How Not To Write An AI-Assisted Novel

The worst way to write a novel with generative AI is to make the AI do all the work.

In fact, thinking of it in terms of “how much of the work can I get the AI to do?” is pretty much guaranteed to give you a really crappy book by the end of it. The AI’s job isn’t to “do the work,” any more than a power tool’s job is to build a house. You do the work. AI is just a tool to multiply your efforts.

But let’s take a step back. Who am I to talk about all of this? My name is Joe Vasicek, and I’m an indie author who’s been writing and publishing regularly since 2011. At this point, I have several dozen novels under my belt, including about half a dozen AI-assisted novels, the first of which is published under my Joe Vasicek pen here on this blog. Also, my wife is a PhD student and research assistant who works with generative AI and large language models. Her thesis is on using generative AI to create interactive cross references for any body of text, customized to the user. We talk a lot about generative AI and share what we’ve learned, so we’re both fairly knowledgeable on the subject.

At this point, it’s still very much the wild west of writing with AI-assistance. The technology is new enough that there really are no experts on the subject, though I expect that that will change rapidly over the next few years. And while I can’t (yet) say that I’ve made gazillions of $$$$ from my AI writing methods, I can say that I’m one of the first professional writers to develop a method for writing with AI-assistance.

And that’s not a boast. Whenever I get together with other writers, I wish there were more of them (really, any of them) that I could talk with about this stuff. There are some online communities that come at it more from the AI side than the professional writing side, and I probably ought to spend more time in those, because it’s probably only a matter of time before one of them has a runaway bestseller and shakes up the publishing industry in the same way that Amanda Hocking shook things up when the indie publishing revolution was just getting underway.

Maybe that someone will be you. Who knows? We’re still very much in the wild west of AI writing, and probably will be for a while.

It’s that very loneliness that makes me want to blog about AI-assisted writing—that, and the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out for myself, so I would love to hear what’s working for other writers. But one thing that I’ve learned from my own experience is that the worst way to write an AI-assisted novel is to dump all the work on the AI and expect anything good to come out.

The main reason for this is that LLMs and generative AI do not think—at least, not in any meaningful way that’s similar to the way you and I think. Instead, these models analyze human language for patterns, and replicate those patterns according to the parameters and instructions give by the user. It’s much closer to how your phone is able to predict your next word when you go to write a text, except that instead of writing the next word, ChatGPT or Sudowrite or whatever LLM you happen to be using is instead predicting the next 5-10 paragraphs.

So really, it’s not very useful to think of an AI as being able to “write” anything. Instead, it’s much more useful to think of it as “simulating” the thing that you’ve told it to write, or producing a simulation of the kind of work that a human would produce, given your parameters and instructions. The AI isn’t “doing the work” for you, it’s merely simulating the end product of that work. You still have to make it your own.

And how do you make it your own? Personally, I’ve found that the best way to do that is to open up a new document on my second monitor and type it all out by hand, occasionally referring to the AI-generated text when I don’t know what to write next, but largely trusting in myself to create the real, non-simulated draft. No copy-pasting! The mental exercise of writing it all out, word for word, stimulates something in the creative mind, and in most cases I end up writing something completely different, using the simulated version of the novel merely as a stepping stone.

So why do I go through all the trouble of generating a whole novel, when I’m probably going to throw out most of that text anyway? That’s a very good question—so good, in fact, that it needs to be the subject of its own post.