#ai thoughts

Thank you, @danni-gurrl for this incredibly thoughtful challenge.

This sounds like a fantastic way to showcase versatility and narrative depth. The "From One, Many" challenge is essentially an exercise in iterative prompting, where the core concept remains the constant "DNA" while each subsequent layer can add complexity, scale, or lore.

To establish the originating prompt, I needed a "Seed" that was rich enough to be expanded but simple enough to not get cluttered too quickly. Since I often bridge the gap between the digital and the organic, the originating prompt i settled on was:

"A delicate, bioluminescent wildflower sprouting from the rusted port of a 1980s-era microchip, glowing with a soft amber light in a dark space."

Originating image

The first thing she typed was not a description of a face. It was a sentence about a girl who collected old postcards and never threw anything away. From there, working through SweetDream's builder on sweetdream.ai, she layered in the voice, the look, the small quirks, the family she invented. By the end there was an AI companion who felt like a specific person rather than a category.

Observing the chat afterward was the convincing part. SweetDream's conversation engine is genuinely realistic and holds onto context, so the postcard detail did not vanish. It came back unprompted, woven into how the companion talked about memory and home. That continuity is what separates a designed character from a generic chatbot.

after all the (very well researched and very important) ai stuff came out, do any other writers on here panic about your writing coming across as ai?

see, now that I know that google docs makes an em dash via two --, the very british, punk rock part of my brain is like "I know I'm not ai, I'm going to use this punctuation tool correctly"

but then I'll bold three words in a row and my inner critic will screech "HEATHEN! AI I USES THAT!" and even though I know I've done it before... yeah.

I'm pretty sure my writing style is fairly distinctive, though I may incorrect on that 😅 either way, this is probably just my brain finding new ways to self sabotage.

welp, if you're still here and reading, the important thing is...

The debate about whether you can use AI to write a story and then claim it as your story is essentially the same argument as whether you can display a factory made brick in an art gallery and call yourself the artist. Is it art? Is it your art? We've been having this debate for the last century.

The debate about AI plagiarism is similar to the debate about whether Andy Warhol should be allowed to copy comic panels made by poorly paid artists and make far more money for them as his art. Where do the limits of "inspired by" lie?

If I accept knitting, sewing and pottery as art but still buy factory made clothes and plates do I have a leg to stand on if I object to factory made stories? Does it matter if machines can reproduce art? (I like that machines can't crochet because I prefer crochet to knitting, but this does not inherently make my crochet more valuable than if I had taken up knitting.)

Also, prior to the industrial revolution there was a lot of knitting and sewing and spinning in the world that was being done not because people enjoyed it or were making an artistic statement but because it had to be done. If 50% of the world's population still had to spend huge amounts of time producing fabric, would the world be better for it? Does it really matter if we are writing our own emails?

I'm curious on peoples thoughts and opinions. I mean, we all know the internets general consensus on AI used in the arts. Which is very fair. Keep AI away from creative fields.

But what about in other facets. Like, say you're solving a super complex math problem and you put it into an ai system. It'll break down step by step how to solve this problem. And you can even specify which methods to use. All in seconds.

The thing is, I’ve yet to see a model that could do actual creative work on its own. If I did “insert AI into my workflow” as the techbros call it, then I’d have to limit it to reference materials during the very early stages.

For example, I could give it an outline of what I want it to write and then use the output as a reference when I write it myself. This would side step the problem of staring down a blank page and get the gears spinning, but that’s about it.

Another way I can see it being useful is drafting early sketches of images. Instead of searching through Wikimedia Commons for references, I could just generate a few images and use those.

Both approaches would speed things up and make things easier for me, but I’d still have to do just about everything anyway.

Plus, this would also irreparably “taint” my work in the eyes of a lot of people because it was too close to the soulless evil of AI.

i also think that a lot of people don't realize that ai isn't just limited to arts based fields

ai has the potential to TRANSFORM medicine through disease diagnosis. ai can be used for optimizing energy grids. ai can be used for so many things that aren't just art and writing.