Overcoming the Fear: How Micro-Tasks Can Help Demystify AI for Writers

A Gateway to AI Expertise for the Hesitant Writer

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Are you a writer? How does it feel to be a writer in the age of generative AI and ChatGPT? I've spoken to several writers about this, and have seen many articles on sites such as Medium or Substack on this topic, where some writers seem worried, even terrified of AI. Have you seen articles about this too?

Writers see what AI is starting to do in generating writing of different kinds, they don't understand how AI works (why should they) and don't know what's coming next, given how fast things are moving. I understand why many writers would be feeling concerned.

Other writers and creatives have responded to AI a bit differently, by being dismissive of AI, defiantly believing AI will never replicate or replace human creativity, and confident that humans are inherently superior to AI and always will be. Perhaps you know someone who feels that way?

They worry me too, as I'm not sure these writers & creatives sceptical of AI really understand how AI works and its vast potential.

I'm also not sure a dismissive attitude is the best way to prepare for the future where AI's potential isn't limited to the beliefs & imagination of a few creatives. I have written about this recently in The Uncomfortable Truth About AI Creativity: What Creatives Refuse to See.

Here's a question for you: How can you fairly judge something as being good or bad, useful or not - if you don't even understand what something is and what it can do?

I think you might agree, that you can't judge something fairly if you don't understand what it is, and how it works.

That, I believe is the key problem for many writers both the fearful and defiantly sceptical about AI - most of them haven't used AI in any way, so don't have much of a basis to understand it. 

As Wayne W Dyer once said:

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

So how do we improve this? Sure, there are endless tutorials, articles and code telling you all about AI. Understandably writers are not interested in learning how to code AI. While many other tutorials tell you how to use text requests to get AI like ChatGPT to do things, how do they know what is relevant for writers?

I'm not sure most of these many articles promising for example 'ChatGPT prompts to help you' are always the most useful and relevant things for writers to be spending their valuable time reading, to be honest. These articles are most often pitched at a general audience, for general tasks.

I believe the best way to help writers better understand how AI works, is to help you focus on tasks specific to writers that you can use AI to help you with.

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That's what this article is going to show you, looking at how you might use AI in different ways to help with specific writing 'micro-tasks' that you would typically do as a creative writer.

However you feel about AI, if you are an optimist, wary or a skeptic, I would encourage you to read through this article and practice the exercises suggested. 

By doing so, you will have a much better understanding of what AI can really do to help you with your writing, whether you feel you ultimately want to use it yourself or not.

While this article focuses on how AI techniques can be applied to fiction writing, these could very easily be applied to non-fiction writing as well.

Free AI Tools to Use for Creative Writing Tasks

While there are many paid AI tools out there, some of the best are free, so I'm going to suggest some free AI tools you can use for these exercises.

ChatGPT is one of the best known, from OpenAI as a web service, you can sign up for a free account here.

Microsoft CoPilot is a free web service, you can find it here (no sign-up required).

Claude is also a free web service, you can sign up for free here.

ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot are based on the same AI model, so can produce similar-sounding writing because of this.

One key difference though is Microsoft CoPilot has access to the internet, so for example can help you do web research by asking it 'What the the trending topics for fiction writers' and it can reference the most up-to-date information on the internet.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

ChatGPT and Claude do not have access to the live internet and rely on things they have learned previously up to a certain cut-off date.

Another difference is for better quality prose, Claude is generally considered better at generating more human & natural-sounding text. The text generated by ChatGPT & Microsoft CoPilot can at times sound a bit too clunky, wooden, too keen, and even a bit hyperbolic at times.

However, not all writing tasks require good prose, as we shall see.

It can be insightful to try the same task using more than one of these AI tools, to see the different responses and to help you better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each of these AI tools.

If you’re like to see a basic quick tutorial of using AI tools like ChatGPT, CoPilot & Claude this 6 minute tutorial video is a good basic quick introduction.

Why Would Any Creative Writer Want to Use AI?

On a broader point let's speak to perhaps the elephant in the room, or perhaps a common fear many writers have about using AI. 

Some writers imagine & fear that using AI for creative writing means essentially letting the computer write the text, copy and paste. 

Given how some AI tools don't always produce the best-sounding natural prose, writers could be appalled at the very idea of using AI for creative writing.

Why would any creative writer want to use AI to produce clunky robotic-sounding text?

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Yet this is a complete misunderstanding of AI's potential to help writers with writing. Sure, you can use AI to write a story for example, and many do, You can even use various tools and methods to make it even sound reasonably good if you want (tip: use Claude). But that's only part of what a writer needs to do.

The most critical thing for writers to understand about AI is it can help you with much more than just producing the text.

I believe some of the most useful things AI can help writers with, is absolutely nothing to do with writing the end text itself. Yes, you can use it to generate text, but I don't think that is the most helpful thing AI can do for writers, personally.

I use AI for my writing all the time, but I never use it to generate the text of my articles for example. All will be revealed shortly in the next section.

AI Prompts to Help with Non-Writing Tasks in Creative Writing

When you ask one of these AI tools a question, the common AI terminology calls this a 'prompt' so I'll be using that from now on.

Remember responses might vary even with the same AI tool, and will certainly vary across different AI tools. 

The key thing to grasp here is, that you could use as many or as few of these as prompts as you like to help with your writing.

I hope it goes without saying that whatever these AI tools produce, would most likely be further enhanced by modifying them further using your writing skills. 

Brainstorming Prompts

Stuck for ideas? use these prompts to help you brainstorm with AI to help inspire your writing..

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