By PJ Parrish
In the wee wee hours of the morning this week, I had an idea for a new story. Now, most things that happen around 3 a.m. usually don’t end well, and I should have remembered that, considering that the last time I was startled awake at that hour was when a coyote and neighborhood cat were squaring off in my driveway.
But no, I got up, grabbed a pen and wrote down an opening paragraph. Let me share it here now:
The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. Its infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air.
Whee, doggies! What’s that smell?
Okay, I didn’t really write that. But I had you going for a sec, didn’t I. But someone DID write it. Actually, it was 1,476 people who wrote that, give or take a few. This gawd awful paragraph was created years ago by Penguin Books for a project called “A Million Penguins.”
Maybe you heard about it. The idea was to write a novel with a million collaborators to be called a “wiki-novel”. It was launched by Penguin Books in collaboration with Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University.
This is what the Penguin folks said on their website: “We’ve created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing….we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel.”
Anyone could call up the site and contribute to the story. Because the site got more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed “reading windows” that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going. Chaos reigned. A month in, Penguin mercifully pulled the plug.
I was thinking about the Penguin project this week after reading an article at Literary Hub about how AI is transforming our business, and why writers should embrace it. To quote the author Debbie Urbanski in part:
So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.
This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.
Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?
Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: Can AI and a human write a novel together?
Sigh. I dunno. She posits that there is a “collaboration” possible between writer and AI. And that’s where I get queasy.
I collaborated with my sister Kelly on 15 books and a lot of short stories. It was at times a fitful process but always fruitful because we were equals and more important, we recognized that there was a third party in the collaboration that was always going to win any argument — the story.
I’ve had a couple other experiences with collaboration. Jeffery Deaver and Jim Fusilli asked me to join 14 other writers for a novel called The Chopin Manuscript, published by the International Thriller Writers. Deaver got the plot in motion and we each had a chapter after that. It was fun, frenetic and in hindsight, not a bad novel considering the inevitable clash of styles and egos. I remember I gleefully killed off one of the main characters in a great chase through the Paris catacombs but Jeff overruled me. We went on to write two more “serial thrillers” for ITW.
Letting another brain into your writing process isn’t easy. It should be approached with only the greatest care and clear-mindedness. When it goes bad — and I know some writers who’ve had it go very bad — it conjures up the Infinite Monkey Theorem:
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.
Which is how I view AI. I’m a retired Luddite who has no real stake in this brave new world. But I know that I should be paying closer attention. I have a friend who has been asked to write a script about the history of the mystery genre. He is struggling mightily because the subject is both broad and deep. He resorted to ChatGPT. And damned if the thing didn’t spit out a workable script. But it has an oddly lifeless quality, like someone afraid to color outside the lines.
So what happened to The Million Penguins project? The university behind it published A Million Penguins Research Report. It concluded: “We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was ground-breaking and exciting.”
Groundbreaking. Exciting. Sounds just like what they’re saying about AI. Or is that sound just the thundering footsteps of a million monkeys?
Keep coloring outside those lines, friends.
Thank you for waving another flag about AI. Now one of the leading spelling and grammar checkers wants us to sacrifice our manuscripts to Moloch, their version of an AI-driven editor for the entire novel. Seems obvious we should feed whatever it births to itself. I can’t wait to use, “Whee, doggies! What’s that smell?”
Good grief. I can’t keep up anymore. Moloch? Conjures of visions of the cannibal race in The Time Machine.
Moloch…also a biblical reference.
“A deity whose worship was marked by the sacrifice of children by their own parents.” (Dictionary)
One wonders why they’d name their fancy software that…
Oh geez. That makes it even worse.
During a recent dark, stormy night, Copilot tried to crawl through a window into my computer via an update. I warned it to get out several times but it refused to leave so I shot it dead.
Kris, I’d been wondering what to do with its body until you described the inky ocean where “lIts infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls.” I’m dragging Copilot out by the heels and dumping it in there.
See ya around Ludditeland.
Laughing. I don’t know what Copilot is either! I’m glad I’m not young anymore. Apologies to Maurice Chevalier.
Ha! I knew it wasn’t you writing “black as ink.”
But you did nail the issue with “oddly lifeless quality.”
I recently listened to a “podcast” that was two bot voice, man and woman, analyzing research an author upoloaded. The voices are stunningly realistic, and the back-and-forth contatins chuckles, the word “like” in there to make it seem spontaneous, etc.
But it was also “oddly lifeless,” and reminded me of Invastion of the Body Snatchers (1956) where people walk around looking and talking like themselves, but with something missing, like a soul.
Ha! Good comparison to Body Snatchers.
The one time I found AI useful was when I had to distill my book description down to 400 characters for a site. It took several tries, reminding the bot that spaces and punctuation counted, but eventually, I had something I could work with.
Otherwise, I’ve never found anything that sounded as though a human was behind it.
You know, I could see how that might work. Beause that distillation process is annoying as heck anyway.
That Penguin project output would have been a Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner for sure.
The “oddly lifeless quality” of AI reminds me that one person creates a voice. A thousand people all talking at once just create a noise.
But it has an oddly lifeless quality, like someone afraid to color outside the lines.
Perfect description, Kris. I am one of those Luddites who will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the *future* we’ve painted ourselves into.
And while I’m ranting, give me real faces at the grocery store, please and thank you, not some squat machine asking me over and over again if I want a bag, and telling me to place my items just so. Infuriating!
Whew! Now I can go on with my Tuesday, coloring outside the lines…heck, maybe outside the paper! 🙂
Don’t get me started on automated checkout. Or cusstomer service that leaves you screaming into the phone: “Representative!!!!”
That said, had a tremendously helpful young man with Delta yesterday on phone. Resolved my issue. After I waited 20 mins with Musak blasting in my ear.
I shoulda known I wasn’t the only one who did that.
Thanks, Kris, for opening Pandora’s box on AI. I salute you.
Unless you delve into AI for fiction yourself, you will continue to read speculation and fear-borne predictions, neither of which bears much resemblance to the LLM projects that are evolving weekly. I’m an old guy, but I like innovation, so I dove in a few weeks ago and plunked down $29 for one month of Sudowrite. I’ve found a writing partner that knows my writing voice, my style, my genre, and follows my story with context across dozens of chapters. The best LLM for fiction came out last week as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and brought accolades from AI writers of fiction.
At first I used Sudowrite to fill out some chapters in a 90,000 word trunk novel. I used their import feature to feed it 40,000 words of my Word .docx file. It fleshed out 5 character analyses, a 40-chapter outline, and an 800-word synopsis. Their “Excellent” writing mode was extremely good at coming up with fresh ideas or expanding on existing ones with zero prompts and minimal guidance from me. I needed three or four days to get familiar with the user interface and how to get best results, before moving to my crime series. Indeed, there is a learning process, but not big and scary.
So far none of the hundreds of LLMs available can write an entire novel. ChatGPT 4o gets flowery. Claude 3.7 Sonnet can generate a very usable 200-word chapter synopsis for as many as 42 chapters, from which you as story engineer can begin to write yourself or feed to a chapter-by-chapter generator. You will then have to proofread, edit, massage, or toss out wholesale what it comes up with. That’s how I’ve been using it for the past two weeks to fill holes in my stalled crime thriller.
AI needs guidance and does its best to invent and create beats and scenes when asked, but usually toward the end of its snippet I’ll see it start to make erroneous plot or character assumptions. That’s okay, because usually the first 80% is usable as is or as inspiration. And it outputs 400-500 words of amazing quality prose in about 5 to 10 seconds.
You can find plenty of YouTube support in the form of reviews, tutorials, and commentary. I firmly believe AI will help me generate my kind of prose much faster, closer to my goal of 4 to 5 books per year. It’s a tool, like having a content editor sitting next to you. Try it if you dare, TKZers.
Ready, set, go!
Thanks a lot Dan for weighing in. I was hoping someone with good experiences would share here. As an experiment, I ran one of my published books thru an AI device (forget the name) and asked it for a detailed summary. The result was not only chillingly correct but quite emotionally accurate in capturing the mood, themes, etc.
I was involved in a Penguin type project on Facebook. The result was hilarious, as romance writers kept matchmaking and crime writers kept killing off the lovers. 😁
Someone had to do it.
I’ve found that since I am a bit picky about my writing, I can’t get an AI to produce prose I’m happy with. I’ve tried multiple AIs and found I have to combine the outputs using the same large prompting document to get a chapter which will then need an hour or so reworking.
With that being said, I started a new project in a different genre (Romance) with no previous writing style. I was able to get some passable prose from ChatGPT 4.5 but the word count was short unless I broke the work down to 500 word chunks. Claude 3.7 did a little bit better.
I order to get the best results, you need to set up a series bible with your world descriptions, character profiles, and character language styles. The outline needs to be broken down to almost paragraphs beats. Those need to be combined into a mega prompt along with about 1000 words of your own style. You then need to create a system instruction which will contain genre style reference and language restrictions such as using CMOS, restricting adverb tags, etc.
Better results seem to be obtained when you can continue the process in one long chat session with you editing the output and feeding it back to the AI. This improves the results greatly from the results of my experiment.
So far I have a few chapters written of a Harlequin type Romance which isn’t too bad. The end result however is no time saved at present if I was to write those chapters myself. I estimate about 50% of the output of the AI remains in the first draft of those chapters.
I have zero concern that AI will replace me either as a programmer or an author. As a helper getting the plot down, creating summaries, helping with blurbs, and keeping track of the World Bible, I would say AI can certainly help an author out. If you can write 2k of usable words a day, I don’t see it doing much better unless you start a new pen name which doesn’t have a set style yet.
I don’t mean to sound flippant but I got tired reading just reading what you had to go through. Maybe it does give you, as you suggest, a workable first draft. I think I could use it for some projects maybe. But a novel is such a personal thing. I don’t want another entity, brain, or artifical heart intruding.
The collaborative project may have worked if the editing wasn’t allowed, and the manuscript was a round robin. Years ago, I was part of a giant rewrite of a Horatio Alger novel. Each person was given a page or two to rewrite or whatever. The collaborators included graphic and comic artists and every type of fiction writer and poet available.
AI is good for brainstorming when stuck, but remember, it is only repeating what is “knows” and that is something that has already been done. I used Claude/Co-pilot to brainstorm a book just to see where it would take me. Well, let’s just say, that it had a couple of decent ideas, but over all, it just gave me a jumping off point of what if questions that changed the whole concept of the the book that AI was proposing.
If you haven’t read and AI book, try it. They care hilariously bad. A lot of repetition, the cliched descriptions, tired plots, stock characters, and generally boring with on the nose dialogue and lacking emotion and a true character arc. If you have it analyze your book, it misses all the subtle things. (like mixing up who the father and brother are even though you put in “her father” or “her brother”.
I find it more of an annoyance than a help. I don’t need AI’s suggestions for phrasing or sentence structure, etc. when writing. All it does is dumb it down to the lowest denominator.
That is what I am getting from this post today — that AI might be useful as prompting tool. A point of departure, as you say.
Seems AI day around here.
This might be helpful:
https://liebjabberings.wordpress.com/2025/02/26/a-legitimate-ai-use-for-fiction-writers/
In short, it can help with a boring marketing task, summarizing your reviews.