The Invisible Servant: The Right Way to Use AI as a Writer

The appearance of AI was met with an uproar: graphic designers fearing for their jobs, writers fearing that people won’t buy human-generated literature anymore, and musical artists feeling relieved, thinking they’ll never have to pay for videos again (ha-ha, that’s cute).

But AI didn’t live up to all those expectations. Not yet, at least.

While capable of much, AI still can’t replace human creativity and imagination. And for true lovers of the written word—the real book worms—an AI generated novel won’t ever replace the experience of reading a book written by a human, with all their experiences and emotions spilled into it.

But AI has begun making its impact on the written word—not replacing, but rather empowering writers. This is particularly true for beginner writers, even more so for those who can’t afford to hire an editor, but it can be a powerful tool for experienced authors as well.

AI can act as your personal assistant, helping you improve your writing at any stage of the process—plotting, writing or editing.

Let’s dive into all the ways AI can help make your writing better.

Look Out for Pitfalls

The more complex the story, the more likely it is to include inner inconsistencies to some degree. A developmental editor can help identify those, but even a seasoned editor can lose a loose thread here and there if the pile of details becomes unmanageable. AI doesn’t have that sort of limitation.

I have personally utilized ChatGPT+ as a developmental editor. I created a chatbot intended to act as an editor specializing in fantasy, and uploaded my full manuscript for a high-level review, and you can easily do the same—minimal technical skill required.

Once your document is uploaded to your personal AI editor, you can start asking it questions.

My experimentations included asking my invisible assistant to summarize the manuscript to ensure it understands it and can identify the main motifs. I then progressed to ask it about potential plotholes, pacing and whether this or that character’s actions were in character (lame pun intended).

The idea is that you can have a discussion with your virtual assistant and analyze your work from the perspective of story structure, character development, parallel storylines and inner consistency.

I found that while it might miss a few details you find important, or focus on others you don’t, this process is still very useful in identifying significant issues.

It’s ‘Your Highness’, not ‘You’re highness’

Once you feel that your story’s inner logic is airtight, your characters are built to perfection, and the pacing is engaging and smooth, you can sit back and relax. But only for a brief moment, as the next chunk of work ahead of you is no less demanding.

The next level of editing I used AI for, and you should strongly consider, is styling and language.

Grammar will also be included in this section, though it isn’t the main goal.

For this phase, what you want to do is improve vocabulary, style and the flow of sentences.

When generating prompts for your AI assistant, you can reference existing writers whose styles you want to match, or genres. An example could be “Edit this text in the style of epic fantasy”.

While some AI bots require a subscription to upload a full document, for this level of editing, you won’t need it. Many free AI tools will allow you to process a fairly high number of words in an unlimited number of messages.

I decided to use the ChatGPT paid subscription, as I felt that the newer language model was more consistent, less prone to hallucinations, and maintained the same style easily.

You don’t have to mimic the style of another writer, but you can ask your invisible assistant to improve vocabulary, sentence structure, and manner. You can even ask it to flag sections that break stylistic consistency.

When reviewing the suggestions your AI editor generates, you might notice things like words being overused and repeated, along with suggestions for other terms to replace them.

You might find sentences that were too cumbersome simplified into cleaner, smoother forms, and that one scene you wrote when you were in a weird mood—that one that doesn’t seem to work though you don’t know why—full of suggestions to keep the tone more consistent with the rest of the book.

Not only was this process useful for making my debut book—Monsters and Heroes—more readable, it helped me grow as a writer.

I started to notice bad sentence-structure habits, and went from cumbersome to a little bit more elegant in mere weeks of work. My vocabulary grew, and while I didn’t use all of the suggestions (you still want to keep it your own, after all), they took my manuscript to the next level.

To ; or To —?

The final level of editing you can utilize AI for is proofreading and punctuation. This is where my prompts became dry, and I specifically asked my digital editor not to alter the style, but to only correct punctuation and grammar mistakes.

This must be the bane of all writers, particularly beginning ones—all you want to do is sit and write, get swept up by the creative process, and then you find yourself thinking about whether you should use an em dash or an en dash.

Granted, it is not the most exciting part of writing, but there are rules you have to follow, and AI can easily help you figure out what these rules are and how to apply them.

If you ask me which job stands the risk of being replaced by AI—my money would be on proofreading. Not to say that proofreaders are not important—they most certainly are—but their job is based not so much on judgement but on clear rules.

Not to mention that it’s easy to miss a typo when you’re knee deep in the tedium of proofreading (and are a human). Your virtual assistant might prove more attentive than the human eye, not to mention quicker.

Pitch Your Best Idea

But what if you haven’t gotten as far as a full manuscript? What if you’re still stuck in an earlier phase of planning your book?

AI can help with this too. You don’t need a complete manuscript to start prodding your AI assistant with questions about it—you can do the same with an incomplete idea as you develop and evaluate it.

For this type of work, AI can be used as a tool for brainstorming, as an idea generator, and a reviewer to run your thoughts by.

You can describe your vision, characters, story arc, and events, then ask questions about it—whether the characters make sense, whether the idea is engaging, and how to fill in the missing pieces.

Alternatively, if you are in the process of writing and get stuck, you can use AI to suggest ideas for what comes next, or evaluate if certain actions your characters take, or certain events would work well.

You can also use AI to help you gather knowledge about areas where your experience is lacking. For instance, you might not know what size the average goblin army is and what ranks it includes, but AI does.

Not All Advice Is Good Advice

While AI can be a wonderful tool that helps writers, there are some things to be aware of:

1. Don’t take all the advice you receive at face value. It might seem exciting at first, as if you’re getting knowledge from an all knowing source, but it can make mistakes. When using AI for research, use it with care and verify the sources.

2. Don’t lose your voice. It could be tempting to use language suggestions that sound more professional and fluid, but one of the challenges a writer must face is finding their own unique voice. Use AI to improve on what you have, not change yourself completely. It is you and your unique approach that will make your book memorable.

3. Avoid cliches. If you use AI to generate ideas for you, beware of relying on things that are too obvious, overplayed, or just plain standard. AI can help you think but it shouldn’t replace your imagination.

Conclusion

So how do you think you can make the most of AI? The options are overwhelming, but hopefully this article helped you feel more organized (and relieved some of the resistance you might have started reading this article with).

Now close this tab (though, if you found this article helpful, consider subscribing), summon your invisible assistant, and get to writing!