Out of curiosity, I made an account with a text generating AI program, and I’ve been wrestling with it to see if it’s useful or fun…
So far, it’s at least as hard as normal writing, possibly harder.
I wanted to start off with a project I’m invested in enough to bother with… but not so much that I’ll mind outside interference.
Then I remembered I had a first sentence stored away for a furry re-imaging of The Matrix and figured writing about AI with an AI could be fun…
Yeah… no. Not so much. My vision for that story (while hazy) is clearly way, way, way too complex for the AI to handle. It was giving me nonsense.
So, I tried to scale down to something simpler, less philosophical. Just a simple cat story, maybe. Should be doable, right?
Hah.
I tried to run with the ideas the AI gave me…
I gave it a cat in the sunshine; it said the cat had lived in an attic for 36 years. Okay…
I did some editing to make the attic thing work, losing the 36 years.
Then the AI was all about cows…
So, alright, the cat is lying in a pool of sunshine, thinking about cows in the field across the way. Sure, why not.
But basically, everything the AI added required so much editing that I might as well have been writing it myself in the first place…
But if I’m going to write something by myself in the first place, I won’t just run with the first random word that comes to mind, like “attic” and “cows.”
I’ll make purposeful aesthetic choices, knowing that they’re leading somewhere.
I dunno. Maybe other text AIs are better…
Okay, so, I opened up a different AI text generator… gave it the same intro prompt about a cat…
And its response feels a lot like if I let my 9-year-old type a random sentence at the end of my work-in-progress without reading more than a sentence or two of what came before.
I wouldn’t want my kid adding a totally random sentence to the ragged edge of a story I’m working on… so, I’m not sure what the appeal of having an AI do that is…
Again, I dunno… maybe if I give it more to work with…
The programs I tried were http://Goose.AI and then http://NovelAI.net…
The second was definitely better but was still giving me sentences that… well, let’s put it this way, if I’d encountered that kind of writing in a slush pile, I would have stopped reading.
I’m toying with the idea of actually making an account with NovelAI and training it on some of my own fiction to see if I can get better (or at least more entertaining for me) results, but that’s not a project for tonight.
We’ll see.