Tag Archives: AI

The Top Ten Tactics for Writers Using ChatGPT – Without Losing Your Voice

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As writers, we’ve all seen, heard, tasted, felt, and smelt the buzz around AI tools—particularly ChatGPT—being able to crank out content at lightning speed. But that’s not what serious writers care about. We don’t want robotic fluff, and we sure as hell don’t want our voice flattened into some generic echo of internet-speak.

What we do want is to write better, write smarter, and keep our voice intact.

I’ve been working closely with ChatGPT for around two years now—really working with it and producing content for the film industry—and what I’ve found is that it’s not a threat to creativity. Used right, Chat is a force multiplier. A powerful thinking partner. A digital editor that never sleeps. And if you do the dance right, it’ll help you waltz out some pretty awesome moves—without anyone guessing a machine was in the lead.

What Exactly Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) computer and algorythm machine developed by the OpenAI company based in Silicon Valley. It’s a general pre-trained transformer (GPT) programmed on massive amounts of digital text—books, websites, conversations—to predict what words logically come next in a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire volume of works. That’s the stupid version.

The smart version? Chat is a tool that can:

  • Outline your stories
  • Research topics instantly
  • Draft articles or posts
  • Suggest creative titles
  • Assist with your novels
  • Build your characters
  • Punch up dialogue
  • Analyze your plot
  • Summarize chapters
  • Rephrase clunky paragraphs
  • Ask tough questions you hadn’t thought of
  • And most importantly, learn your unique voice over time

But here’s the kicker. ChatGPT doesn’t know truth. It doesn’t “think” like we do. It’s not sentient. It reflects probabilities and recognizes patterns from information or prompts fed into it. Which means you have to be the discerning human in the loop.

That’s your job. To guide it. Train it. Push back. Sharpen it into something useful.

With that, let’s get real about how to effectively exploit this big, bad, and beautiful bot.

Ten Real-World Tactics to Use ChatGPT Like a Pro Writer

These aren’t tips you’ll get from a “101 Ways to Prompt ChatGPT” article. These are hard-learned, field-tested tactics I use every day.

1. Feed It Your Work. Literally.

Want ChatGPT to sound like you? Give it samples of your writing. Paste in 2–3 blog posts or several book chapters and say: “This is my writing voice. Learn it. From now on, respond in this style.” It will. And it gets better over time. In fact, it can be downright spooky.

2. Talk To It Like a Writing Partner.

Don’t treat it like Google. Have a back-and-forth. Ask it what’s missing from your argument. What’s weak. Where the tension drops. “What’s the most compelling way to open this post?” “Challenge this idea. Where could I be wrong?” It becomes a live writing room, not a vending machine.

3. Use It for Reverse Outlining.

Paste in a rough draft and ask: “Summarize the structure. What’s the logical flow?”
This reveals hidden structure—or lack thereof—and shows where to tighten or reorder.

4. Rapid Rewriting at Scale.

Stuck on a paragraph? Ask: “Rewrite this in plainer English.” “Make this sound like Hemingway. Or like Garry Rodgers.” Use what works, ditch what doesn’t. It’s a revision shotgun.

5. Create Better Metaphors.

ChatGPT is surprisingly sharp with metaphor. Ask: “Give me three metaphors to describe the writing process.” You’ll be amazed what turns up—and one might be gold.

6. Simulate Your Audience.

Ask it to act like a reader of The Kill Zone or your novel’s target demographic. “What would a thriller reader think of this twist?” “What questions might a new writer have after reading this post?” It helps you pre-empt confusion.

7. Build a Persistent Memory.

If you’re using ChatGPT-4o with memory turned on, it can remember your preferences, style, and ongoing projects. This makes it less like a tool—and more like a silent writing partner who gets you.

8. Run “What’s Missing?” Checks.

Paste your article in and ask: “What ideas did I leave out that would make this stronger?” It’ll surface blind spots you didn’t know you had.

9. Draft Titles and Hooks on Command.

Don’t burn out trying to come up with snappy titles or email subject lines. Ask: “Give me 10 strong, punchy titles based on this content.” Keep the good ones, toss the rest. No ego involved.

10. Never Let It Publish Without You.

This one’s crucial. ChatGPT can help you draft. It can help you edit. It can even ghostwrite if you really want. But never hit “publish” until you—the writer—the human element—have done the final pass. Use your judgment. Your voice. Your standards. The machine assists, but the mortal decides.

Final Word

Writers who embrace this technology—without surrendering to it—are bound to outpace those who ignore it or fear it. AI won’t replace us. (At least not yet.) But writers who know how to use AI well will inevitably rise above, and possibly replace, writers who don’t.

Treat ChatGPT like a sharp, tireless apprentice. Not a ghostwriter. Not a gimmick. But a collaborative tool to help you write with more clarity, more insight, and yes—more you.

Kill Zoners—What do you think about ChatGPT and AI in general? Do you use an AI bot such as Chat in your research and writing? And who do you think wrote this post—ChatGPT or Garry Rodgers?

Meta Stole Copyrighted Work from Millions of Authors

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On December 9, 2024, I wrote about Meta’s new terms of service, effective January 1, 2025. This month, I’m even more disgusted by what I learned. An email from one of my publishers told me Meta stole 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers to train their new AI model, Llama 3.

For those who haven’t heard the news yet, Alex Reisner first broke the story in The Atlantic…

“When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?”

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they nixed that idea, stating, “[This] seems unreasonably expensive.” A Llama-team senior manager also said it’d be an “incredibly slow” process. “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.”

Offended yet? Not only has Meta and others stolen copyrighted work but they’ve reduced authors’ blood, sweat, and tears to nothing more than “data.”

“The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” said the director of engineering at Meta in an internal memo.

If caught, the senior manager claimed the legal defense of “fair use” might work for using pirated books and research papers to train AI…

“[It is] really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP. Books are actually more important than web data.”

How did they solve this problem? Meta employees turned to LibGen (Library Genesis), a digital warehouse of stolen intellectual property, neatly stacked with pirated books, academic papers, and various works authors and publishers never approved.

As of March 2025, the LibGen library contained more than 7.5 million books and 81 research papers. And Meta stole it all, with permission from “MZ”—a reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

Internal correspondence were made public this month as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by Sarah Silverman and other celebs whose books LibGen pirated. If that’s not bad enough, the public also discovered OpenAI used LibGen for similar purposes. Microsoft owns a 49% equity stake in the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI LP. It is not yet known whose idea it was to download the LibGen library to train its AI model.

Does it matter? They still used copyrighted material without obtaining licensing fees or giving authors the option to opt-out.

“Ask for forgiveness, not for permission,” said another Meta employee.

Even when a senior management employee at Meta raised concerns about lawsuits, they were convinced to download the libraries from LibGen and Anna’s Archive, another massive pirate site.

“To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, I accessed a snapshot of LibGen’s metadata—revealing the contents of the library without downloading or distributing the books or research papers themselves—and used it to create an interactive database that you can search here:

https://reisner-books-index.vercel.app”

~ Alex Reisner, The Atlantic

Meta and OpenAI have both claimed the defense of “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs (Large Language Models) “transform” the original material into new work. Work that could directly compete with the authors they stole from—by duplicating their writing voice and style!

This legal strategy could set a dangerous precedent: It’s okay to steal from authors. Who cares if they worked for months, even years, to write the pirated books and/or research papers?

The use of LibGen and Anna’s Archive also raises another issue.

Alex Reisner stated the following in one of The Atlantic articles:

“Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI.”

Not only has Meta and OpenAI stolen copyrighted material from authors, but they’ve distributed it to others.

By now, you must be wondering if your books are included in the LibGen library. I found six of mine, including my true crime/narrative nonfiction book, Pretty Evil New England, which took me a solid year to research—driving around six states to dig through archives—and then submit the finished manuscript to the publisher by the deadline, never mind the weeks of edits afterward. Each one of my stolen thrillers—HACKED, Blessed Mayhem, Silent Mayhem, Unnatural Mayhem, and HALOED—also took months of hard work.

Click to Enlarge

By stealing six books, they robbed me of years—years(!) of pouring my soul onto the page to deliver the best experience I could—and I’ll continue to put in the time for my readers. I suspect you’ll do the same. But authors still need to eat and pay bills. It’s difficult to write if you’re homeless.

What message is Big Tech sending to the public?

If Meta and OpenAI prevail in the lawsuits, authors everywhere are at risk.

Quick side note about pirate sites: Sure, you can read books for free. Just know, most sites include trojan horses in the pirated books that will steal banking and other personal info from your network. Every pirated book steals money from authors. If you want us to keep writing but can’t afford to buy books, get a library card. Or contact the author. Most will gift you a review copy.

Care to read Meta’s internal correspondence?

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.415175/gov.uscourts.cand.415175.449.4.pdf

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.415175/gov.uscourts.cand.415175.417.6.pdf

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.415175/gov.uscourts.cand.415175.391.24.pdf

And here’s a court document regarding OpenAI:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.414822/gov.uscourts.cand.414822.254.0.pdf

Disgraceful, right?

The Authors Guild is also reporting on the theft and closely monitoring the court cases.

If your work is included in the LibGen library, your name will automatically be included in the class action (there are many filed), unless you opt-out. However, if you prefer to contact the attorney handling the case against Meta, contact Saveri Law Firm HERE.

Did you find any of your work in the pirated libraries?

ChatGPT Goes to Court

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By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

The day after Jim’s recent post about AI and ChatGPT, I ran across an article about what could possibly go wrong.

In a case before the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Mata v. Avianca, Inc., the plaintiff’s attorney submitted a motion to dismiss based on research cites from ChatGPT.

One problem: the court discovered the cases cited didn’t exist.

According to an affidavit filed by attorney Peter LoDuca, the law firm of Levidow, Levidow, & Oberman, PC represented Roberto Mata in a personal injury case against Avianca, Inc. for injuries allegedly sustained by Mr. Mata as a passenger on Avianca Airlines. Another attorney with 30 years of experience, Steven Schwartz, used ChatGPT to conduct research to support the motion to dismiss.

Chat GPT turned up the following cases:

Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co, Ltd, 925 F 3d 1339 (11th Cir 2019); Shaboon v. Egyptair, 2013IL App (1st 111279-U (IL App Ct. 2013); Petersen v. Iran Air, 905 F. Supp 2d 121 (D.D.C. 2012); Martinez v. Delta Airlines, 2019 WL 4639462 (Tex. App. Dept. 25, 2019); Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, 2017 WL 2418825 (Ga. Ct. App. June 5, 2017).

According to an affidavit by Mr. Schwartz, he “has never utilized Chat GPT as a source for conducting legal research prior to this occurrence and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

Attached to the affidavit is the following transcript:

ChatGPT transcript:[Q:] ls varghese a real case

[A:] Yes, Varghese v., China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019) is a real case.

[Q:] What is your source

[A:] I apologize for the confusion earlier. Upon double-checking, I found that the case Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), does indeed exist and can be found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. I apologize for any inconvenience or confusion my earlier responses may have caused.

[Q:] Are the other cases you provided fake

[A:] No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.”

Apparently ChatGPT wasn’t under oath. The cases were not found.

Mr. Schwartz’s affidavit states that he “greatly regrets having used generative artificial intelligence” and “had no intent to deceive this Court or the defendant.”

On May 4, 2023, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel issued an order to show cause that stated:

Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations…Set forth below is an Order to show cause why the plaintiff’s counsel ought not be sanctioned. 

There are numerous documented cases of ChatGPT “hallucinations,” a polite euphemism for bovine excrement.

The headline of an April 3, 2023 article in Bloomberg reads: “AI Doesn’t Hallucinate. It Makes Things Up.” According to a January 17, 2023 article in Datanami.com, “making stuff up” occurs an estimated 15 to 20% of the time.

Here’s another incident involving lawyers. On May 10, 2023, NewRepublic.com conducted an interview with Will Oremus, a reporter for the Washington Post. According to Will, a law professor asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of lawyers who had sexually harassed someone. Will describes the results:

ChatGPT spits out this list of lawyers, and it not only gives names, but it gives citations, which is really helpful. You can look up the stories about when they were accused of sexually harassing people. And the lawyer who gets the list is looking through it and he recognizes one of the names: Jonathan Turley. He’s a pretty prominent lawyer. The guy who was looking it up, Volokh, says, “Well, that’s odd. I don’t remember that controversy.” And so he follows the citation and it actually cited a Washington Post story about the supposed incident, and it doesn’t exist. It’s just completely fabricated out of thin air. So he emails Turley and says, “Hey, did you know ChatGPT is accusing you of sexually harassing a student on a trip?” It was very detailed, right? A trip to Alaska. It sounded like the thing you wouldn’t make up, but in fact, ChatGPT did make it up.

How could this happen? One theory is that, as AI scrapes data, it seeks out search terms, keywords, and names that are linked on the net. Using those search connections, it then creates a story that sounds plausible although it could be false.

Will opines:

Turley has been in the news as a commentator on stories about sexual harassment in the legal profession. His name was in articles that have the words lawyer, and sexual harassment. And that’s probably how it came up with him doing this in the first place.

Here at TKZ, many comments have been critical about AI’s attempts to write fiction, calling them soulless and without emotion.

However, unfortunately it appears to do a convincing job of incorporating fiction into what is supposed to be nonfiction.

Would you call ChatGPT an unreliable narrator? 

~~~

Taking this a step further, as crime writers, we do some pretty unconventional searches.

TKZers: Are you concerned AI might inaccurately connect you with topics that you’re researching? For instance, serial killers, poisons, explosive devices, kidnapping, etc.

~~~

 

Although AI is the subject of my new thriller, Deep Fake Double Down, no AI was used to write the story. Please check out what 100% human imagination can make up.

Amazon sales link   

Other major online booksellers

Using ChatGPT as a Blog Research and Writing Tool

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ChatGPT is a deep-learning natural language processing application developed by Open AI that can simplify research and writing for bloggers.

In today’s digital landscape, bloggers are regularly being challenged to produce high quality, informative blogs to reach their target audience. This can be a daunting task, especially when a blogger is pressed for time and resources. Luckily, with advances in technology, a helping hand is now available: Open AI ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is a text-generating deep-learning means application developed by Open AI. It uses a number of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, including natural language processing (NLP), to help people generate text.

By entering a prompt and providing concise answers to the application’s questions, ChatGPT can provide a starting point for your blog article. It does this by returning the prompt in a new format, with additional verbiage, in order to aid in the research and writing aspects of your blog post.

Using ChatGPT is an efficient way to streamline research and writing. It allows you to skip the preliminary research and start writing. ChatGPT simplifies the research and writing process through three key steps.

The first step is to enter your prompt into the application’s text window. Once your prompt has been entered, the user is then asked to provide answers to questions that are related to the prompt. By submitting your answers, ChatGPT can generate a blog post topic and develop a skeleton structure that can be used as a basis for the content.

The second step is validating the information. After the initial output has been generated, the user can then refine the research by verifying any information that is provided by the program. This is an important step as it ensures that any data provided by the application is accurate.

The third step is to utilise the text output in the blog post. Once your main points have been made, the information generated by ChatGPT can be used to craft content around the main points by providing additional detail. This can be especially helpful if the user is short on ideas or lacks the depth of knowledge required for a particular subject.

ChatGPT is an effective tool for bloggers because of the time and resources it saves. Instead of putting in hours of research and writing, users can quickly get the information they need and have a solid foundation for their blog post.

Unlike other AI applications, ChatGPT is extremely versatile, offering blog writers an effective means of generating fresh ideas, verifying sources of material, and providing structure and direction to their writing. Furthermore, the application’s natural language capability makes it quite effective at helping users stay in tune with readers’ interest and quickly provide quality material.

To conclude, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that offers real and tangible benefits to bloggers. It can help save time and resources by providing a easy and convenient starting point for blog content. Moreover, its natural language capabilities ensure that the content created is relevant to readers. So, if you are looking for a way to simplify research and writing for your blog, Open AI ChatGPT should be at the top of your list.

Kill Zoners — I (Garry Rodgers) didn’t write this post. Nor did I copy & paste. Artificial Intelligence composed this original content for me, at my request. Yes, it’s a bot’s work and it’s unedited. All I did was enter the following prompt into Open AI ChatGPT. Then I pressed submit and, in 34 seconds, the app produced the preceding piece:

Please write me an approximately 500-word blog post on what Open AI ChatGPT is and how to effectively use it as a blog research and writing tool. I want to post this on The Kill Zone and need it written in a format that suits The Kill Zone style. Please include a clear and helpful conclusion.

Here’s the link to the Playground where you can try out ChatGPT:  https://beta.openai.com/playground

Here’s a link to a clear tutorial about using ChatGPT: https://app.gumroad.com/d/e52116ff42766c5d8567cb6d812c5dbb

Discussion question: Has anyone else used ChatGPT technology? It’s been available for six weeks and is getting a lot of attention.

Footnote: I’m offline for the next few days, so I’ve asked Debbie Burke to drive the KZ comment bus for me. Thanks, Debbie!

AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Authors

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Anyone remember HAL9000 from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 Space Odyssey series? HAL, or the Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer, was the artificial intelligence (AI) voice that famously said, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” That series was set in 2001. Now, 20 years later, we authors are firmly anchored in a world of artificial intelligence.

Think about how AI affects our writing life. I’m pecking away on a laptop with spell check big-brothering me. My smartphone keeps tab of my time and when I text, AutoCorrect interferes—sometimes with hilarious changes. (Sidenote: no form of AI will ever get comma use right.)

I stop writing, more often than not, to fact check or rabbit hole on Google which is one large AI search engine. Same with Amazon and Facebook. They’re loaded with AI features we take for granted.

When I finish this piece, and I have no idea right now how long it’ll be, I’ll plug this AI-overseen Word.doc into my AI-run Grammarly editing program and clean it up the best I can before I pop it into AI-filled WordPress and hit publish so you can read it on AI-induced devices. Like, how cool is this brave new world of artificial intelligence?

Speaking of cool, I once paid top dollar to experience a gyro-ride in an artificially intelligent F/A-18 Hornet flight simulator. How I didn’t puke from being strapped-in and pulling multi-G’s was amazing in itself, and that’s for another story, but part of the thrill was listening to “Bitching Betty” who artificially sits with you in the cockpit and shrieks in an Edith Bunker voice, “Pull up! Pull up!” when you get too low to the ground while exiting an inverted loop.

Okay, back down to earth. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, AI for authors. I’m a big believer in making work easier. In fact, I’d like to not work at all, but writing is work and it helps pay the bills. So I embrace what AI technology is out there to assist with the income.

I’m keeping a close eye on Text-To-Speech (TTS) technology. I think the next tech wave is interactive ebooks where the reader will have a solid listener option for the device to convincingly turn the text into a realistic voice. That virtual reality already exists. It’s just not perfected yet. But my bet is within a few short years AI will allow a quick tap on your eReader, and you’ll listen to your book as if Bitching Betty was real.

This AI advancement may put the screws to those expensive human narrators or voiceovers who control today’s audiobook production. That’s progress, as they say, and I look forward to an affordable alternative in entering the audiobook market. It’s just that today’s TTS apps aren’t realistic enough to let my book babies play well with them.

They’re getting there, though. What brought on this artificially intelligent post was a recent wave of internet ads by a company called Speechelo. Anyone else see the FB ad-flood offering a 3-step, simple-to-use AI TTS generator for a 1-time low, low price of $49.00? Well, it turns out to be too good to be true, and the AI bots from Google shrieked, “SCAM!”

However, my rabbit hole descent found something else which I think is the real-deal AI writer program. I’ll get to that in a sec. First, I want to say a bit about TTS technology.

There’s some good AI reading apps out there, no doubt. Amazon’s Polly is remarkable. Word on the street is that AZ has an experimental TTS program on the go that aims to perfect NGL (natural language generation) on Kindle devices. Currently, AZ has a Kindle text-to-speech enablement that’s terribly inefficient. Here’s a quote about the new TTS program from an Amazon side channel I found in the r-hole:

“The second-generation Kindle and the Kindle DX have an “experimental” feature that converts any text to speech and realistically reads it to you. Calling a feature experimental means that it’s a peripheral Kindle feature that Amazon is working on;  they’re available for “test driving” by certain Kindle owners to use but they might not be fully featured. There are some features that Amazon could choose to discontinue before they’re available to the open market.”

I don’t have a Kindle, so I can’t apply for a test drive. What I’ve done is plug some of my WIP text into Polly, and I have to say it sounds pretty good. From a voice perspective, that is. However, the AI still doesn’t have convincing NGL where the pace, accent, pronunciation, pitch, and infliction is that of a human narrator who brings emotion to the audio experience. That’s coming, believe me, and I’ll welcome its arrival.

Okay, on to what I found in AI for authors and the takeaway from this piece. It’s an AI novel critique program called Marlowe from a new company called Authors A.I. I found this software by rabbit-holing, and I was as skeptical as a sailor being offered a discount date. Marlowe is a next-generation AI critic (not so much an editor) who works for peanuts compared to the flesh and blood word scalpel. Here’s their sales pitch:

Marlowe* is an artificial intelligence that helps authors improve their novels and long-form fiction. She was born in January 2020 as the creative child of Matthew Jockers, Ph.D., co-author of The Bestseller Code, abetted by a surrounding cast of bestselling authors who have been contributing ideas and enhancements to her reports.

Here are a few fun facts about this brilliant reader.

She’s fast. Marlowe can read your book and deliver a 25+ page comprehensive critique within an hour.

She’s inexpensive. Priced at a fraction of the cost of a human editor, Marlowe allows you to run multiple versions of your report and can be used at every stage in the life of your manuscript. Let Marlowe identify and help you solve early issues before your manuscript reaches an editor or beta readers.

She doesn’t play favorites. Marlowe doesn’t have a favorite genre. She doesn’t judge, whether your book is a light-as-air fantasy or a thriller filled with gore or violence. She reads all fictional genres and sub-genres and returns equal and unbiased feedback, though she will tweak her results based on her specific genre norms.

She knows what goes into a good story. Seriously. Marlowe can critique character traits, plot arcs, narrative arcs, pacing, punctuation, sentence structure, reading level, and more.

* Why Marlowe?
Marlowe is named for both Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan tragedian who inspired Shakespeare, and Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled private eye who plays chess and reads poetry. We like to think she has Philip Marlowe’s intellect and investigative skills and Christopher Marlowe’s pioneering spirit and love for the written word.

Marlow offers a free trial. Not being one to turn down something for free, I entered my manuscript for Beyond The Limits which is my latest release in my based on true crime series. I have to say I was impressed with the results. The freebie gave me twelve pages of professional-looking feedback on:

Sentence stats and readability score
Clichés
Dialogue vs narrative
Explicit language (aka profanity)
Frequent adverb and adjective use
Verb choice and passive voice
Punctuation data
Possible misspellings

This was all for free and the feedback provided excellent suggestions. It also offered the upsell that would give me information and criticism on:

Plot structure
Story beats
Pacing
Personality traits
Subject matter
Repetitive phrases

Now I’m not on the Marlowe affiliate program or getting some sort of kickback for promoting Marlowe. I just found this AI tool interesting enough that I think I’m going to buy their Pro version which runs at $89.00 for a single complete report or a monthly pass at $29.99. A full-year subscription will set you back $199.00.

And that is what AI is to authors—a tool. AI assistance is a valuable tool for writers. I’d say it’s an invaluable tool that’s only going to get better. However, I don’t believe AI will ever replace the human brain and the imagination it produces. As Kevin Kelly says in his 2016 book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, “It’s not a race against machines. We’ll lose. It’s a race with machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with machines. Let them take your existing job and let them help you dream up new work for the robots.”

I’m good with that take on AI. I’m not about to let some bot steal my story. As HAL said, “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

What about you Kill Zoners? What feedback can you give on AI for authors?

——

Garry Rodgers is a retired homicide detective and coroner. Garry’s expertise is investigating human deaths which led him to his third career in crime writing. His newest release in his 12-part Based-On-True-Crime Series is Beyond The Limits which covers an incomprehensible tragedy. The tagline is, “You never know what goes in in people’s minds.”

Garry Rodgers also hosts a popular blog at DyingWords.net. Besides writing ventures, Garry also holds a marine captain certification and uses it on the Pacific waters surrounding his home at Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.