AI as Your Co-Author?
Thinking of writing a story but need some fresh ideas to spark inspiration? That’s where you might consider turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for help. After all, chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can do a lot more than just answer simple questions. Still, while AI can sometimes step in as your personal editor, it can also leave your story sounding flat, cliché, or unoriginal. If you’re debating whether to use AI as a writing buddy, here are 10 ways it can help your storytelling—and 10 ways it might ruin it.
1. Brainstorming
AI can help authors brainstorm ideas, whether for character names, title suggestions, or basic story prompts. Asking AI for general ideas can help jog your brain and may inspire you to write something completely different from what you first thought of. It's like having a writing buddy in your pocket.
2. Grammar & Spellcheck
Sometimes, when you're too focused on getting your story out, you might not have time to review the grammar and spelling from the get-go. You want to keep your creative juices flowing, after all. That's where AI comes in handy: send a copy of your document, and AI can act like your personal editor and proofreader.
3. Drafting Outlines
Maybe you need help drafting out a basic outline—no details yet, just a generic structure of how things might pan out in the next few scenes. AI can be incredibly useful for this, too, and may help generate concepts and angles you hadn't initially thought of.
4. Character Development
Or maybe you need help fleshing out the characters in your story. From their names to backgrounds and favorite hobbies, AI can also throw out suggestions to give your characters the details they need to stand out from the crowd.
5. Keeping Track of Characters & Details
If you have too many characters and details to keep track of on your own, AI might be able to help on this end, too, so long as it can reliably keep these facts and features in its memory bank. Sure, you could also write it all down in a dedicated notebook, but it might be challenging (and time-consuming) to flip through and find what you're looking for when you need the information right away.
6. Reading Aloud
If you want your scenes read aloud to you so you can get a gist of the flow, style, and dialogue, AI can sub in as an incredibly realistic narrator. Plus, having your writing spoken aloud allows you to see any awkward phrasing or errors more easily than if you were to just passively skim through it.
7. Plot Structuring
Let's say you have a plot idea, but you're not completely sure how the details will pan out. Just as AI can help with drafting outlines, it can also structure storylines for you and help ensure that things flow smoothly and are paced well. This gives you more time to focus on other important gears, like refining your prose.
8. Research Facts
Need help researching historical or scientific facts? AI can help summarize large amounts of relevant data and organize it into neat, concise bullet points, so you don't need to spend time searching and reading through pages of text to find what you're looking for.
9. Personalized Thesaurus
Another great way you can use AI for writing is by asking it for specific synonyms. Instead of searching up a word on a generic online thesaurus, you can narrow your prompt and give AI some context for what you're writing or what effect you're going for, and it can suggest words that align much more closely with what you want.
10. Overcoming Writer's Block
If you're experiencing writer's block (as all authors do sometimes), AI can help get you back on track by suggesting prompts, brainstorming different ideas, or just being your own personal cheerleader. Don't be afraid to chat with it whenever you find yourself stuck!
And yet, despite all the ways AI could help you write a story, there are ways it can ruin it, too. Here are 10 things you'll want to watch out for when planning to use AI as a writing buddy or editor.
1. No Lived Experience
Unlike humans, AI can't grasp the emotional depth of a scene or dialogue you share with it. That means if you're asking it to create something that mimics or expands on complex human emotions, it'll likely be unable to accurately capture that nuance, which can make the writing feel hollow.
2. Nonsensical Scenes
It's not news that AI can sometimes generate odd details that seem to spring out of nowhere. It is, after all, not a perfect machine. That means it may sometimes insert inconsistencies or plot holes when drafting up outlines for you, which is why you always need to have a thorough read through whatever it outputs.
3. Hallucinated Details
More than just generating nonsensical scenes, AI may also hallucinate details, meaning a character may suddenly have a completely different name or be an entirely different person. This can make it extremely frustrating and confusing when writing with AI as your personal helper.
4. Incorrect Facts
Even though AI can often summarize large amounts of data accurately, it may still make mistakes. Sometimes, it can give you outdated information, and without double-checking, you might accidentally include the wrong details in your story.
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5. Overuse of Clichés
Tell AI to write a prompt for you, and you'll probably notice that it tends to write in a very specific way—one that's often riddled with cliché phrases and metaphors. The worst part? It often repeats these expressions when you task it to write long scenes and paragraphs, meaning you'll see certain clichés used multiple times.
6. Bad Memory
Using AI to remember your story characters and details might seem like a good idea, but it's also important to note that, again, it can make mistakes, and it can remember the wrong things. Your characters may suddenly be given completely different profiles if the AI's memory bank randomly decides to misremember.
7. Wordiness
AI also tends to write in a clunky, "purple prose" way. Unless you specifically ask it to mimic or emulate a certain writing style, it may spit out content that's extremely wordy or convoluted. (But as a writer, you should be doing the actual writing, anyway—not AI!)
8. Generic Ideas & Content
Sometimes AI may be able to generate fresh, interesting ideas for you to incorporate into your story, but other times its suggestions can be dull, overused, or generic. It may also bring up the same ideas over and over, even after you've already passed your opinion on them.
9. Odd Dialogue
If you ask AI to draft up scenes or outlines for you that include dialogue between characters, you might want to be careful before you take inspiration from it. Because AI can't understand human emotions the way, well, humans do, the dialogue it generates is often odd, cliché, stilted, and emotionless. And did we mention cliché?
10. Lead to Overreliance
Another way AI might ruin your story? Overreliance. As a writer, it's understandable to want a personal writing buddy you can turn to when you need help, but you don't want to rely on AI so much to the point that you lose your own creativity. Stories that stick and resonate take meticulous and painstaking work, not 60-word prompts that make an AI do all the heavy lifting for you.
