I Sacrificed My Writing To A.I So You Don't Have To
I was thinking about how people often say "Oh, Chat GPT can't write stories, but it can help you edit things!" I am staunchly anti-A.I, and I've never agreed with this position. But I wouldn't have much integrity to stand on if I didn't see for myself how this "editing" worked. So, I sacrificed part of a monologue from one of my fanfictions to Chat GPT to see what it had to say.
Here is the initial query I made:
Chat GPT then gave me a list of revisions to make, most of which would be solved if it was a human and had read the preceding 150k words of story. I won't bore you with the list it made. I don't have to, as it incorporated those revisions into the monologue and gave me an edited sample back. Here is what it said I should turn the monologue into:
The revision erases speech patterns. Ben/the General speaks in stilted, short sentences in the original monologue because he is distinctly uncomfortable—only moving into longer, more complex structures when he is either caught up in an idea or struggling to elaborate on an idea. The Chat GPT version wants me to write dialogue like regular narrative prose, something that you'd use to describe a room. It also nullified the concept of theme. "A purity that implied personhood" simply says the quiet(ish) part out loud, literally in dialogue. It erases subtlety and erases how people actually talk in favor of more obvious prose.
Then I got a terrible idea. What if I kept running the monologue through the algorithm? Feeding it its own revised versions over and over, like a demented Google Translate until it just became gibberish?
So that's what I did. Surprisingly enough, from original writing sample to the end, it only took six turnarounds until it pretty much stopped altering the monologue. This was the final result:
This piece of writing is florid, overly descriptive, unnatural, and unsubtle. It makes the speaking character literally give voice to the themes through his dialogue, erasing all chances at subtext and subtlety. It uses unnecessary descriptors ("Once innocuous," "gleaming," "receded like a fading echo," "someone worth acknowledging,") and can't comprehend implication—because it is an algorithm, not a human that processes thoughts. The resulting writing is bland, stupid, lacks depth, and seemingly uses large words for large word's sake, not because it actually triggers an emotion in the reader or furthers the reader's understanding of the protagonist's mindset.
There you have it. Chat GPT, on top of being an algorithm run by callous, cruel people that steals artist's work and trains on it without compensation or permission, is also a terrible editor. Don't use it to edit, because it will quite literally make your writing worse. It erases authorial intention and replaces it with machine-generated generic slop. It is ridiculous that given the writer's strike right now, studios truly believe they can use A.I to produce a story of marginal quality that someone may pay to see. The belief that A.I can generate art is an insult to the writing profession and artists as a whole—I speak as a visual artist as well. I wouldn't trust Chat GPT to critique a cover letter, much less a novel or poem.
