Robot illustration AI generated by Adobe Illustrator – AI seems to have as much trouble with fingers as a lot of artists I know.
A colleague of mine is quite the creative – he’s done screenplays and published a non-fiction book. He does 3D modeling work and is a heck of a video artist and editor. Recently, he told me that he thought he could feed the outline of a story into Claude AI and it would do the nuts and bolts of writing his first novel. Last week, he gave me the first two sections for my thoughts – a Prologue and Chapter One. I looked at it with the same eye and ear as I do the work of my fellow authors in the DFW Writers Workshop.
I am no longer worried that AI is coming for our careers as writers. At least not for a while. This was his first run at fiction, so I’m not sure what into the machine, but what came out was extremely hard to read. A sample of my notes –
“Overall, the writing is just tough to get through. The descriptions are far too dense and rather than flavor the story, they become the story itself. It gets in the way of the narrative. It makes understanding what is going on a very difficult chore.
The opening reads like a screenplay and screenplays should never be read as prose.
The job of the author is to curate the experience for the reader. Rather than tell the reader what they are seeing or should be imagining they hear, put them in the room. Don’t have us see a screen. Put us on the set…”
Now, I’d never sell myself as an editor or a story mechanic, but I have been sitting in on DFWWW read and critique sessions for the last ten years and even a hardheaded guy like me learns a few things.
AI isn’t telling a story, it’s assembling words in a way that makes sense to what it’s seen those words do before. After a page or two, this novel became a predictable mess. Three sentence paragraphs that gave every possible adjective-noun, adverb-verb description of what the AI programming decided the narrative was trying to accomplish. It read like a robot wrote it.
The problem is this guy might be a pretty good writer. But he’s impressed with AI on some other projects and thinks it’s a shortcut. After reading my notes, he was disappointed at the amount of work he still needs to do. I tried to explain that, yes, writing is rewriting, but I think he’s looking at AI to iterate its way through that as well. We’ll see how that goes.