How I Use AI In My Writing (And It Might Not Be Like You Think)

 Artificial Intelligence.

Some call it the enemy of creative pursuits. To some degree, I get that point of view. AI models need to be trained on something, and there are copyright problems galore in its path to online dominance.

For me? Maybe I don't see it as a problem, because I don't know how much value there's been in the stuff I've created! :D

Having previously described how the whole person of Flint came to my mind and imagination one day, I still get the same feeling when I sit down to write a Flint story. He's the first character I've had to survive more than one novel. I'll be honest, the character I've liked the most out of the ones in my books.

But life interferes with writing. I don't that phrase working the other way around. It's a consuming hobby, but also one that requires a lot of those who seek to do it.

I've had to carve out time for writing (and sometimes spaces to write in). Sometimes this has been before starting my full-time job for the day. Sometimes in my lunch hour. A lot of writers prefer quiet times of the day. Early morning before others are awake. Late at night when they've all gone to bed again.

With modern tech as it is, writing in any place is easier than ever. The problem can come with blocking the world out and bringing that world in which you're writing back to the fore of your imagination. This, for me, is where AI helps.

First, characters.

For Enoch Flint, I had the guy in mind from the first moment. I knew what his voice sounded like. How he looked. How he dressed. All of it. I used AI to help bring that vision to life.

Possibly one of the longest running AI platforms out there is thispersondoesnotexist.com which can amassed photographs of various facial features by the hundreds of thousands and every time you refresh the page, you get a new photo of a person who does not actually exist. I find this very useful for giving me the faces of my characters, so I can visualise them for writing descriptions. I sat on this page, hitting refresh for characters one day when Flint showed up. A happy coincidence. I kept on going and got all the characters that appear in The Departure Lounge. If you're struggling to visualise your characters, this is not a bad place to start.

I often do the same with locations and Google Street View or the Bing equivalent, but I don't consider these to be AI.

I also sometimes need a little help with names and personal details to really flesh out a character. Usually a photo and a name is enough to get me going. For names, when I need a hand, I've often turned to www.fakenamegenerator.com which gives you not only a name, but an address, phone number, social security number, various other things. All entirely made up (as far as I know).

So that's the stuff that gets me imagining. But how about sticking me right in Enoch Flint's world?

Sometimes in the past I'd search on YouTube for ambient sound and music videos. These can be useful to put you on a beach, by a river, up a mountain, whatever. Some music has been very helpful in getting me into Flint's mood and frame of mind (often soft, moody jazz does it, despite my previous aversion to jazz).

When I started writing Flint stories, a simple melody popped into my head, which I don't think I've heard anywhere before. Might have stuck in my head one night after a dream (or I nicked it from somewhere without knowing. If it was from you, sorry!). I tried to use MIDI websites to help me get the tune down. One of these worked, but it all sounded a bit basic, like MIDI music always does.

I've recently discovered the websites suno.com and more particularly sonauto.ai which have both helped me bring that simple melody to life, and generate several minutes of audio based from it. Thanks to this, I've joined with AI in composing music to go along with reading The Departure Lounge, so I can help fire the imaginations of my readers (and also use the music as backing for audiobooks). I've also paid out for an AI voiceover website which allows me to clone my voice. With some messing around with tone and accents, I found Flint's voice here too. Using these audio methods together, I can create immersive audio files to tell Flint's stories.

I haven't used AI website for the actual writing part. I still consider this cheating, I suppose.

But for editing, systems are all around us, and it's foolish not to at least give them a try to polish your product. Microsoft Office 365 has its Editor, which is actually decent. Some people swear by Grammarly, but I've never quite got on with it. I've also dabbled with the hemingwayapp.com website, which can help me tune my writing style to be a little more concise and sharp. It takes things too far every once in a while, I think, but if you take what it offers as advice, it can be useful.

AI has its place, and I'm still really trying to find ways to allow it to enrich my creative process as well as life in general. There may come a time when most writers resort to AI for the difficult part. Should they do so, I'm wondering why you'd bother, personally.

For me, AI has its use for immersing a writer in a story and giving their imagination a kickstart.

For me, at least, that's not cheating.