Can ChatGPT (or Any Other AI System) Write a Novel?

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) programs are the subject of many media articles and much discussion in the writing community. Some writers see the possibility of AI programs helping them to research and draft. Other writers are appalled that AI programs develop their knowledge base and fluency with language by perusing vast volumes of human writing—plagiarism, they cry!

As this debate rages, we should remember that writers have used AI for many years without labelling it as such—spell checkers, grammar programs, and search engines have been tools in most writers’ arsenals for a few decades now. So what makes today’s AI options different?

Power is the short answer. Past tools have focused on a single function or a few simplistic rules. Spell checkers use a dictionary as their data source and merely point out when a combination of letters is not a word, or perhaps is the wrong word. Even grammar programs as complicated as Grammarly or ProWritingAid use the same rules that can be found in style guides. Moreover, these grammar programs are not very good at assessing whether or not dialect and other stylistic differences are accurate.

By contrast, the newer AI programs are “almost” intelligent in integrating their databases into a coherent whole. Past search engines have take a query and found sources. The new programs can write an essay based on what they find in these sources. Not only does ChatGPT sift through vast quantities of data to determine relevance, it then follows written style guides to come up with human-ish prose.

The new AI programs aren’t perfect. If their sources contain errors, then so will the resulting text. The rule of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. At this point, only human intelligence can assess whether sources are true or not.

In addition, current AI technology doesn’t sound quite human. The output is a reasonable facsimile of human writing, but it’s almost too rule-bound. It doesn’t show the quirks of human creativity, humor, and intellect.

But over time, AI will get better.

I have experimented with ChatGPT, one of the most advanced AI programs, several times in recent months. How did it work for me? Here are some of the ways I’ve used it, and the results I got:

• Drafting blog posts. I won’t tell you which of my posts I first drafted with ChatGPT. I didn’t take any of the text the AI program generated without substantial editing. But I would say I got a good rough draft—as good as some of the first drafts I write myself. I found some errors in the factual aspects of the drafts that ChatGPT wrote, and I don’t see myself accepting ChatGPT’s input without reviewing it carefully anytime soon. But, depending on my topic, I might well use the program again to generate rough drafts.
• Editing back cover text for my work-in-progress. As most novelists know, it is as hard to write the few paragraphs on the back cover as it is to write the first draft of the entire novel. I had written several versions of the back cover text for my current work-in-progress, and got it close to what I wanted. But some of my phrasing seemed bland, less impactful than I wanted. So I asked ChatGPT to punch it up. (I think my query was something like “make the following text more dramatic, then I gave it my version.) What I got back from ChatGPT was over-the-top purple prose—nothing I would ever use. But there were a few words in what the AI program generated that appealed to me. So my current version of the back cover text was influenced by ChatGPT, even if it resembles more what I
• Generating book titles for a writer friend’s novel. One of my critique partners has been struggling to come up with a title for her current book. I typed a two- or three-sentence summary of her plotline into ChatGPT and asked it for fifty titles. Most were pretty boring, and neither she nor I thought any of them struck the right tone. But who knows? They might trigger some ideas down the road.
• Starting an outline for my next novel. After seeing a post suggesting that ChatGPT could provide an outline for a novel using the Save the Cat storyline beats, I was intrigued. Surely, AI wasn’t advanced enough to plot a novel. So I typed a couple of sentences in about my next book—the one in which I only know the beginning and the ending—to see what I would get. Obviously, ChatGPT doesn’t know my characters as well as I know them after six books in the series, but it didn’t do a bad job of giving me some generic plot twists that I might be able to develop. As with anything else, I won’t be able to rely on AI for the plot, but it can help with some brainstorming.

My conclusion is that AI is good enough to be helpful to writers at this point, but it is no substitute for human judgment and creativity. AI works best at the brainstorming stage, when writers are facing a blank or almost blank page. While AI will only get better over time, I believe novelists and other creative artists will have the edge for decades to come.

As author David Means said in a recent New York Times opinion piece,

“A.I. will never be able to do what I can do because A.I. has never felt what I’ve felt. It will never move through the emotional matrix of living a singular, individual life.

. . .

“A.I. will do what it does, just as the automobile replaced the horse and buggy, but we artists will do what we do, which is to readjust and find new ways to lay claim to our humanity.”

David Means, “A.I. Can’t Write My Cat Story Because It Hasn’t Felt What I Feel,” The New York Times, March 26, 2023

“Laying claim to our humanity” through the lens of a “singular, individual life”—that is a worthy goal for any writer.

What’s next for me with AI? I’ve just started playing with Bard. Bard is the Google experiment in AI. I’ll let you know if I learn anything new from it.

What experiences have you had with AI?