I’ve seen lots of movies about AI run amuck. The Terminator was an early one, and those movies were good for about the first three, then there was The Matrix, where the first was good while the rest (haven’t seen the fourth) were pretty much abominations. I tend to like dystopian, disaster, thriller movies, as they tell stories about the human spirit and people rising to the challenge, even if the scripts are not often the best and some of them can get pretty hokey.

Having said that, they’re just movies. There are many needed conversations about where AI is taking us, and there are a lot of experts sounding the alarm, suggesting we should pull back and figure out some of the holes, know exactly what we’re doing before we dive in head first. I generally think they’re correct, even if I don’t believe in the sort of machine-domination worries that some people espouse. While someone could program a machine to do something horrific and a bad actor could theoretically set something in motion using AI, I see no way a machine could gain consciousness.

I’ve been thinking about AI for some time. I’ve seen lots of information that suggests it’s an excellent tool for writing, even if it has limitations. But I’d never really looked into it. Perhaps that’s just me set in my routines and not really wanting to go out of them. Until recently.

I have a project I needed to complete, and as I wasn’t making any headway, I decided to turn to AI to see if it could help. The results were middling at best, but at least it gave me a few ideas which set the ball rolling. While I was doing this, I decided to take a look at AI and see if it could help me with some writing projects that have been languishing on the virtual shelf.

That’s where I was blown away. Again, it has limitations. The ideas it spits out are only as good as the input you give it. Some of the stuff I got wasn’t very good, but some was excellent, so much so that I jotted the information down and am planning to go back to explore it. That’s where it really seems to shine, in giving you ideas. I don’t think it’s ethical to instruct AI to write something for me and pass it off as my own writing. I also don’t think it’s good to tell it to do an outline for me. But to use it to get ideas and jumpstart things that aren’t going so well? That is fair game as far as I’m concerned.

As most who frequent this blog will know, I’ve published almost exclusively Pride and Prejudice variations, but I have lots of ideas for other stuff. I’ve been so immersed in P&P that it’s been hard to get the other ideas going. Now I have some hope that with AI, I can massage my muse until it begins to figure out how to plan some of these stories. Hopefully in the future I’ll branch out a little more!