Creative writing with AI
For a while now, I have been really enjoying co-writing fiction together with AIs.
There is a preconception that AI-written prose is bad. And if you only give the AI a two-sentence prompt and then have it do all the work itself, it often is! But if you use a good model, throw your soul into it by telling it exactly what you want, craft an initial scene to build upon, and aggressively rewrite its outputs to address issues, it can become much better.
For a decade or two, I've been having difficulty finding things that I could do on my own that would consistently bring me pleasure. This has been a major contributor to varying levels of depressive episodes. Even in the absence of anything clearly bad going on in your life, just the mere lack of anything consistently good that you could feel unambiguously excited about can bring with it a sense of pointlessness.
With AI co-writing, I've finally found such a source of pleasure again. I've occasionally been finding myself waking up in the morning and feeling actually excited about getting to continue some story that I'd been writing before. It has felt like something has been coming alive - some deep emotional content finding a way to be expressed in a deeply satisfying way.
However, it's taken some time to get to a point where I really enjoy it, and I think I'm still in the process of figuring out the best ways for it. In this article and my next one, I'll try to share some of what I've learned.
