AI novel-writing is pointless
“Nobody goes sailing so they can use autohelm”
To say that I started writing a book with AI is a misnomer. I am finishing a bit of work culminating in a book, having begun as a screenplay almost 15 years previous. It's a black comedy inspired by the work of Martin McDonagh. I wrote it with Brendan Gleeson in mind for the main character role, with Pierce Brosnan as be the baddie. The world could do with seeing Brendan Gleeson trying to kill Pierce Brosnan at his smarmiest, and I wrote a screenplay that would make it happen. More on that here. But I don’t know how to sell a screenplay, so in a moment of hubris I thought hey, let’s turn it into a book and try and sell that instead.
Because I'm building a company with AI, I force myself to think in an AI-first way and it's slowly become my default setting to ask: “I wonder if I can do this with AI or I wonder if AI can contribute to any old thing I'm doing being a little bit better. “
So, when I decided to adapt the screenplay into a novel I broke the screenplay down and fed it scene-by-scene into ChatGPT and Claude, like live rats to a snake, to see what the digestion would yield.
AI as a writing partner
I'm certainly not the first person to conceive of AI as a writing partner. I've read a couple of books at this point that I genuinely liked, where the author has drawn in AI as an additional voice. But they've always been business books or by people in the AI space – so AI has its natural place in those.
I couldn’t imagine reading an AI-generated novel. I’m currently reading Paul Lynch’s sublime famine novel Grace. Lynch is the antithesis of AI, one of those writers like Cormac McCarthy who’s practically reinventing English, sentence by sentence, as he writes. He’s constantly stabbing you with shivs of brand new language. Look at this sentence:
The child no more than four, flame-haired, bull-dognosed, the little hand held out, the voice so tiny it is like the sound that escapes from a hug.
» the voice so tiny it is like the sound that escapes from a hug «
I don’t care how many stolen books you feed your algorithm, an LLM will never conjure a phrase like ‘the sound that escapes from a hug’. To prove my point, here’s my attempt to get Claude to sound like Paul Lynch. His books are in LibGen, so it’s fair to assume that his prose has found its way into all the major models.
It produced a kind of ninth-grade effort. You can sense the machine grinding away at mimicry, without fully grasping what it’s mimicking, but you can also see the borders. It’s recognizably trying to be like him, but it’s too verbose. And yet, the chatbot is so confident it’s gotten it right – after all, it followed the recipe all the theft gave it. It put all the right ingredients in the bowl, but the bread is not like mother used to make. There’s Lynchian prose in this vast glob of text it’s given me, for sure, but the overwhelming sense is of a forgery, or a sculpture still trapped in a rock. You could edit it to be Lynchian, were you inclined.
Art is about seeing unseen things, and that’s the thing with LLMs – they operate exclusively on seen things, vast quantities of what has gone before.
They originate content, but it’s not always original - and often that’s absolutely fine. If you need to generate a substantial body of competent copy to gin up SEO traffic, AI is a fantastic way to do that. If you need to enable teams to go from creating material that’s 20% acceptable to consistently 85-90% acceptable – the right AI tools will do that. But if you want something that’s embued with fine emotion and really requires the human touch, you’re going to need humans to touch it.
The chapters-from-scenes I asked ChatGPT and Claude to generate lacked a warmth; they leant on clichés and jaded, recognizable syntax structures. There was nothing unique or flavorsome or innovative or voicey about the descriptions or the mise-en-scene; the AI didn't try and draw me into the heads of the characters. The AI didn't assume their point of view and shine a light out from where they stood, it didn’t stand in their shoes and close its eyes and imagine how they might be feeling, all the irrational thoughts that might intrude on their consciousnesses. It didn't go deeper. Its flaws weren’t even interesting, they fit clumsily like a cheap sweater.
AI as anti-matter
I am using the soulless proto-chapters as anti-matter, as an example of what I don’t want the book to be, going back to the original dialogue to work each chapter through anew myself until I find my own voice and the voice of the characters I’d created. I’m nine or so chapters deep now and enjoying the process.
Frankly, it was something of a relief that AI failed on the novel project. The best books are the ones that get their hooks right into your heart. And they either do that by inspiring you with the sheer virtuosic beauty of how they're crafted and written, or they make you fall in love with imaginary beings that an author has conjured out of thin air and pure emotion. AI attempts at this are comfortingly derivative. They may well generate something ostensibly novel, but they’re not de jure new, because they lean heavily and directly on what’s already been done. Arguably, the same is true of human creations, but we are at least humans and when we create something of our memories and emotions and experiences, all of which by definition are very human, there’s an organic mulch that nourishes the idea from seed with a little more earthy chaos.
Generative AI creates something based on proximity of concepts and approximations and extrapolations from next-best algorithms (if you really want to go deep on it there are 19,000 very smart words here). Those creations are very useful in plenty of situations, but none of them are fired by an ephemeral human synaptic spark, none of them arise out of a moment of inspiration. None of them are love or fear or spite or desire.
AI works, just not everywhere
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in the ‘AI is just a next-word prediction machine’ camp. That’s lazy, reductive cynicism peddled by the fearful & the ignorant. I am a huge AI-in-the-right-context booster. I believe that it has a catalogue of failings, but that it is an astonishing but infant technology which will, in aggregate, advance humanity in an incredible number of ways.
At NOAN, by day, we’re building a platform that is an enormous enabler for people to build their concepts into businesses and find ways to make a living that they arguably couldn’t do before generative AI came along - because they didn’t have the skills. I believe that’s a good thing. And better people than I are using AI to solve much bigger problems, cure diseases, and hopefully make the world a better place to try and cancel it some of the negative externalities that AI brings with it.
By night I’m trying to cleanse by writing something straight out my synapses, unmediated in any way.
RECORD SCRATCH – This is where I pivot to the water.
What I love about sailing is that it’s a nerdsport, but also something completely organic. It’s all maths and geometry and physics and variable mapping and materials science and process optimization. But it demands that you put away synthetic distractions and pay attention to it. It has endless variety. Soccer is soccer is soccer - it’s always a ball and a goal, very little changes. There are tens of thousands of boats you can jump into, each with individual quirks and profiles. The tides and wind and weather are different from location to location, and change further based on the weather and time of day. Nothing is static. It demands mindfulness, constant awareness. It is blissfully all-consuming.
Sailing is novel-writing in this metaphor, I guess. AI is autohelm.
Only so much of sailing is purely mechanical and transferrable to a mechanism like AI, especially when racing. Steering is the most obvious - you can delegate it to autohelm with pretty satisfying results. Plug in a waypoint to a GPS, or even a series of waypoints, and you’ll get where you need to go as long as the sails are trimmed, and either the wind keeps blowing or there’s diesel in the tank. It doesn’t feel great. It’s jerky and noisy. Its reaction times are a bit dull.
Anyway, nobody sails so that they can use autohelm. You sail so you can feel it in your fingers. Autohelm is fine if you’re sailing solo, or doing a long, dull delivery, where you’re covering the miles thoughtlessly. If you need it so that you can sleep or change a sail offshore and keep the boat from going out of control, it’s a godsend; or if you simply cannot be arsed being at the helm, it’ll take on the drudgery. And if you’re sailing an insane 60-foot hydrofoiling offshore monster non-stop and alone for 2.5 months only sleeping 15-30 minutes at a time, it helps to have autohelm powered by machine learning.
But for the most part, people sail for the tiller-in-hand authenticity, that’s what makes it worthwhile. Even on a delivery, doing the helming still feels un-chore-like, it’s still where the most joy is in the whole endeavour. I’ve done a few multi-day deliveries and helming the boat at night on a breezy reach - there’s no way I’d let the autohelm take that away from me.
Automations are wonderful things and you should absolutely use them where you can to make life easier, safer, more affordable, less arduous or inequitable. That’s what they’re for. But it’s as important to figure out where we are best to wrest control back from the machines and keep our fleshy hands on the tiller.
