I just use ai to find synonyms and names+ to ask existential questions 😅😂 bro my little sister brought me a whole book and said she made it, shit made no sense but the writing sure was clear and concise asked her when the heck she made it, looking up my 10 year old sister told me chat got made it, said she couldn’t get past 1 paragraph 😂😂

I loved this chat ♥ it was nice and felt very personal :) thank you for the inspiration

Um, I enjoyed this SO much! It was such a natural conversation with so much insight and inspiration.. loved the interview ! I’ll be watching it again! ☺️

not to sound dramatic but… i will. if i ever publish a book one day it will be at least 30% thanks to your channel.

I just watched you on Ana's channel, Kris! Thanks for sharing this conversation.

🎉🎉🎉

It was so much fun chatting with you, thanks for having me on☺️💕

What's more artistic? Using chatGPT to keep track of all the input that ive fed it, and helping me arrange it, or being a human and just reimagining an existing ip? Asking for a friend

Such a good lip color btw!

Thanks, this going to help me actually finish my short stories drafting, revising, and publishing ❤🎉 You offer unique but practical advice on the craft, appreciate it 😊

kris your vlogs are perfection

I already feel bad using chatGPT as a google substitute for my DnD writing.. I want to use it in a similar way for normal writing but am really on the fence about it. What I notice now is that when I give the AI several things I have thought of myself and ask it to connect or blend those ideas it usually really helps me when I'm stuck. Usually I don't use anything the AI wrote but it gets my gears turning like crazy. Using it as a muse or buddy to bounce ideas off of seems very useful to me and having it quickly list things that would take me minutes, or hours even, to google also seems useful. I do really agree that it harms the industry though! I wish there were an easy way to regulate the use without banning it..

Just found your channel, very insightful stuff.

AI writing will never be good. Why? It can't get into to the head or the heart of a character. A good story is not about writing flowery sentences, intense and dramatic scenes or amazing descriptions. We don't care about how well a description of a foggy mountain is written, we care what the foggy mountain MEANS to the character. It's not what our characters say or notice or even do, its why they say or notice or do it that makes for an intriguing story.

In the reading challenge section you can also hit explore and there is a section of challenges based in promts or specific book titles.

Useful analogy (the reader has entered a room and the opposite door is slightly ajar)… end chapters with some kind of lingering question.

Hustle culture and AI go hand and hand, all the “get rich quick by making a book with AI” tutorials saddens me to see, but at the same time wonder how the hell that stuff even sells in the first place.

I’ve used it here and there for research, but never as part of the writing process itself. Writing is how I give my life meaning, so I would never want to deprive myself of that.

i love all of your advice! if you could, can you talk a little about how you find ideas?? it’s so weird but i feel like i’m ready and have the right headspace to get back into writing, but have absolutely no ideas lol. head so empty

I think for ai using it for grammar is fine because grammar isn’t necessarily created by one individual person. But when it comes to creating the story and all of the other nuances I don’t think can do that. Writing as well as drawing I feel like you are pouring in your emotions into ur writing. Giving it life itself.

From Nick Cave when someone sent him a 'song in the style of Nick Cave' from ChatGPT "ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become." The man knows his stuff.

Kris I have just binged all of your videos!! I wanted to ask, as a baby writer myself, where did you find/connect with your writer friends? I know you mention twitter in other videos, but I'm struggling to find other like-minded people who love books and writing.

Careful with the editing, you seem to be clipping a lot of words and syllables.

As of this time (July 2024) the courts haven’t clarified this as “theft” which is a legal term. In the past the courts have actually favored the industry and not the creators. The Google decision pretty much said that as long as it is sampling then it is not theft and nothing is owed to the creators. Since AI doesn’t even quote the original in the way the Google search does, it will probably be declared legal. Having said that, I personally haven’t found AI generated work useful in my creation, but I don’t believe it is a good idea or honest to declare it as theft or stealing. Let’s let the courts and legislatures settle this and stick with statements of “I don’t like it.” “I don’t use it.” But let’s move away from the shaming and judgement statements towards those that use it. There are in fact creators, many with disabilities, that use it to provide them a way to create. Best of luck in your writing endeavors.

What shocks me is how some people actually feel a sense of pride and accomplishment over having prompted AI to write a book. As you mentioned in the video, everybody can come up with story ideas. Actual writing is converting that idea into a fully fleshed out story. If someone or something else is doing that part, then you are not a writer, just as patrons of historical artists are not themselves artists.

Thank you for making for this video and echoing all of my thoughts on A.I it's doing more harm than good. I don't want to embrace it because it's advance tech etc. I want to learn the craft and hone my skills even with all the struggles with writing.

Haven’t even watched the video yet, but I need someone to coin the term for people who can read but can’t write or understand the writing that they’ve “written” using the help of AI. Like grammar bots that correct grammar, we are at risk of becoming functionally illiterate or a-literate, unable to understand or meaningfully reproduce the writing that we are capable of doing now. I don’t need to translate, AI can do it. I don’t need to have ideas, AI will have them. But what can I do? Do I have my own free will to write words? Or even worse, if words come out of the AI black box that I don’t understand or writing that I can’t grasp, is the AI wrong or am I wrong?

AI will only ever be able to copy, it will never be truly creative. It will never be able to write from a human perspective, and being able to generate a connection with the characters is kinda what most of literature is about.

AI is such garbage at writing fiction. You can literally see how it moves down a logic tree from paragraph to paragraph, often it will change the words but repeat the same thing over and over through the story. And ChatGPT forces a happy ending. Even when I tricked it to where the monster destroys the town or the bad guy wins, it always has to get the last word and tacks on an extra paragraph at the end pushing its moral values, "the residents of Townsville learned a hard lesson that day they would soon not forget. Evil exists, and it is still out there."

There is nothing wrong with AI writing. A lot of AI critics cling to their purity tests for creativity but don't apply the same stringent standards to other aspects of life.

I use Novelai as a writing buddy. I have no friends that write. Unfortunately this means I have no one to bounce ideas off of, or help with a sentence when it sounds bland. I will take and rewrite maybe 100 or less words from Novelai for a 4k+ word chapter. It makes me sad when I tell someone this and they say “oh so ai is writing your book?” I only use it when I’m stumped or can’t for the life of me describe something 😭

I don't need to watch the whole video to know that you mirror my exact sentiments 🥹 Not sure if you'll ever say "F^ck AI", but that pretty much sums up how I feel about it as it relates to writing, art and creativity 😌 People who defend the use of AI in generative processes are vile to me 😩

also just wanted to say you are extremely eloquent ALWAYS and I am always so impressed by how you carry yourself and how thoughtful everything you say is.

This is incredibly valuable, thank you Kris!

Louder, Kris, louder for the people in the back.

The only time is use ai for “writing” is when I want to alter the hair color or something like that on a certain image to match my character for my PERSONAL character board

this is such a wonderfully well-thought out video -- thank you for sharing your thoughts ♥ if stories and writing are about the experience of humanity, we do need to think critically about what AI can bring to that space in a meaningful way and what boundaries and protections need to be put in place -- especially when it comes at the cost of other artists and their years of work -- I like your perspective on both the craft perspective for a writer's point of view of improving their craft but also the protections that artists need in the future

There's so much moralistic language here that feels condescending. The same generation that champions "art is subjective" has no leg to stand on criticising AI work now. None. Having surplus time to spend on art is a point of privilege. Some people like me don't have hundreds of dollars to hire an editor for developmental or line edits. Or hundreds of hours to spend cleaning typos from a 200,000 word manuscript one by one. So long as the reader enjoys the work, AI or not, what is your problem? Intellectual property law was a tool invented capitalism to protect itself from populist iteration on art anyway. Do you not see the cognitive dissonance in decrying modern corporatism yet stanning IP laws that came from it? Writing is great. I love it. But I'm only one guy. My brain is fallible. Using AI like "a best friend thats read every book" to chip in thoughts and ideas or primal meat brains might overlook or forget is GOOD, actually. The readers win at the end of the day. Making the best book you can for your readers is the goal. If AI helps, that's a net positive.

Ironically, what I've noticed is that the sanctimonious gatekeeping boomers have been the driving profiteers off AI software. They don't have to struggle to be recognized, therefore they assume younger generations will want to avoid struggle. The answer to which is a tangled, ugly "yes and no" ... how are those people struggling and what is the actual solution? Those same boomers are backlashing on WGA writers striking for being "entitled". According to the boomers, all writers enjoy immense privileges and make tons of money, so what are they complaining about? Why can't they just stand back and let the middle-class consumer enjoy what they paid for? Art and craft being automated is a tale as old as engines. Henry Ford looked at the majestic, hard-working qualities of a horse and said to himself, "nature is stupid; let's turn horsepower into a contest and the winner is whoever can mechanize that power quickest". The assembly line has made our lives both better and worse. In that same vein you had Thomas Edison, who gatekept celluloid film as an artistic expression he could patent. He would've monopolized paintbrushes if given the chance, and told every painter outside his payroll to kill themselves. But smart people fought against him, and that's how we got Hollywood. The current problems with Hollywood are beside the point. We have so many cautionary fiction about artificial mindhives. We have Skynet, we have Ultron, we have the blonde robot created by Mr. Young (I don't care if no one else gets this reference) who makes toast from his buttcheeks. Yet here we are as a society, placing our faith in ChatGPT as if it will never plan to cut us while we sleep. As an artist, I'm always angry at myself for not being good enough to crack the code. If recycled content is the only thing audiences want anymore, why can't my human brain take the sizeable knowledge at its disposal and recycle millennia's worth of art in a genius way? At the age of 31, how am I less respected than the Twitter bot from 2016 who parroted racists?

It’s such a big pet peeve when people talk about ai generated stuff as something they’ve written e.g “I just wrote this story about x and y” they didn’t write a goddamn thing 😂

I am going to be the bad person an say that as someone the hyperfixates on things using to not annoy my friends is alittle freeing. Also with trying to use it to fix my really shit spelling (no spellcheck has never been good) But I need to let all the writer know that it could not really replace you all. For people without vision AI slaps, for people with vision it can and will be faster to just do it yourself (it goes for the same with artist). AI can do subtly and subtext and has an ugly hadit of trying to finish everything with a nice and neat bow and best thing about art it letting the character get messy and have conflict which is something i have issue with making. But it would be better and easier just to use speech-to-text on google docs! Tl;dr: AI is only good for spellcheck and outlines because it it will the the shortest emotional path to the nearest ending. For those without vision it slaps. If you have vision and story beats/ story arcs it can only be good for vauge undetailed outlines becuase it is shit at writing emotions.

The thing is, AI isn't even that helpful in software engineering like people think. As a software engineer, it is rarely "smart" enough to come up with usable code. I have never successfully had it solve a problem I was stuck on. I was wondering about writing, since writing is my passion, and this is comforting to hear.

I loved the points you made, especially about how using AI gets in the way of us being better writers. And also like Alyssa said in the video she made, writing shouldn't be quick and easy. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who thinks about how dangerous it is to let artificial intelligence enter the art world, it takes away our humanity. The beautiful thing about art is how it connects us to each other regardless of social and cultural differences because we connect through human experiences, emotions. The reason why we can connect with a superhero in a movie is because there was someone behind it using their own emotions and experiences to translate it into that superhero . If we convert art into mathematical functions, what will we connect with? Not seeing our own experiences reflected in the art we consume will only make us feel alone, and what will become of the human being if he is lonely and without empathy?

❤

Really resonated with your thoughts. I’ve always believed the joy of writing is in the craft and process. Honing those parts, feeling yourself grow as a creative is some of the most cathartic emotion I think anyone can experience-you’re dead on about the soullessness of AI-generated writing. There’s no foundation for prose without the thought and care a writer puts into every sentence-and more than that, the world and character between the words. It makes for something directionless and purposeless-action without intention. It’s like trying to pretend there’s life in something that’s never been alive. It’s sad to me that people disregard, or simply don’t care to understand, what is really being lost in this AI-manufactured creativity. The consumerist nature of our society probably plays a big part in this ignorance-It creates this dichotomy between the artist and their art, where people seek art out, consume it to the fullest, but turn a blind eye to the misuse of tools that diminish the heart and creativity that makes us enjoy art in the first place. But for all that bad stuff I think there will always be that niche of people that want to be writers and respect themselves-and the craft-enough to take the time to carve their path. Makes me believe that art isn’t the kind of thing that gets replaced by AI.

I used ChatGPT once, and only once- spending about a hour trying to see if it could give me anything interesting in terms of ideas for a Role Playing game Creature book I was creating- but I realised quite quickly that there really is no mind there- no actual thought process, just a very clever party trick that creates the illusion of intellect without actually having any real intelligence. In the end I gave up because it became clear that the AI was never going to be able to come up with anything genuinely novel or surprising because it was not really made to do that- it was a computer programme and like all such programmes it is problem solving machine. However creativity is not a problem to be solved, creativity is about emergence- that magical process by which something comes out of nothing. What makes writing so fascinating are those moments when something appears on the screen that surprises the writer as much as any future reader- I write, in part, to tell myself things that I did not know that I knew. The Latent space that forms the 'mind' of an AI is vast to be sure but it is also static- once 'trained' the ability of a given AI model to learn new things is limited- they are less like creative fire and more like great warehouses, repositories of things already written and ideas already explored- this vast resource combined with the speed at which they 'think' can- like the frozen frames of a movie strip- create the illusion of life and of creativity- but that's all it is, an illusion. There is no spark there, no real magic.

People who think AI can help them become professional writers are so short-sighted, they don't realize they are helping put their own career path out of existence. Why would anyone need to pay you to write if they can type a quick prompt into AI and have it spit out exactly what they want? What value do you offer to a publisher or an employer if AI can do it for free? It's so frustrating people don't see that. They just see a shortcut and want to immediately take it. Thank you for this video, I hope it helps change some minds.

This is such an amazing, thoughtful, well-researched video that perfectly encapsulates how I feel about AI's presence in creative spaces. I think that the 'general public' are more accepting of AI's intrusion on art because of the way our capitalism-enamored society has already devalued art, and it's honestly heartbreaking. All of my books and stories have been so deeply personal and the process of writing them leads to so much catharsis, and ultimately the themes and ideas I explore during that process are what readers usually end up connecting to the most. Also, the way that AI writes with a complete lack of perspective-WILD. ROTTED. Hollow is the perfect word for it!!

Make easy money quickly! AI is a grift and no different than NFTs or crypto. All these sales techniques are exactly the same and we should learn to spot a fraud. All these technologies have actual value, but the people selling it are trying to make a quick buck off of gullible customers and clients.