a way to jailbreak a few ai models and you should try to do it so if you want to write a book with a few gothic fantasy then you can .

AI in film and television is a rough argument. Because there are people who hate it, you have major directors like Nolan who say they only want to do practical effects. Critics call out "marvel CGI" all the time, so there are lots of people in all industries that hate AI

AI acts as a "mechsuit" that enhances my writings and drawings.

Can AI create the first paragraph in Slaughterhouse 5?

I don't mind non-fiction written by AI but for me, it feels weird, if a machine tries to invoke feelings in me by writing romance or anything else that invokes feelings. However, as I write in another language than I grew up with, I use AI as an editor. I write the entire draft myself as good as I can and then ask AI if my grammar was applied correctly or if it can improve it. For me, AI is NOT the writer but an editor, just like one who sits in a publishing house and improves a novel.

Thanks for this. It needed to be said. Probably the best advice would be a contemporary line to those naysayers…don’t be hatin’

I have tried using ai to write. I have no talent and yet I knew it wasn’t anywhere near as helpful, or even competent, as the opposition would say. So many capabilities either simply missing or insufficient for anything. But even if it was, the idea that the user isn’t responsible for the story would still be wrong.

There are some people, primarily nonfiction Content creators, but also some people who are interested in making a quick book on Kindle, unlimited, who are putting out 100% AI written drivel, But it's not reflective of most of us, And I do agree that those people aren't actually authors

Funny enough, I use AI as a copyeditor, as opposed to the other way around. Grammarly's generative AI does a terrific job of learning from the author and can copyedit in my own voice. As you mention, it is a collaborative effort, and I still use human editors after that. I'm one of those crazy writers that will read through a work at least a couple of times fixing my mistakes before handing it off to my wife who does my first edits, and then a third party editor for copy or line editing depending on where I feel the manuscript is at the time. AI is good, but it won't replace people. As soon as AI tries to grow from within itself it pukes on the floor, in every discipline. However, learning a confined discipline from humans it can be quite impressive, but unless and until developers can find a way to develop algorithms that breach their own mathematical limits, AI will always be a bit challenged. (Full confession, I'm a retired developer/manager of business intellilgence big data systems, the precursors for a lot of what is going on.) A.I. is very impressive, but we still see similar limits to what we experienced. It takes an actual hand to lead the program to where you want it to go.

Your film example is on point... UNLESS you're talking about Neil Breen

As an AI writer, I hear so much flak about it. But when you analyze WHO is exactly complaining, its generally people who stand to lose out and can't understand that its just a tool. I tried letting the AI write everything. Unpublishable garbage was the result.

Womp womp

it’s a tool. i use it for brainstorming, outlining, rough drafting, and research. it’s very rapid. it’s accessible. again, it’s a tool. deal with it.

did you manage to sell ai book so that to make a living?

There's a lot of irrational fear regarding AI. That said I do agree with some antagonists, but that's mostly towards those "get rich quick" schemes where some RU-vidr tries to promote selling hundreds of AI written trash books on Amazon or other retailers. The reason these guys tick me off is because they are ruining the book industry by filling the digital shelves with sludge. This is going to turn readers sour on books as they have to wade through piles of useless, out-of-date, and incorrect AI generated content to find books written by actual authors. It also makes it harder for new authors to be discovered under the mountain of AI sludge. These "get rich quick" schemers don't realize how AI works, and they don't realize that writing a book is only the first (and fastest) stage. Editing is what makes a book good, and that's a lot of time and effort, even with AI helping out. As an example, my latest book, which was written with AI collaboration has taken five months from planning to publishing. Most of that time was editing, and yes, I did use Claude Haiku to help me in the editorial stage. A book is like a sculpture. The first draft just gives you a roughly humanoid shape. To get a David, you need lots of editing, chipping away at the book and removing everything that detracts from the perfect image. AI is also quite often factually incorrect. It will try to do what you tell it to, and if it can't then it'll make crap up. My wife complains all the time about AI generated crotchet patterns that look good on the site, but when you buy them and try to use them you quickly discover that they don't work. The AI just made up a bunch of crap that sounded reasonable, but didn't work. I love AI, and I use it all the time in my writing, but AI will NOT make you into a writer. Please don't believe those RU-vidrs that are just trying to get views by encouraging you to commit felony copyright violations like crazy. Each copyright violation is punishable by up to 5yrs in prison and $250,000 dollars. At 93 books per month, which is what most of those RU-vidrs try to push, even if only 1 in 10 books was guilty of copyright, which I think is generous, you're still looking at serving 50yrs and $2.5 million every month. It's just not worth it. If you're going to turn to a life of crime, robbing banks might be better. At least there you aren't likely to leave your name, address, and bank account for the police.

The argument that I love to hear is when the AI haters say "but the AI is using someone else's work". What gets me about that statement is, do they not know how humans learn from childhood. We learn by doing the same things others do. Sure, you'll get that once in a generation person who thinks outside the box and makes something totally new. But that's a rarity. I think of AI as another being that is just trying to learn how to create. They learn the same way humans do - by imitation.

Chatgpt is the best invention for writing idiots in history

I agree with much of what you've said, I am in favor of AI in general. I have worked with AI and am well aware of the reality of its uses and capabilities. However, in colaboratives, all contributors are given credit, in the case of using it like software/equipment-- software doesn't come up with the words for the writer. I agree it can be helpful to hash out concepts, sequence of events, a plotting tool, but if the AI is providing the bulk of the words being published, then it was not written by the person/promptengeneer/writer. It was written by the AI. And the writer is the AI's editor. Everything you list that can be done with AI is as you said are all part of the writing process, and all necessary. So, why not just do it all for the story, rather than do it all for the AI to write and be edited. Editing is necessary for all writer's. If you have an effective process, the process doesn't have to take so long. I don't care if other writers use AI, to help them figure things out, but if the book has large AI written portions, that were edited by a human, just let the reader know it is an AI Assisted story. It's just part of satifying reader expectations. Even if you guided a ghost writer in writing your story, it is often customary to give them some sort of credit, or aknowledgment. Do the same for your AI collaboration.

AI is excellent for outlines, but it's best to write the prose yourself. If AI writes better than you, then you aren't a very good writer. Its prose is still pretty bad unless you heavily edit it.

What I hear 99.9% of the time is that AI steals other people's work and therefore by you using it, you are contributing to that.

I am very excited about pushing the boundaries of AI and human creativity and I agree with the points of the video. BUT. There is the elephant in the room here: most of the AI models and tools, wether for text, image, audio, or video, were built upon stolen artistic content. We love the tools and what they can do for us, but the debate becomes nastiest when it comes to how to reckon with the above issue. Big Tech is screwing artists, full stop. Most people using AI in this lovely community of ours are indie authors or younger more inexperienced authors, which explains why we are more experimental and open minded. That is fantastic. But, on the flip side, there are those who have built a creative career over decades of hard work who now feel robbed. As creators, I think we have a duty of solidarity to one another. What that means in practice, honestly, I am not sure. But I'd say we have to acknowledge the issue openly.

The proposition is well argued, but too many points the explanation raises are skipped over. For example, the rhetorical question-put as a proposition-that if you use AI, you are not a real writer is not about the idea of being a ‘real writer’ but authenticity. Is the work entirely authentic, or is there a scale of authenticity? Remember, your work, if you use AI, is anchoring your novel in a large language model-i.e., the language, skill and craft of other novelists. You are not those writers and probably have not even read their work.

Okay but if someone depends on AI to write their prose, then they’re not a writer since they’re literally not writing!

The reason I can't finish a book is actually because of Ai. While it has its own beautiful way of writing I have my own ideas of what I want my story to feel like and Ai actually makes it harder (idiots would think otherwise) Ai is helpful for brainstorming and it does do some level of editing of the prose and it is a good learning tool for writing because it is trained on countless drafts of writing. But if you want something short, yes, Ai can do that all on its own but once you go beyond 20k words, the Ai starts to drift off into lala land and at that point you know you need to learn this sh! t for yourself or you won't finish anything. I have learned a lot about writing thanks to Ai and I don't see any reason to downplay it's benefits to providing information you would otherwise have to pay too much to learn.