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I’ve been playing with ChatGPT as we leave 2023 in the rear-view window and embark on the shiny new highway of 2024.

I like new technology, generally speaking. (Frankly, I wouldn’t say no to a robot assistant who’d decide what we’re having for dinner, remind me of appointments, proofread, and walk the dog on rainy days.) And let’s face it, like everything from the wheel to mobile phones, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay.

So, What Is ChatGPT?

Despite the name AI, models like ChatGPT do not really think for themselves. ChatGPT is a deep learner. It was trained not by being told the rules of the English language — it being impossible to come up with such rules, as a language is a complicated thing — but by being fed pages and pages of example text. That’s what the P in the name stands for, pre-trained. (Its full name is Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer; you’ll also come across the term Large Language Model, LLM for short.) The model digested it all, looked for patterns, incorporated user feedback, and acquired the ability to predict the next string of words in most contexts. ChatGPT can carry on a dialogue and generate text on various topics. It’s a fancier version of those annoying chatbots that pop up on retail sites.

There are concerns. One is whether the training phase of ChatGPT violated copyright, overstepping the bounds of fair use as the model absorbed Internet articles and books available online. There are lawsuits. Another concern is that since the way it works is a bit of a black box, there’s a risk of accidental plagiarism. The model doesn’t cite sources.

AI as a Ghostwriter

You’ve probably already read news articles written by AI without realizing it. Some fiction writers have jumped on the bandwagon, using ChatGPT or other LLMs to generate a “zero draft”, which they then edit into something usable.

So if a novel is your end goal, how does it work?

My experiment began with me signing up on the OpenAI website. I stuck to the free version, ChatGPT. (There’s also a more sophisticated version, ChatGPT Plus, also known as GPT-4. It’s $20 per month.)

The interface is pretty straightforward. It’s very good at some things, I discovered at once. You can use ChatGPT as an online thesaurus, without the annoying ads. It excels at translating, at least with the two languages I know, English and Serbian. You can ask it for a list of words connected to a setting, a color family, or whatever random thing you need. For example, for the series I’ve been working on, I was looking for an out-of-the ordinary style of fence. Not wood. Not aluminum. ChatGPT gave me a list of ten options, and one of them was a chalkboard fence, which I didn’t even realize was a thing. Perfect. Could I have dug around for unusual fences with a Google search? Sure. But it was nice to have a quick response without having to click through pages of Google results and ads.

But how about that novel writing?

Well, you can enter a prompt. For instance, I went with this one: “Chat, write the opening paragraph of a mystery. A woman breaks into a library after hours and encounters another intruder.”

This was the result:

Emma’s heart raced as she picked the lock on the library’s side entrance. The moon cast a silvery glow over the deserted town, and a slight chill hung in the air. The rusty door creaked open, revealing the dimly lit interior of the library, its shelves holding the secrets of countless stories. Emma had a mission—a clandestine rendezvous with a hidden manuscript that whispered of answers to the questions plaguing her restless mind.

Silent as a shadow, she moved through the labyrinth of bookshelves. The carpet muffled her steps, and the only sound was the soft shuffle of pages in the breeze she created. She reached the secluded corner where the coveted manuscript was rumored to reside, anticipation pulsating through her veins.

As Emma’s fingers brushed the edge of an old, leather-bound book, a noise disrupted the tranquil atmosphere. Startled, she turned to face an unexpected intruder stepping out from the darkness. A man, his eyes reflecting the same surprise that mirrored in her own. In that tense moment, the library’s hallowed silence shattered, replaced by the palpable uncertainty of two strangers caught in the act.

“Who are you?” Emma’s whisper cut through the stillness, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. The man hesitated, his gaze shifting between her and the manuscript in her hand. The library, once a sanctuary of solitude, had transformed into the stage for an enigmatic encounter. The answers Emma sought were within reach, but the mystery had just taken an unforeseen turn.

ChatGPT came up with that in about ten seconds. It’s…not great? Overwritten, flowery, lacking in specifics and grounding details.

I did a few back and forths, requesting that ChatGPT alternate between short and long sentences, add sensory details, and have the intruder be someone from Emma’s past. Here is what it came back with:

Emma deftly worked the lock, slipping into the moonlit library. The scent of aged paper and wood polish filled the air as she stepped into the quiet expanse. The shelves loomed like silent sentinels, their secrets veiled in shadows. Her focus was laser-sharp on a hidden manuscript, its pages rumored to hold the answers to the questions that tugged at her consciousness.

Silent as a whisper, Emma navigated the shelves, the rough texture of the carpet beneath her feet absorbing the sound of her movements. Her fingers trailed over aged spines, feeling the cool embrace of leather and the slight roughness of worn fabric.

A noise shattered the library’s hush, a figure emerging from the darkness. Their eyes met, mutual surprise etched on their faces. The library’s tranquility morphed into a stage for a clandestine encounter.

“Who are you?” Emma’s demand sliced through the silence. The man hesitated, eyes darting between her and the manuscript. The air crackled with uncertainty, the unfolding mystery taking an unexpected turn.

As recognition flashed across Emma’s face, it wasn’t just any intruder—it was someone from her past. The past she thought she’d buried, a door creaking open to memories she had long tried to forget.

The library held not only the promise of answers but also the specters of her own history.

I still want to take a red pen to this, but at least now we’re getting some tension.

I stopped there. But could the generated page have been reworked into a decent story opening? Sure. With time, ChatGPT would train me in the kind of instructions it needs and it would spit out text closer to my own style of writing. And presumably the paid version of ChatGPT yields better, even faster results.

Thing is, it seems to me that I’d be trading away the fun part of writing, for speed. Exchanging the playground of creativity for prompt mastery. Foregoing the hard work that makes the work my own creation and not a machine’s. The earning — the journey — is not only part of the process. It’s the whole game.

And there’s something else.

Rereading what ChatGPT wrote above, it strikes me that what’s missing most of all in its output is seasoning. The text it provided is bland. A lukewarm airplane meal. Wonder Bread, still in the package.

Let’s Talk Bread for a Minute

These days, since my husband is gluten free, we follow a recipe from this cookbook, Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The title is misleading. Five minutes is how long it takes to transfer the dough you’ve already prepared and stored in the fridge into a baking pan and shape it into a loaf. Making the dough, well, that involves yeast, 3-4 kinds of flour, and about three hours. The baking adds another 45 minutes. But you know what? The end result tastes way better than store bought gluten free bread.

Another bread I know how to make is traditional Serbian pogacha. That one takes about three hours, too. Yeast, kneading, an egg wash at the end. My mother’s recipe. Baked in a round pan, it’s particularly good when paired with prosciutto and a bit of feta cheese.

Woven into home-made bread are time and effort, the quirks of the chef and her kitchen, a bit of history and artistry even.

And so it is with books. In my time travel series, Minnesota plays a role because that’s where I live; Pompeii, because I’d always wanted to see it. A novel of mine might lean more towards mystery or closer to sci-fi/speculative…or it might hover right there, on the sharp divide. We make what we make.

Nothing wrong with Wonder Bread. It’s been around since 1921, it’s soft, conveniently pre-sliced, always the same, and comes in a familiar red-blue-yellow package.

What would be wrong is if I tossed it into my grocery cart, drove it home, took it out of its wrapping, and pretended it just came out of the oven.

The Bottom Line

Look, I’m not gonna sit in front of my MacBook Air, with its spell-checker, thesaurus, and Wikipedia at my fingertips, and argue that the One True Method of Novel Writing is chiseling into stone letter by letter. Will there be a time down the road when the models improve, are trained ethically, are as common as word processors and prompt mastery an art of its own, the pointing of a camera into a landscape of words, and only dinosaurs refuse to use the technology? Possibly. I can see the appeal of a chapter draft served up in a blink of the eye.

But for now? For now, I’ll stick to the old way.

My books will be of the artisan kind. I’m not a very fast writer, so the production time will be long. There shall be typos. Odd bits of humor. Peculiarities due to English being my second language. Random facts I happened to be in possession of will make their way into the story, as will my inner-world concerns, dreams, opinions. A novel is an opinion piece. Art. A playground. That’s the fun part, after all.

By the way, I asked ChatGPT to come up with a title for this post and it suggested Navigating the Write Path: A Fiction Writer’s Skepticism on AI and Novel Craftsmanship.

It was one of ten options it provided for the title. They were all long and they all had colons. ChatGPT likes colons. It’s not an intelligence, it’s not doing it on purpose — but what it is doing is offering up its own quirks in the place of mine.

Thanks for reading.