Using A.I. in Writing
Ah, artificial intelligence: depending on who you ask, A.I. will give us three-day work weeks and make our daily lives easier…or take all of our jobs and destroy humanity. Although you’ll likely get a perspective somewhere in the middle of that very wide range. Given the risks and opportunities, the subject of A.I. is controversial, especially since we’re already seeing positive and negative applications and results. But what about using A.I. in writing, or other creative pursuits?
Well, the simplest answer to that question is a solid no.
To say that the use of A.I. in creative pursuits is unwelcome would be an understatement. But there’s clearly more nuance than that, which is why there’s a whole bunch of text below this. So, let’s start out with expanding upon the “no” before looking at possibilities for “yes,” and why those might be okay.
The State of A.I. in Creative Works
Right now, the attitude towards the use of A.I. in creative works is intensely negative, and that’s understandable. Instead of relying on human artistry and creative talents to form a novel work of literature, entertainment, or art, a person or company can prompt an A.I. platform to quickly synthesize works based on rearranging and recombining parts of existing works. Such outputs can easily come across as lifeless. And worse, just a small number of people or organizations could use this technique to flood the market, with each person generating more content than tens or hundreds of human artists or writers. And while most A.I.-generated works are trash, there are two issues here:
The sheer volume of artificially-generated content can drown out original works.
A.I. could start producing content that competes effectively against human-made works by ruthlessly optimizing towards the most marketable content, shoving human artists and writers out of the market by effectively harvesting their works (along with the works of the generations of artists and writers before them).
This is why many creative professions are hurrying to shore up protections for their fields. If A.I. becomes dominant in any creative field, it would not only dry up talent pools and rob us of creative individuals (not to mention those individuals’ livelihoods), it would also subject us to lower-quality, derivative works as a standard.
At the same time, the reactions to A.I. use have been intense. And in some cases, they’ve been zero-tolerance. For instance, the critically-acclaimed video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (full transparency: I have not played that game) had two awards withdrawn because the studio used A.I.-generated placeholder textures early in development. And as I’ve started to look into literary agents and publishers, many include questions about A.I. use, including ones that ask you to verify that you haven’t used it. I’ve been able to truthfully say that I haven’t used A.I. in my novel writing, but I imagine that many people might turn to A.I. for some background research or development. At this point, even using search engines often engages an A.I. agent. Does that kind of A.I. use count? I’ll get into that gray area, but for now, you should assume it does count.
If you want to be fully on the safe side, simply do not use A.I. for anything related to your writing.
For background research, use books, films, articles, and other non-A.I. content. Developing characters? Don’t turn to A.I. for help: you can use some of the tips from my blog posts for that, along with many, many other sources. And for writing itself? It might be tempting to pop your text into ChatGPT or Claude or something to have it review it for you and give you suggestions, but avoid that: use some editing tips and/or find a friend or beta reader to review it.
If you use A.I. for any part of your process, you may need to disclose it, and it could severely limit which literary agents and/or publishers will be willing to take you on. Use it too much, and you might end up having to compete with swarms of A.I.-generated rubbish.
But is the situation really that black-and-white? And what if things change to be more flexible? Well, before we get to that, let’s cover some general topics about A.I.:
The Promises and the Downsides of A.I.
When we think about A.I., we often jump to the big promises and the big risks. But those headline-grabbing topics probably don’t feel so big when you’re asking ChatGPT for a book recommendation or Claude for the history of soup (or something). So, let’s bring the A.I. topics down to the human scale: what are the pros and cons when you open up your favorite A.I. tool?
On the positive side, we get efficiency and detail:
In many cases, A.I. is acting as a smart search tool, able to find information faster and more thoroughly than ever before.
A.I. can provide you with sources (and you should ask for those), letting you explore deeper.
Conversing with A.I. allows you to build upon information you’ve already gained, and to dig into areas of interest.
You can reduce or eliminate costs and time associated with retrieving information or generating content.
You can train an A.I. to remember your interests, preferred sources, topics related to what you’re working on, and even your voice and style.
An A.I. can potentially be a partner in the development of your works: we’ll go into that soon, but you’ll need to weigh it against the downsides.
On the negative side, we get into some of the known issues with A.I., and the ethical questions that arise:
A.I. can hallucinate: it can and will tell you things that are completely untrue, which is why it’s important to ask it for sources on how it came to its conclusions.
Some A.I. can also be rather sycophantic, going along with whatever you’re saying without providing meaningful feedback or criticism. This can also translate to bias, where A.I. can fail to challenge you on assumptions or beliefs, tweaking information to better meet your expectations.
For some A.I. uses, you could be directly or indirectly taking labor (and therefore resources) away from humans. For instance, if you need to generate some artwork for your story, turning to A.I. can be cheap and fast, but you’ve denied a real artist the opportunity to create something new (and as an aside, people will be able to tell that you used A.I.; I’ve recently seen a few advertisements that clearly used A.I. art, and it made me more than a little disgusted that large companies would choose to cheap out that way).
A.I. processing requires enormous amounts of power and water, and every interaction with A.I. adds to those resources used. Data center impacts are already causing electricity rates to rise for residential users (and often for other businesses, as well), and some areas are calling upon residents to conserve water and power, essentially giving priority to data centers. You could argue that spending hours searching for information on the internet or driving back and forth to libraries and such might use more energy than tasking A.I. to retrieve the information, but that’s hard to tell.
There’s an economic justice argument hiding in here as well:
So, are there ways to use A.I. ethically for creative works? Are there ways for you to improve your efficiency without causing harm? Or at least without causing notably more harm than we all do with our use of resources? I think so, and we’ll go into that below…but I’ll continue to emphasize the disclaimer that any A.I. use in creative works is viewed dimly, so proceed with utmost caution.
Note: if you feel that the energy usage and/or economic arguments are sufficient reason to avoid A.I. entirely, I think that’s an entirely legitimate stance to take. This post won’t attempt to argue that A.I. should or shouldn’t be used in general.
Ethically Using A.I. in Creative Works
Can A.I. be used ethically in creative works? For the moment, let’s assume yes, and dive into what that might look like. I’m going to start off with a trio of “rules” to serve as a baseline, and I’ll expand upon the ideas below.
No A.I.-generated content shall end up in the final product (e.g. cover art, written content, etc.)
Any A.I.-generated information used to inform content should be verified by a human-produced source
Any content generation that could be reasonably expected to be performed by a human should be performed by a human
In essence, A.I. can potentially be a partner in your creative efforts (if you’re comfortable with it), but should not be performing creative acts or generating content that would reasonably be performed by you or by another human. What does “reasonably” mean there? Let’s look at two examples:
An art-challenged lead at a corporation needs to get some concept art to help designers with something like an advertisement campaign or models/artwork for a final product. The concept art won’t end up in a final product and merely represents the lead’s vision for what the team will create.
An art-challenged single content creator (let’s say this person is a writer) is struggling to visualize something about their world and/or characters. They want to generate some concept art to make things clearer.
Ideally, in both of the above cases, the people would hire an artist to generate their concept content (or would attempt to generate their own, even though they lack confidence or skills). But I think you can probably spot the difference: in the former case, a company is involved, and we can reasonably expect that they can use internal resources or pay a fee to get that art generated. Even if timelines are tight, it would be reasonable to expect the company to have resources to pay an artist. But for a single content creator, the resources might not be available. A wealthy content creator could perhaps be reasonably expected to hire out some tasks, but someone doing creative works in their free time has what I’d call reasonable cause to use A.I.
Now let’s add in some more detail.
I’m going to break this down by types of writing/creative labor, rather than the writing process or the PETS system in my introductory post. This will include research, character-building, art, the actual act of writing, editing, and getting your work out into the wild. For each of these categories, we’ll look at what they encompass, how you could potentially maximize A.I. usage, how A.I. can give you grief, and what an ethical A.I. usage might look like.
Research
Background research is an essential part of writing. Sometimes, that research can be academic in nature as you dig to learn about life in completely different times and places…but it can also be as simple as revisiting your own memories. And because research isn’t writing, it can be very tempting to get it over with as quickly as possible. And that sure sounds like a use case for A.I.
Maximum A.I.: with sufficient prompts, context, and resources (since utilizing A.I. will cost money at any kind of scale), you can potentially have A.I. generate entire reports on the subjects you're researching without having to dig into a single book. You could even train the A.I. to provide you with quick references, bulleted lists, and other reference content that relates directly to your work. This would effectively turn your A.I. agent into a researcher for you. It can gather, summarize, and present relevant information at a blistering speed. But, as we’ll see below, reliability can be a real issue, something that requires spending the time to tune your A.I. agent to use verifiable sources and to support all of its outputs.
A.I. Downsides: when relying on A.I. to retrieve and contextualize information, there are two big traps to watch for: hallucination and sources. A.I. platforms can and will just make stuff up. This is the infamous hallucination problem, where an A.I. will tell you what you want to hear (without any evidence) or just confidently spill oodles of bullshit. And that brings us to the second point: sources. It’s always best to prompt A.I. to provide sources, allowing you to examine those sources yourself. This is where skills with A.I. start to come into play, and if you’re going to use A.I. for research, you’ll want to practice: prompt the A.I. into explaining where it’s sourcing its information and how it’s synthesizing it.
Ethical A.I.: at the simplest level, A.I. can be a research search engine, collecting and summarizing information that you ask it about. A.I. can essentially sift through information for you, finding the pieces most pertinent to the subject you’re examining. And from there, you can converse with the A.I. agent, having it refine and/or expand its findings to better match exactly what you’re looking for. In this usage, A.I. is effectively a highly efficient search engine.
Ethics: the nice thing about research is that it’s something that you’d otherwise be doing exclusively by yourself (or nearly so). And because you’re synthesizing content out of previous works and available facts, you wouldn’t be transferring A.I.-generated content to your audience (unless you use A.I. poorly, without checking its information). Now, if you were going to be making use of libraries, interviews, or other sources that would involve consulting with real people, this starts to get into a fuzzy ethical space, since A.I. usage could be taking resources and expertise away from real people. But if you’re working closer to the surface on your research topics, this should be far less of an issue.
Is it ethical? In my opinion, A.I. use for research is ethical as long as you’re using it responsibly and ultimately relying on real sources (books, articles, videos, etc. that the A.I. finds), and checking any summaries that the A.I. provides.
Character-Building
In my other posts, I talk a lot about character-building: I find it to be perhaps the most important part of crafting a story (although this may be because character-building was my weak spot early on, and learning how to do it up-leveled my work substantially). And since a great deal of character background work doesn’t directly reach your audience, it can be tempting to turn to A.I. to do the legwork for you. So let’s see what that might look like:
Basic A.I.: if you’re adopting some of the tips and tricks I’ve posted to generate characters, A.I. can be used again as something of a search engine, helping you find sources for personality types, real or fictional characters to use as inspiration, and helping to summarize and expand upon that information. This can essentially make it faster to build your own character development tools.
A.I. Downsides: as with many A.I.-related issues, you’ll need to watch for hallucinations and lack of sourcing. By having A.I. assemble character-related information or tools, it may provide you with made-up content that could lead you astray (although your own sense of your characters should detect blatant issues as you go). And if you go so far as to try to use A.I. to build your characters for you? Well, the biggest downside there is that you’ve now used A.I. for a critical part of the creative process, which can jeopardize your publishing goals. And let’s face it: it will be difficult for A.I. to generate a unique character; it’s more likely that you’ll get a copy of another character (potentially leaving you vulnerable to legal disputes) or a cobbled-together Frankenstein of a character.
Maximum A.I.: at a simple level, you could potentially use an A.I. agent as a character-building partner. After using it to gather information you need, you can build up your character’s traits and share them with your agent to check the character’s consistency against the tools you’ve decided to use. It would essentially be a reviewer for you. If you go further, you could potentially tweak an A.I. agent into a character engine. Rather than build your character and use A.I. as a validation tool, you could train an agent to output a full character profile based on simple prompts. If you go that far, though, the characters are no longer really yours, and you’ll need to take into account more of the practical and ethical consequences.
Ethics: I think the biggest ethical issue here (aside from any of the basic A.I.-related ones that are important to you) is that character development via A.I. can result in porting A.I. content to your audience. Now, I do think there’s a big gray area here, where A.I. can help you find and understand different character-building tools and ideas. But if you’re having A.I. synthesize those tools into characters, you’re playing with the kind of hefty A.I. usage disclosures that could make it harder to get published or make your audiences hesitate to consume your works.
Is it ethical? In my opinion, the ethics of using A.I. for character building is fuzzy. I think it’s ethical to use A.I. as a partner in finding resources and tools, but that it’s ultimately best for you to generate the character. If A.I. is building your characters, that’s replacing your own creativity with an A.I. tool, and I don’t think that’s ethical for a work of art.
Art
Aha, one of the big ones. We’ve all seen A.I. art, sometimes used carelessly in embarrassingly visible ways. But if visual art is part of your creative process (and/or part of the final product), where do you draw the line? Using A.I. in art, even when not in the final product, has harmed some creative works, so do you even take the risk of using it? Let’s dig into it:
Basic A.I.: this might be controversial, but if you’re the only person working on a project and you’re not artistically talented, it might make sense to turn to A.I. if you want or need some visual assets for development. Perhaps you want to see your main character? Perhaps there’s a landscape or building or planet you want to see, or maybe some kind of vehicle or creature. Sketching is great, but if you want more detail or can’t quite get the look you want, A.I. can be a powerful tool to provide concept art.
A.I. Downsides: many A.I. tools are quite limited when it comes to generating images. You’ve probably noticed that A.I.-generated people often look quite similar to one another (there are a few in particular that seem to show up constantly, with little variation). And most A.I. images have that somewhat plastic look, or that odd lighting reminiscent of amateur photos from the 80s to the early 2000s (but with a sharpness that those photos often lacked), or the weird patterns and shapes that start to look Lovecraftian if you look too long. So just know that your concept images will likely have those artifacts. And, of course, a big downside is that there are people who do art for a living: it would be ideal to hire an actual artist to generate visual assets. That being said, that could quickly get very expensive. On the other side of that coin, you could be missing an opportunity to develop your own artistic skills; don’t underestimate that.
Maximum A.I.: at the highest levels, we’re talking about working with an art-focused A.I. platform to generate a slate of concept images, going back and forth with the agent to refine your images to exactly what you want (to whatever extent is possible). You could even have A.I. generate images, maps, and cover art for your final product. And that gets us to the ethics side of things:
Ethics: what it comes down to, I think, is whether the art is going into the final product. If so, I’d say quite strongly that the usage isn’t ethical, since that content should come from you or from an actual artist. This would include cover art, any maps or artwork in the book, and any promotional or public material. So, what about concept work? That’s a bit fuzzy: it’s understandable that a company could be expected to hire artists to generate concept art (although I think there’s room for argument there). But you, working by yourself on a writing project? I think it’s okay to use A.I. to generate art for your own use. You could argue that A.I. would be influencing your creative process, but I think that’s up to you to decide. One thing you could potentially do is use A.I. to generate a rough draft to hand off to an artist. In the end, that could allow an artist to work faster and deliver a product without as much back-and-forth. But since I’m not a professional artist, I’m not going to claim any concrete ethics with that.
Is it ethical? Overall, I’d say that it probably isn’t ethical to use A.I. to generate art for your creative work. I think it can be ethical to generate a handful of concept images that are outside of your own ability to sketch, but given attitudes towards A.I. in relation to artwork, it’s best to minimize or avoid it.
The Act of Writing
So now we’re at the heart of the craft: writing the story. This is where everything comes together and where you deploy your own voice to weave a tale. Does it make sense to make A.I. a part of this? Is there any way for that to be ethical?
Basic A.I.: at the lowest levels of A.I. usage,