Being a Writer and AI – Activity Research

I’ve seen a lot of rhetoric surrounding AI and the art of writing and being a writer, and there are a lot of valid fears and worries about how AI will fit into our future as creatives and as humans. It’s definitely a concern that I’ve had over the last few months as I have been navigating myself through going freelance and trying to realise what that means and how I want to continue my career.

A few months ago now, my brother-in-law was chatting all about Chat GPT and how he was using it creatively. He talked about how you can pivot the value you place on your own creative input and make adapt and make space for these innovations. Because, let’s face it, AI isn’t going anywhere, and history is full of examples of how humanity reacts with fear around the unknown that new technology provides, and how success always comes from humans who adapt and embrace the change.

For example, when the plough was invented it changed the whole farming and food production industry, and there have been further such technological milestones that have similarly flipped a landscape around for the eventual betterment of humanity.

So I decided to think of AI and my career as being a writer in the same way. How can I, as a writer and editor, use AI as a tool to help me do my job more productively now and in my future.

First, I realised that I had to reevaluate what my value was when writing and editing projects - what did I bring to the table that AI or another writer or editor did not. My initial thoughts centred around research, and that although it often takes up most of my time on projects, and it is a part of my job and role that I pride myself upon, and that I really enjoy, my unique value isn’t the act of research. Collecting information is not a particular skill in a world where information is freely available to all, but my value is in what I can do with the information; deciding and knowing how to do something creative, interesting and unique. Although researching takes the most time and effort, and historically time and physical effort has always been equated to monetary and other value, this isn’t where I give my unique value to a project.

Though this is not by any means a profound discovery, it did help me to reorientate my thinking, and help me to look into the first way that I thought I could use AI to help to do some parts of the research for me, to cut down the amount of time this part takes me and free up some time, my brain space and creativity.

So I decided to experiment with Chat GPT 3.5 (which is the free version) to see how I might implement this into my work flow. Often, in moments of writer’s block, I try and find different ways of getting a spark going again, as illusive as this process always is, so I asked Chat GPT if it could give me ideas for activities for a sticker book for 3 to 5 year olds.

The link to the chat is here.

The ideas it gave me were simple and solid. I can definitely see how they could help me spark a moment of inspiration during a page plan stage, and to help me make sure I am including a good variety of activities in a book. I would then be able to add the variety, twists and detail to the activities to make them unique and fun, depending on the license or theme of the book.

Then I decided to test if Chat GPT could give me a little more pizazz, so I asked it give me dinosaur activities for 5 to 7 year olds, and although it did give me some solid ideas, again it simply gave me a stock bank of ideas from which I could expand and finesse.

I have been reliably informed though that Chat GPT4 is much better at giving more creative outcomes, so that’s the next stage of my research into how I can work alongside AI when writing projects.