If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, it’s an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that has the ability to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of questions and prompts.
It can provide concise information (but not always accurate – check your sources!), and assist with writing short-form such as emails and reports.
While ChatGPT has an incredibly useful ability to generate text that mimics human writing, it is limited by what information was used to train the data – for example, ChatGPT doesn’t know about any world events that occurred after 2021. It’s also limited by how much it can output. It can’t spit out a full-length novel in minutes, not just because the standard word count of a novel is 60-100k and that word count is just too high for the current version of ChatGPT to produce long-form content, but because creating a novel requires a level of creativity and understanding of narrative structure that ChatGPT simply cannot replicate.
Artificial Intelligence is just that: it’s artificial. It’s not real intelligence. And any reader can tell you that it requires a certain degree of creativity to write a whole-ass novel. A whole-ass novel is not just a series of sentences or paragraphs strung together. It requires a plot with rising action, character development, and a resolution that satisfies the reader. It requires its author to make decisions about pacing, dialogue, and scene settings. These are all things that are difficult for AI to accomplish without a high level of input and guidance from a human, which makes it a better time and energy investment to just write the damn novel yourself.
The issue is that the AI needs a thinking, creative person to hand-feed everything into the AI to get the responses required to cobble together a full-length novel. ChatGPT lacks the imagination and intuition that a full-length novel requires, and can only regurgitate content it already knows from pre-existing sources fed to it during data training. It can’t draw on the author’s experiences, emotions, and creativity that make those stories engaging. It can’t come up with something original without significant input and guidance by a human.
That’s not to say that ChatGPT can’t be used in the writing process, and I’ll talk more about how I use AI to help my own writing process in a later blog post. But the current limitations on the technology and the intricacies and skill required to craft a full-length novel means that ChatGPT is not capable of writing a full-length novel in 2023.
Lissa Bilyk 