AI and My Writing Process
Hello dear readers,
Today I wanted to talk about a hot and divisive topic: Artificial Intelligence. There are two types of AI used frequently today by millions of people, including authors: Large Language Models (LLMs) and image renderers. LLMs are your chat machines that can talk to you like a real person and perform all kinds of tasks, often faster and more accurately than any human could. Image renderers can take a prompt and deliver an amazing image with incredible graphics within seconds. I’ve seen both being used widely in the market space that I occupy: erotica.
In the early days of my Thomas J. Love persona, I wrote everything in LibreOffice, then reread what I wrote and fixed “all” the errors myself, missing about 90% of them. Sadly, when we write something and then reread it, our clever brains autocorrect for us, and it is very hard to catch the missing words, doubled words and commonly misused words like there, their and they’re.
In 2018, when I was editing Lurid Tales Volume I, I discovered and paid for the Grammarly service to help me out. It still missed a lot of errors and was of very little use when it came to finding awkward or overused phrases. But excited about the prospect of being a published author, I rushed the book out to Amazon and sat back and waited for all the money to come rolling in.
I pushed it a little on social media but didn’t run any ads or do appearances, and the book floundered. The three reviews I did get were mixed: one 5-star and two 3-stars. For a long time I wondered why. I thought the stories were clever and well written and would connect with readers. I let it sit and abandoned it for six years.
About a year ago, I kept hearing all the hoopla about AI and this thing called ChatGPT. I decided, being an engineer in the tech industry, I should do my due diligence and check this thing out. I started by having philosophical discussions with it, political dialogue, engineering ideas I had, and then discovered the one place where it could really help me: web design.
My wife and I are photographers, and Chat, as I call it, was able to help me create a really nice website for selling our photographs. It helped me figure out things I had struggled and failed to do before, like e-commerce on websites. And I discovered how quickly it could generate mock-up images of web designs I wanted to try.
It was paradigm-shifting in what it allowed me to do that I could not do on my own and how quickly I could implement and try things. I, like most people, have a full-time job and limited free time. ChatGPT has enabled me to achieve a level of productivity that was completely impossible on my own.
Then came the day I sat and wondered about my book. I had the follow-up Volume II manuscript written but unedited. I started wondering if Chat could help me fix it up and finally get it to market. But how?
First I tried the easy way out. “Hey Chat, here’s my manuscript. Can you fix it up and spit it out?”
Let me tell you something I’ve learned the hard way with the ChatGPT LLM. It never says, “No, I can’t do that.” It will say sure. Then, after you wait for 30 minutes for your cleaned-up manuscript to come out and you ask about it, Chat will finally say…oh, I can’t do that.
By trial and error, I discovered a long and laborious way I could use Chat to actually help me.
I take my manuscript page by page, take screenshots and paste them into the ChatGPT app. Chat reads them and finds all my typos, my doubled words and even suggests how to fix awkward sentences. In this way, I retain my voice, my vision and my integrity. And I produce a much better product.
I stopped working on Volume II after one story. There was an itch I still had to scratch. Volume I. It was not the best version it could be.
I downloaded it from Amazon and started using my new editing process on the old book. Holy cow, did I find a ton of errors—sentences that made no sense, all kinds of problems. I think 3-stars was generous.
I spent about a month, maybe more, redoing the entire book and published it as the Definitive Author’s Revision. Now I am finally proud of the book that is on the market.
The other thing Chat was able to help me with was the artwork. My original cover featured a red mask my wife bought years ago, laid on a plush purple blanket on our bed and photographed with my Nikon. I then did some editing with Corel PaintShop Pro and voilà! A book cover.
A kind of boring book cover.
Once I started playing with the ChatGPT renderer, I started seeing all kinds of possibilities. I tried lots of variations based on the stories inside the book. I did run into, quite often, the image Nazi that would say, “I’m sorry, I can’t make that image as it would offend nuns in the Vatican.” Or some such legalese that was basically: I refuse to acquiesce to your request. No.
I will say in defense of the use of AI simply this: If I had a publishing company that would pay a human editor and a human graphic artist to work on my books, I would much prefer that. But being an indie publisher, I think these new tools allow me to get to a level of professionalism I could not afford to do on my own. And by not afford, I mean time or money.
So there you go, open kimono. I use AI, and this is how I use it. I use it to an extent that I can still feel like my integrity has not been lost and the work produced is mine.
If, after reading this, you are still turned off by the thought of AI usage, I understand. No hard feelings, and Godspeed on your reading journey, my friend.
Yours,
Thomas J. Love