For the first time ever, I've decided to scrap a book that I have written. I have scrapped them before I wrote them - deciding not to write them, but this is the first time I've written a book and then said no. I didn't like it. I did the whole AI thing, telling the AI what to write, and I sat back and let it go. The results were miserable. They were so bad - and so unwanted, I couldn't put my name on it. It was just not meant to be. Gone!
That's not to say I won't get around to writing the book myself, but I couldn't allow the AI to do it; not my style. I did try. I promise, I did. I laid down the ground rules, the instructions for the skeleton, the framework, the juicy parts. I even told it what should happen in each chapter, but when it was done, there were just too many mistakes. I'd have spent weeks just correcting them, even before getting to the grit of it. When I write, I use AI for suggestions, but this time I wanted to see if it could write the entire book - it failed.
When I say it failed, I don't mean that the AI (Type AI to be exact) didn't write the book, or that it couldn't write the book. It could, and it did. However, the book it wrote sucked so badly, in my opinion, that I would never have admitted I had much to do with it. It wasn't just what the thing wrote, it was the layout, the wording, and the way that it disregarded what I wanted and took off on its own. I don't know if it was thinking (can an AI think?) that I would be happy with their choices rather than my own, but I was not.
When the book was finished, I hadn't even read one page before noticing that the word wrap wasn't engaged, and a word like "word" would have the "w" at the end of the line, and the "ord" would be on the next line. I tried to fix it, and it got worse. Maybe it's me, maybe I don't know how to fix Word documents as well as I thought I could, but it was a mess. I tried justifying the entire document, and it made it worse. I couldn't begin reading it for all the spacing issues. I finally decided to just read it, and ignore them -- but it frustrated me so terribly that I had to give up.
When I did get around to reading what was written, I laughed. My main characters were Bindy Vance and Marley Knox. The AI had them as Bindi Vance and Charles Marley. Yeah, well, that's not what I told it. Then, it decided to kill off Bindy's mother - Disney much? The book started off with the mother dying, and how Bindy's love for her mother's dreams led her to move to Scotland to fulfill her mother's unfulfilled destiny. NOPE! That is NOT what I asked for, not by a million miles. TRASHED IT.
I think I read half of the first chapter before skipping through the next 300 pages and finding more and more discrepancies; too many to remember. I consumed a lot of chocolate in the process, just trying to calm myself. I couldn't have been more disappointed if I had tried. I decided to scrap the entire project and tell the world my opinion of having thought it was a good idea to allow AI to run free with my words. I've learned it's not only a bad idea, but it's also something we should consider if we use AI to do anything else for us.
I noticed something else after reading the first half of the first chapter. I guess it never dawned on me before, but all my lead characters in my novels are women, unless they are Nick Posh. Nick Posh, of course, is the lead character in all of the Nick Posh books, but in all of my non-Nick books, the character that is the lead is a woman. I don't know if I did that subconsciously because Nick was in all the Nick Posh books, or if it is because I like developing other characters. My best friend likes the fact. She's always been a big girl-power type. I'm not really bothered either way.
No more AI for me, in that I won't ask it to do more than just take a line or two and fluff it. I ask it to give me a good start for a paragraph, or to add color to this or that paragraph. I write my own books. I'm almost 99% sure that I wouldn't have liked the book even if it had been written to my input -- I would have found a reason to hate it because I didn't write it. I'm such a snob. People will ask me if I read this or that author, and I don't. Sorry, I don't. I don't have time to read much because I'm writing. I prefer to do the fingers on the keys thing - it's who I am.
That's it. That's all I have for you. I'll let my friend Brandi Kinikin know that she'll just have to be embedded into the next Posh book instead of into the modern-day Highland romance I titled "Cheeky!". She'll understand. I may use her maiden name because I already have a Brandianne Kiskis in one of my Posh books -- it's not the same, I know, but pretty close. I like to keep things a little less confusing if I can. I'll make her a really interesting character -- she'll love it. OK then, I'm off to start the next Posh book -- ON MY OWN -- without any help from any AI until I need a flash of fun...but just a flash. I wouldn't trust anyone or anything with Nick!
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