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I’ve seen dozens of articles in the past month about fiction writers using AI to write their books. Use AI to jump start your writing! Let AI start your story, and you can finish it! Or you start, and AI finishes! No one will know! You just have to tweak a few things!
I constantly get emails like the one below, offering to replace my writing with AI (100% uniqueness):
Last month I was watching some random YouTube video and the ad that played before the video was this completely mesmerizing lady filming herself on her phone from her car, telling me that she makes so much money selling books on Amazon, and the best part is that you don’t even have to be a writer. (I’m assuming she uses AI, I did not want to take her course to find out her precise method.)
I have feelings about all of this. My main feeling is that I don’t get it. I suppose I get that if you’re going to spam people about your program using AI to write something for Wordpress, you might as well have AI write the email. But for books? Good books?
The thing is, I like writing. Yes, sometimes it’s hard and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do always like it. I don’t want to give it over to AI.
Also – while I, too, would like to make so much money selling books, historically “writing books” is a laughably inadequate get rich quick scheme.
But. Well, sure, I was curious. I have been laughing at Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness posts for years now, and some of them are so absurd. I like absurd, and absurdism is fun in picture books. I started to wonder if there was something to asking AI to provide me with inspiration. Maybe it would say something like “what if a dog ran a shoe store with a secret basement lair?” or “write a story where a pineapple and a firework are best friends, and their dream is to go on a roller coaster.” Maybe AI could be a prompt, could suggest fun and ridiculous new picture book ideas that I, a mere human, could never come up with.
Maybe.
I chose the program Sudowrite based entirely on the fact that it’s free to try. I signed in, told Sudowrite that I’m trying to write a picture book, and set about to see what my new robot collaborator could come up with.
First, I needed a name. I asked Sudowrite to imagine a robot who loved to write. This is what it spit back:
I decided on FIKA-13 because it was the most robotty of the names, and also made me think of Swedish coffee breaks.
Sudowrite tells me that it’s a way to
and, as I’ve established, I already do love writing, but ok, maybe I’ll love it more with my new friend FIKA-13. I imagined kicking back with FIKA-13, brainstorming over coffee and cardamom buns, laughing together about all of our brilliant ideas. Or, I would laugh, and FIKA-13 would make the percussive beeping that counts as laughing in their world.
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