The next chapter will be a while yet, ChatGPT has suddenly become overwhelmed by users. I’ve had no issues with it until yesterday when my account was blocked as I tried to log in. That was resolved by this morning, and I logged in to check all was well. When I logged in later to use the AI, I couldn’t access anything related to the writing. The “Upgrade to plus” has always been available to me from the sidebar but now apparently there’s a waiting list that I need to join in order to subscribe. 

I will subscribe so that I can finish what I’ve started but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it once this project is finished. As I’ve reached the point where I can either pay for the service or finish the book myself, I thought I’d write about how I am using ChatGPT and the pros and cons of it; 

I first decide what the chapter should include, then bit by bit, I describe each scene to the AI and ask it to elaborate and give it detail. This does not produce anything that can be used as it is. The AI uses the same words repeatedly. I can’t tell you how many times it’s used the word ethereal, everything is ethereal and has an ethereal glow. Each paragraph is around four lines long and uses the same framework, which is I suppose, how websites that check if a work is written by a human or AI can tell. 

The repeating words doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you’re trying to find synonyms and realise that there are no alternatives, so the structure of the sentence needs to be changed to give the same meaning and then you’re rewriting the whole paragraph to make it fit. Repeating words and phrases are something that annoy readers, I’m one of them; I used to read a lot of Wilbur Smith books when I was younger and loved the Courtney novels but one thing that I can remember some twenty years later is that Sean Courtney would light a cheroot every few paragraphs and it used to annoy me and spoil the experience ever so slightly, so I’m very aware of the need to avoid repetition. 

To write a chapter that reads like a novel, I must ask for a description of a scene, then I have to ask for the same scene description again with dialogue and I must describe the dialogue. If I don’t say exactly what needs to be said by the characters, the AI will make something up by itself. The dialogue always needs to be changed in the same way that the repeating words and paragraph structure must because it just doesn’t make sense, or it repeats prior conversations. 

The story I have been writing needed riddles for each of the characters, whenever I wanted a riddle and asked the AI for one, it would give me the same riddles repeatedly, each of them were very easy to answer and no good at all for what I needed. It was quite difficult to get any that I could use and took many attempts and variations of prompts and I’m certain that I could have found them quicker and easier on the internet. 

Lastly, every time that I ask for part of a chapter and describe everything that it needs to contain, the AI will use two paragraphs of that scene to wrap things up, as though the story finishes there. As each response only contains around a couple of hundred words, sometimes a little less and sometimes a bit more, it is an annoying waste of words. This means that I will have to ask for another description of the same part of the story to get enough to work with and hope that I can blend them together. 

I know this sounds like I don’t really think very much of ChatGPT, but I really like it. It is an exceptional tool. There isn’t any way that I could have written three chapters a week without ChatGPT. What I have found though is that it is only a very good tool. Unless you are capable of writing a novel without any help from ChatGPT it will not be of any use to you in that regard. 

I have seen a good many articles and videos which claim that people have used ChatGPT to write whole novels, one claimed that the user had written 120 books in a year using it. This is nonsense. It may be that those books are very short, or it might be that ChatGPT helped, as it has in my case, but ChatGPT can’t write a novel by itself, and any short stories will be uninteresting without significant input from the user. 

I have seen videos of people writing articles using ChatGPT, to make money. They take an existing article and feed it into the AI and ask for it to elaborate or give more detail. They then take that output and feed it into a website that changes the text so that it isn’t detected as AI output and can be sold on as original, when it is anything but. This is just a sneaky way of getting around copyright laws and is simply plagiarism. I don’t like this type of behaviour and I hope that regulation will be put in place to stop it. 

I shouldn’t really be as disappointed as I am with people who do this, after all every newspaper has the same stories written in a different way. Every film I see is a copy of a story that’s already been told in a different way. Because people are willing to pay those who exploit the work of others, original work can’t easily be found now. It pays so little, because there’s an abundance of “writers” who will churn out rubbish that they’ve copied from someone who took the time to sit and think. Eventually those who sit and think will stop sitting and thinking because it won’t be worth their while.  

Midjourney AI has the same issues; if you write a prompt that describes things in detail and is specific, you will get a great image. The trouble is that everyone can read the prompts you’ve written and as you’re enlarging your images, someone else is using your prompt to generate their own images to go and sell online. This is against the terms of service, so they’ll change a single word of the prompt, and this will produce a variation of the image and save them the time of having to write their own prompts. 

With ChatGPT, you can’t see how others are using the AI but from the articles I’ve seen and the videos I’ve watched, there are many people using it to generate text for websites and articles to sell as blog posts and eBooks to sell on Amazon. What is an awesome tool is being used by people who refuse to learn how to use it properly. I think we need some kind of regulation of this before it ruins our lives. A hammer in the hand of a Carpenter is a great tool but in the hands of a fool, who knows what he’ll do with it? 

I’ll post chapter eleven as and when I can access ChatGPT, in the meantime I’ll post about whatever AI I can use. 

Cheers,  

Old Man