AI tools for creative writing
The development of generative artificial intelligence has revolutionised how writers think about the writing process. As much as we wouldn't want to diminish the importance of traditional poetry writing or creative writing as a tool for fostering human creativity, it must be acknowledged that digital tools are transforming the field in powerful ways and that the topic needs to be addressed.
We want to mention the general benefits and potential risks of using AI in the creative writing process before we go into individual tools or recommendations. We will specifically focus on writing in general, not on scientific texts, where several limitations formulated by specific journals need to be reflected.
The main benefits of AI tools in the writing process can include:
Saving time - with AI, we generally write fast, and writing a book is a long and frustrating process for which not everyone has the patience. So, these tools can help create a volume of text, speed up activities, etc.
Stylistic editing - stylistic and grammatical editing is crucial and can be done with AI; we can have it shorten or lengthen the text, shift its emotional tone, structure it better, or use the tools to find good descriptions and synonyms. So, they replace the editor in this area, which can be very practical.
Finding a possible sequel - if you have a story, dialogue or plot, you can let the AI generate different scenarios for where the plot will go and choose from them. But it can also be used to create your own plot or sequel text when you have no idea.
Creating illustrations or soundtracks - stories don't have to be based on text alone but can also be worked with in a complementary way. For example, specifically crafted music or illustrations can add another quality dimension to the final piece.
Overcoming the blank page - many people find it hard to get started with writing. If you have a beginning of text created, it can be easier to build on it later.
Translations into literary forms - do you need to have a text in a particular dialect, speech style or perhaps in verse? Artificial intelligence can convert an author's text into specific forms, which can be very practical for literary purposes. On the other hand, such adaptations almost always require the author's intervention.
Translation - must you translate a verse or text into another language? Artificial intelligence can be instrumental in this, and an author can easily insert phrases in Latin or Italian into a historical novel, for example, even if they don't know those languages.
Error correction - generally, these tools are perfect for proofreading a manuscript.
Discussions can be used effectively to think through a particular action model, dialogue, and character behaviour. A well-chosen prompt allows for specific dialogic thinking about possible further development or characters' actions, which can positively affect the final text's consistency.
In addition to these possibilities or positives, it is also necessary to consider certain limitations that the use of such tools may entail, such as:
Ethics and authorship - it is essential to seek a balance between when the product created is "ours" and when it is more the work of artificial intelligence. But there are also acknowledged collaborative elements of authorship. It is always the case that if the AI participates in the text more than the eventual editor of the text, its role should be explicitly acknowledged and described. Transparency pays off in this area.
Risk of loss of personality - texts created by artificial intelligence limit the specifics of the author's literary style - from lexical devices to sentence construction to the metaphors or similes he uses. This particularity constitutes a key parameter of the quality of creative activity.
The risk of banality and low originality - AI makes it possible to generate things that are perfect on average but lack originality, surprise, and radical change. Its outputs are the essence of banality unless the author can add something special. Creative processes aim to avoid these banal structures and instead use the outputs for one's creative work.
Risk of inconsistency - the individual outcomes may not be remembered well enough by the author and mapped onto the story, which can result in the loss or limitation of the consistency of the entire literary work.
Risk of errors - AI can generate errors or hallucinate. It is essential to check the individual outputs carefully and work with them critically, reducing the production speed of the final texts.
Now, we can look at some AI tools that can be used for creative sleep. We're not going for a complete list, as much as we are creating some typological idea of what AI now enables in creativity. However, choosing a specific tool is rather illustrative and always depends on the particular situation (type and financial) and the optimal tool. At the same time, we have to stress that the effectiveness of a tool is related mainly to experience - just because something doesn't work for you doesn't mean it won't be a good tool with different knowledge. At the same time, this field is developing very fast, so changing the language model can make an utterly mediocre application into a great tool or, on the contrary, make some tools no longer needed.
Proofreading and translation. If you want style and grammar editing tools, Grammarly, ProWritingAid or DeepL Write are highly recommended. They offer you style control, the ability to work with tone and consistency of language quality. For translations, DeepL and ChatGPT seem to achieve good results; in both cases, the outputs can be combined with Grammarly. ChatGPT can also do simple text rephrasing and things like that.
Character Creation. Character AI is used for defining characters, so it guides the author through the possibility of carefully constructing each role in the story, showing who has what qualities, allowing for more efficient story creation or the ability to ensure consistency in the different parts of the story.
Creative helpers. Type is a minimalist text editor that has a ChatGPT tool integrated into the sidebar, making it easy to add or work with AI directly while typing. Squibler works similarly - a person writes text and can have a paragraph expanded, text shortened, a description of something added, or a character created. But the app can also offer a text outline when a topic is entered. The licensing policy is interesting here, as the app includes the ability to write 6000 AI words for free per month. SudoWrite also allows you to create chapter and character summaries, generate or edit text sections, etc. It acts as a kind of assistant or editor that is always at hand.
If you want to focus on advertising copy or marketing in general, you will have a much wider range of tools. However, in our review, the essential criterion was that the tool chosen should allow truly sophisticated support for authorial creativity. So the goal is not to build a collection of short stories using ChatGPT but to learn how to build an ecosystem of tools that allow us to be more creative. The last group of tools, in particular, can be very helpful.
