I think you're misconstruing the real point of writing. This is why AI does ruin the art. By asking "does the process even matter?" Indicates that your focus is leaning towards the "results" of writing.
By using AI in the writing process itself, you're commodifying writing as manufactured product rather than a form of art itself which values the "process" of getting it done...
Just like what Brandon Sanderson said:
"The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don’t care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation."
If you treat Writing as an "outcome" it loses its credibility of becoming an art.
This is the same reason why Blatant Copying (Plagiarism) is criminalized but Genuine Inspiration is not.
AI is trained from copyrighted content, and it spits out those content directly from its dataset.
What's the difference of that from a Human writer who was just inspired? A human writer who's genuinely creating something transforms that inspiration from one thing to another.
AI doesn't do that. It mumbles words from direct sources, calculate which word is the most likely to be put next to another word, rather than thinking about meaningful context. There is no mind behind the machine, only numeric parameters.
You can argue that it is always similar to how a Human thought is formed, but humans doesn't need prompts to be directly fed to us by someone for us to think. We can choose to think without any prompts, and we can choose what things to think about.
AI on the other hand is like a conveyor belt of words and content from original sources, mashing them together to create a Frankenstein of a "book".
I think, using AI for assisted research is good, using AI for initial critique for grammar technically could be helpful, but to help you write the prose? Help you rephrase and regenerate something you already made? The art stops becoming yours, the art stops becoming an art.
I hear what you’re saying. It must also be true that the crafting of sentences and paragraphs is not the only part of writing that is transformative to the human engaging in the work. The experience of creating that novel was one of the strangest and most magical in my life—despite using AI for a part of the creation https://www.explorations.ph/p/i-figured-out-what-made-my-experience
These are fascinating questions—this is one reason why I wanted to discuss this in the open. The art world has been asking this with the creations of the likes of Damien Hirst, who is infamous for having personnel to manufacture his art/"art". Is the art/"art" even his? In the case of the novel, there is no doubt that the story is mine (or at least I was the channel chosen by its muses https://www.explorations.ph/p/how-the-diwata-got-me-to-write-a ). The words that express that story however is a mix. I did the mixing but the "ingredients" came from Claude and from me. I also did the finishing touches manually, but so did ChatGPT (as a developmental editor) and Claude, who also did edits based on my feedback, and the ones I approved from ChatGPT's developmental editing. I go into more detail here https://www.explorations.ph/p/im-writing-a-novel-300-faster-with
The result is probably better than what I would have produced with pure biological brain power. Does the process even matter? Interesting questions!
This article you wrote just further proves my point.
As you explicitly said: "I won’t do it for the experience but I would for the outcome."
While the process itself of making the art defines the Art.
The grueling process of creating a story, no matter how "ugly" it might turn out despite of the efforts is what makes Literary work an art form.
It is liberating for you because you strip away the "struggle" of constructing a Chapter that takes you a month? It doesn't sound like a problem, that struggle is the transformative process of getting good, just like how lifting weights is a pain when you're trying to build a muscle...
Removing the HARDEST part of writing doesn't make you an author, because that "struggle" is the point of making a story.
You could've been liberated by the stress of writing a novel, but then again, It is the AI who created and constructed the Novel, not you. It stops becoming you.
You commissioned the AI to finish and organize the story, you instructed it to make the story for you, instead of you making the story.
If you made the AI tell your own story, then the story wasn't yours anymore.
I'm not a native english speaker, and a lot of the struggle was "translating" the story in my head into english, and into the voice I wanted to for the novel. I don't think AI could have made the story. It is way beyond its training data. However, language is essentially convention—otherwise we won't understand each other—and AI is essentially a convention machine. To poets and many literary fictionists, English itself is the artform. To me, it is just a channel for the story.
Writing can't possibly one single experience for everyone. It would have been a different experience of course if I made each paragraph by hand, but even if I had a machine to produce the bricks, the design and the laying of the bricks was still a transformative experience. Perhaps that means "writer" is a label that does not describe me in the way I created the novel, but in this post I was simply relaying my experience, and it was undoubtedly transformative.
I would not say I made AI tell the story. It's more accurate to say that I used AI to create variations of English expression of paragraphs I wanted, and used the ones that accurately expressed what I wanted to say as the bricks of the castle that is the novel.
I am not a native english speaker as well. And I get how hard it is to translate the story in your head before you can even write it in english, and that is much more reason for you to write the novel by yourself.
Writing the first draft straight out of your head is not the final form of a book. A poorly written book is not ugly, it just needs editing. And perhaps you shouldn't edit while you are still writing, that's probably the reason why you are taking a month to finish a chapter. Perfecting the chapter as you write it is self destructive. This is also why people get it wrong. Writing in its rawest form is not going to be publishable, writing is very much like sculpting, you must carve the details after you outlined a form of the wood, rather than doing the details before you even sculpted the form.
What you did is just doing a shortcut.
Yes you may have finished the book itself, but you missed all the other things you could've learned from yourself if you wrote it down with your hands on the keyboard.
You missed the opportunity to feel your own tone and voice to bleed on to your writing, because you let the AI to bruteforce the way and use the "variations of English expression of paragraphs you wanted" that the AI have created.
You missed the opportunity to learn your own tone, your own voice and your own agency to write the words yourself.
You may have the "deciding power" of what paragraphs to include in the book, but those paragraphs, no matter how grammatically correct or high falutin those paragraphs are, do not have your inherent soul.
The AI had the rough picture of your Idea, collected the right words from the noise of its dataset to form the closest thing that you wanted based on your inputs... But it's not YOU.
YOU, the artist, is the point of creating an art. You are crystalizing your own thoughts to a text that expresses pieces of yourself to the page.
You should've just written the Book in Tagalog or Cebuano if you're severely having a hard time writing the Paragraphs to English, and then fix the draft after.
The point of art is not about making it good the first time, the point of art is doing the process despite the fact that it's not practical, nor easy... Yet satisfying in the end, or as how Oscar Wilde put it:
“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
You took a shortcut, and learned nothing but how to prompt the AI correctly. You became a prompter that asked the AI to assemble the book for you.
"This suffering might explain why I have no desire to go through that experience again."
If you didn't like the process of writing the book by yourself, why create one? Why make something and call it yours if you're not the one that made it?
I always found it curious when people ask me who I am among the characters in the novel. I think your comment points to the spirit behind this question. It is true that writing a lot allows you to find your own voice. Since I've been blogging since the word blog was invented, I think I found my voice many years ago. It's the voice I use in this blog. If you read my posts in Medium from the 2010s, I'll think you'll notice a consistency. I'd describe it as janky, meandering, earnest, and a bit nerdy.
This voice—my default literary voice—however, was not what the novel wanted for itself. I knew what that voice it wanted was, and with effort could produce it. I have in front of me rn John Bengan's Armor and Miguel Syjuco's I Was the President's Mistress!! These are displays of literary virtuosity, particularly in the crafting of voice. These writers are like the Hidelyn Diazes or the Alex Ealas of Philippine literature. They are gifted and have honed those gifts consistently starting at a young age. It is a great pleasure to see their handiwork. They deserve their literary awards.
I think writing is like the Olympics. There are many different events, each with its own definition of excellence. I don't think I'm playing in the same sport as Bengan and Syjuco. In their world, the sounds of the sentences themselves is the work of art. There are other kinds of writing where these sentences are simply channels of the other kinds of excellence the writing is attempting to achieve. This is how I viewed Rajah Versus Conquistador. The sentences were intended to be conventionally good, but nothing that would impress readers or win literary awards.
However, it is still ambitious in other areas. If you compare other historical novels on 1521, I think my book has the chance of winning the gold medal in terms of research. The weaving of worldviews through the two perspectives and the characters that we hear through them is also something I'm quite proud of, though I sense that very few will notice it. Most writers in this space are trapped within the epistemologies of Nationalism and Christianity. You can't imagine the difficulty of the mental surgery needed to de-Christianize and de-nationalize ones mind.
You mentioned in a previous comment that you think it is okay to get some ideas from AI but not in the crafting of the sentences. What RVC required of me was the opposite. Any idea from AI was a threat to what the novel wanted to be: to be maniacally faithful to the historical and anthropological record, while being as wild as possible in the plot, and also still producing a suspenseful story; to have extremely varied psychologies and worldviews for the characters, consistent throughout the novel, but to also have a conversion arc for the main characters; to be free of the oh so common anachronism of using the past to promote "moral lessons" for the present, but to also use the present to make sense of and "translate" the past. This was the real game for me. It was like 4D chess. It entailed a lot of mental anguish but at the same time I feel this was the game I was born to play. This novel map gives you a sense of the game I had to play: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fz21LWhYn0p7fqqIWWqVoC8CGm7Urk3dnKazvABg_HM
I understand the ideals you hold for the act of writing: it is a path to discovering yourself and your literary voice; the complete artistry of expressing your soul through the choices you make at all levels—from each word, to the plot, to the stucture, to the voice; and each word, each choice, paid with suffering. Yet the experience of writing is I'm sure rich enough that could hold varied ideals and kinds of writers. The act of writing can also be an escape from the self; the artistry can be in the weaving of worldviews instead of words; and the outcome—the book itself—can be treated as more important than the experience, the writer's feelings about it, or his transformation through it.
Kidding aside, I am ashamed that AI writes better than me boohoo. But then as an ameliorative tool (that's not something to be ashamed of), AI can help us write better or maybe organize our thoughts better. I'm all for tech optimism.
Me too! lol Now I let them handle the mechanical parts (like correct grammar, spelling, and not sounding out of tune in English) so I can focus on the human parts: emotion, insight, memory, personal relevance, and strange requests from beyond this world.
The best thing I like about AI is that there are nuances of feelings that I cannot articulate into words but intuitively, AI knows how to construct those thoughts into a grammatically coherent sentence. I’m amazed actually.
what I do is I ask Claude to give me multiple variations, and I pick and combine the best ones. this used to be super exhausting when I used to do this manually
It’s too bad the recording of our lengthy discussion on the use of AI to write RVC got destroyed. But while like Mitya, I’d disagree with the practice, mainly because I myself have been writing for a living for a very long time, that changing how I’ve been doing things for 15+ years would be counterproductive, not to mention, I don’t believe that a “faster” way is necessarily the better way, plus all the ethics of it—I see where you’re coming from.
That said, we agreed during that discussion that the use of generative AI to help people write is so complicated and nuanced, that conversations about it should keep going, because this “early” version of this technology is going to be different in a matter of years, maybe months. What I’ve always respected about you is your openness to discuss, and I hope more people approach this in such manner.
Props for posting this. Great insights and reflections. It's clear we're figuring this new world out
Thanks, Jon. It’s fascinating. 10,000 year-old OS at the cusp of… I don’t know what.
I think you're misconstruing the real point of writing. This is why AI does ruin the art. By asking "does the process even matter?" Indicates that your focus is leaning towards the "results" of writing.
By using AI in the writing process itself, you're commodifying writing as manufactured product rather than a form of art itself which values the "process" of getting it done...
Just like what Brandon Sanderson said:
"The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don’t care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation."
If you treat Writing as an "outcome" it loses its credibility of becoming an art.
This is the same reason why Blatant Copying (Plagiarism) is criminalized but Genuine Inspiration is not.
AI is trained from copyrighted content, and it spits out those content directly from its dataset.
What's the difference of that from a Human writer who was just inspired? A human writer who's genuinely creating something transforms that inspiration from one thing to another.
AI doesn't do that. It mumbles words from direct sources, calculate which word is the most likely to be put next to another word, rather than thinking about meaningful context. There is no mind behind the machine, only numeric parameters.
You can argue that it is always similar to how a Human thought is formed, but humans doesn't need prompts to be directly fed to us by someone for us to think. We can choose to think without any prompts, and we can choose what things to think about.
AI on the other hand is like a conveyor belt of words and content from original sources, mashing them together to create a Frankenstein of a "book".
I think, using AI for assisted research is good, using AI for initial critique for grammar technically could be helpful, but to help you write the prose? Help you rephrase and regenerate something you already made? The art stops becoming yours, the art stops becoming an art.
I hear what you’re saying. It must also be true that the crafting of sentences and paragraphs is not the only part of writing that is transformative to the human engaging in the work. The experience of creating that novel was one of the strangest and most magical in my life—despite using AI for a part of the creation https://www.explorations.ph/p/i-figured-out-what-made-my-experience
If you used AI to write it, did you actually write it or you just gave an AI an Idea to write?
Who is the real writer? What even is art anymore?
These are fascinating questions—this is one reason why I wanted to discuss this in the open. The art world has been asking this with the creations of the likes of Damien Hirst, who is infamous for having personnel to manufacture his art/"art". Is the art/"art" even his? In the case of the novel, there is no doubt that the story is mine (or at least I was the channel chosen by its muses https://www.explorations.ph/p/how-the-diwata-got-me-to-write-a ). The words that express that story however is a mix. I did the mixing but the "ingredients" came from Claude and from me. I also did the finishing touches manually, but so did ChatGPT (as a developmental editor) and Claude, who also did edits based on my feedback, and the ones I approved from ChatGPT's developmental editing. I go into more detail here https://www.explorations.ph/p/im-writing-a-novel-300-faster-with
The result is probably better than what I would have produced with pure biological brain power. Does the process even matter? Interesting questions!
This article you wrote just further proves my point.
As you explicitly said: "I won’t do it for the experience but I would for the outcome."
While the process itself of making the art defines the Art.
The grueling process of creating a story, no matter how "ugly" it might turn out despite of the efforts is what makes Literary work an art form.
It is liberating for you because you strip away the "struggle" of constructing a Chapter that takes you a month? It doesn't sound like a problem, that struggle is the transformative process of getting good, just like how lifting weights is a pain when you're trying to build a muscle...
Removing the HARDEST part of writing doesn't make you an author, because that "struggle" is the point of making a story.
You could've been liberated by the stress of writing a novel, but then again, It is the AI who created and constructed the Novel, not you. It stops becoming you.
You commissioned the AI to finish and organize the story, you instructed it to make the story for you, instead of you making the story.
If you made the AI tell your own story, then the story wasn't yours anymore.
I'm not a native english speaker, and a lot of the struggle was "translating" the story in my head into english, and into the voice I wanted to for the novel. I don't think AI could have made the story. It is way beyond its training data. However, language is essentially convention—otherwise we won't understand each other—and AI is essentially a convention machine. To poets and many literary fictionists, English itself is the artform. To me, it is just a channel for the story.
Writing can't possibly one single experience for everyone. It would have been a different experience of course if I made each paragraph by hand, but even if I had a machine to produce the bricks, the design and the laying of the bricks was still a transformative experience. Perhaps that means "writer" is a label that does not describe me in the way I created the novel, but in this post I was simply relaying my experience, and it was undoubtedly transformative.
I would not say I made AI tell the story. It's more accurate to say that I used AI to create variations of English expression of paragraphs I wanted, and used the ones that accurately expressed what I wanted to say as the bricks of the castle that is the novel.
I am not a native english speaker as well. And I get how hard it is to translate the story in your head before you can even write it in english, and that is much more reason for you to write the novel by yourself.
Writing the first draft straight out of your head is not the final form of a book. A poorly written book is not ugly, it just needs editing. And perhaps you shouldn't edit while you are still writing, that's probably the reason why you are taking a month to finish a chapter. Perfecting the chapter as you write it is self destructive. This is also why people get it wrong. Writing in its rawest form is not going to be publishable, writing is very much like sculpting, you must carve the details after you outlined a form of the wood, rather than doing the details before you even sculpted the form.
What you did is just doing a shortcut.
Yes you may have finished the book itself, but you missed all the other things you could've learned from yourself if you wrote it down with your hands on the keyboard.
You missed the opportunity to feel your own tone and voice to bleed on to your writing, because you let the AI to bruteforce the way and use the "variations of English expression of paragraphs you wanted" that the AI have created.
You missed the opportunity to learn your own tone, your own voice and your own agency to write the words yourself.
You may have the "deciding power" of what paragraphs to include in the book, but those paragraphs, no matter how grammatically correct or high falutin those paragraphs are, do not have your inherent soul.
The AI had the rough picture of your Idea, collected the right words from the noise of its dataset to form the closest thing that you wanted based on your inputs... But it's not YOU.
YOU, the artist, is the point of creating an art. You are crystalizing your own thoughts to a text that expresses pieces of yourself to the page.
You should've just written the Book in Tagalog or Cebuano if you're severely having a hard time writing the Paragraphs to English, and then fix the draft after.
The point of art is not about making it good the first time, the point of art is doing the process despite the fact that it's not practical, nor easy... Yet satisfying in the end, or as how Oscar Wilde put it:
“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
You took a shortcut, and learned nothing but how to prompt the AI correctly. You became a prompter that asked the AI to assemble the book for you.
"This suffering might explain why I have no desire to go through that experience again."
If you didn't like the process of writing the book by yourself, why create one? Why make something and call it yours if you're not the one that made it?
I always found it curious when people ask me who I am among the characters in the novel. I think your comment points to the spirit behind this question. It is true that writing a lot allows you to find your own voice. Since I've been blogging since the word blog was invented, I think I found my voice many years ago. It's the voice I use in this blog. If you read my posts in Medium from the 2010s, I'll think you'll notice a consistency. I'd describe it as janky, meandering, earnest, and a bit nerdy.
This voice—my default literary voice—however, was not what the novel wanted for itself. I knew what that voice it wanted was, and with effort could produce it. I have in front of me rn John Bengan's Armor and Miguel Syjuco's I Was the President's Mistress!! These are displays of literary virtuosity, particularly in the crafting of voice. These writers are like the Hidelyn Diazes or the Alex Ealas of Philippine literature. They are gifted and have honed those gifts consistently starting at a young age. It is a great pleasure to see their handiwork. They deserve their literary awards.
I think writing is like the Olympics. There are many different events, each with its own definition of excellence. I don't think I'm playing in the same sport as Bengan and Syjuco. In their world, the sounds of the sentences themselves is the work of art. There are other kinds of writing where these sentences are simply channels of the other kinds of excellence the writing is attempting to achieve. This is how I viewed Rajah Versus Conquistador. The sentences were intended to be conventionally good, but nothing that would impress readers or win literary awards.
However, it is still ambitious in other areas. If you compare other historical novels on 1521, I think my book has the chance of winning the gold medal in terms of research. The weaving of worldviews through the two perspectives and the characters that we hear through them is also something I'm quite proud of, though I sense that very few will notice it. Most writers in this space are trapped within the epistemologies of Nationalism and Christianity. You can't imagine the difficulty of the mental surgery needed to de-Christianize and de-nationalize ones mind.
You mentioned in a previous comment that you think it is okay to get some ideas from AI but not in the crafting of the sentences. What RVC required of me was the opposite. Any idea from AI was a threat to what the novel wanted to be: to be maniacally faithful to the historical and anthropological record, while being as wild as possible in the plot, and also still producing a suspenseful story; to have extremely varied psychologies and worldviews for the characters, consistent throughout the novel, but to also have a conversion arc for the main characters; to be free of the oh so common anachronism of using the past to promote "moral lessons" for the present, but to also use the present to make sense of and "translate" the past. This was the real game for me. It was like 4D chess. It entailed a lot of mental anguish but at the same time I feel this was the game I was born to play. This novel map gives you a sense of the game I had to play: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fz21LWhYn0p7fqqIWWqVoC8CGm7Urk3dnKazvABg_HM
I understand the ideals you hold for the act of writing: it is a path to discovering yourself and your literary voice; the complete artistry of expressing your soul through the choices you make at all levels—from each word, to the plot, to the stucture, to the voice; and each word, each choice, paid with suffering. Yet the experience of writing is I'm sure rich enough that could hold varied ideals and kinds of writers. The act of writing can also be an escape from the self; the artistry can be in the weaving of worldviews instead of words; and the outcome—the book itself—can be treated as more important than the experience, the writer's feelings about it, or his transformation through it.
Kidding aside, I am ashamed that AI writes better than me boohoo. But then as an ameliorative tool (that's not something to be ashamed of), AI can help us write better or maybe organize our thoughts better. I'm all for tech optimism.
Me too! lol Now I let them handle the mechanical parts (like correct grammar, spelling, and not sounding out of tune in English) so I can focus on the human parts: emotion, insight, memory, personal relevance, and strange requests from beyond this world.
The best thing I like about AI is that there are nuances of feelings that I cannot articulate into words but intuitively, AI knows how to construct those thoughts into a grammatically coherent sentence. I’m amazed actually.
what I do is I ask Claude to give me multiple variations, and I pick and combine the best ones. this used to be super exhausting when I used to do this manually
yes, the multiple versions to suit a specific publication or audience. It’s incredibly useful. :)
It’s too bad the recording of our lengthy discussion on the use of AI to write RVC got destroyed. But while like Mitya, I’d disagree with the practice, mainly because I myself have been writing for a living for a very long time, that changing how I’ve been doing things for 15+ years would be counterproductive, not to mention, I don’t believe that a “faster” way is necessarily the better way, plus all the ethics of it—I see where you’re coming from.
That said, we agreed during that discussion that the use of generative AI to help people write is so complicated and nuanced, that conversations about it should keep going, because this “early” version of this technology is going to be different in a matter of years, maybe months. What I’ve always respected about you is your openness to discuss, and I hope more people approach this in such manner.
Thank you, as always, for the conversation. Whatever will happen and whichever side we find ourselves in, kindness will never be a wrong choice.