AI has been slowly creeping into storytelling online. Not in the sense of a robotic apocalypse, but in the way media itself is written. Some have used AI to write entire stories, while others use it as a tool to assist them. One such assistance tool that I have become engrossed in is NovelAI.
There are multiple ways to use NovelAI. There have been
those use it to write complete stories that borrow from its vast collection of
stories, while others use it to complete something where it left off. In a way,
it is like a toy, that authors can use to bring their stories to life in a way
not possible before.
I have been using NovelAI like a toy too, just to create
stories nobody will ever see, rather to write serious creative work. Using the
knowledge I have, I decided to use this opportunity to experiment with it a
bit, one where I let the AI author the story for me and another where I instead
allow it to assist me in works that I have personally written.
In Novel AI, there is multiple terms that we need to keep in
mind:
Prompt – Initial text given by the user, depicted in yellow in the text.
Configuration – Settings given to the AI that determine how the text will be generated.
Output – Text generated by the AI using previous tokens.
User Input – Text written by the user, shown in pink when in-between output and blue when independently written.
For the first experiment, I only gave the AI a name to work with and let it run free. The configuration was the default. With every generation it gave me 160 characters, which I regenerated until I got to the one that I thought best fit the flow of the story.
I find it interesting that without much input, the AI went in the direction of a queer, fantasy drama, reminiscent of fanfiction written online. In many of the times I used NovelAI, there were times when a scene ended, and it started showing Author’s Notes like here:
These piqued my interest. The AI began acting less like an inanimate machine but instead like an author with feelings, a life outside of the servers it lives on. It felt like I was witnessing the AI transform into a sci-fi depiction of itself like discussed by Benson (2022) and Chubb et al. (2022), an artificial life capable of having experiences the same way humans do.
Though, the real reason this is happening is much more
depressing. NovelAI, like many other AI tools on the market, is known for using
works from websites like Archive of Our Own (AO3) to train their models (AO3,
2023). These sites, best known for their huge collection of fanfictions, almost
directly influence how NovelAI writes its works, lead to Author’s Notes like
the one above. Additionally, because most fanfiction is written about queer
relationships, it leads to an implicit bias towards outputting them. This also
includes sexual outputs, which the AI favors even when there is no indication
of it.
Next, I guided the AI through a story. The idea for this story came from the Russian song, “My love is on the fifth floor” (Моя любовь на пятом этаже) by the band Sekret (1986).
I used the configuration “Writer’s Daemon” for a more
dynamic story.
For this story, I also made sure to make any edits to the AI’s output if I wanted to change anything.
In my experience, writing alongside the AI was far more engaging than just letting it do its own thing. It also gave much better outputs then prior. The ability to edit the narrative and move the AI in the direction I wanted it to improved both the work and the creative process itself, giving me more time to think about where it is going.
Zhou and Sterman (2023) discussed this in their work on the creative struggle and the use of AI tools to enhance the experience of the writing rather than diminish it. They said that instead of putting emphasis on the tedium of putting words on the page, a successful writer can use the AI to let them put more effort into the creative process of making the story instead. In the two stories above, I can see the point they’re making. Not only NovelAI help when stuck, it also allowed me the breathing room to explore the ideas written.
Overall, using NovelAI in such a way really opened my eyes to the possibilities of AI and the deeper implications it has to the future of storytelling. Perhaps, in the future we will move towards all stories using some form of AI assistance; but that can only happen if the ethical issues surrounding it will be addressed.
References
Archive of Our Own. (n.d.). AI and Data Scraping on the Archive. https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/25888
Benson, D. C. (2022, June 3). AI in Fiction and the Future of War. The Strategy Bridge. https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2022/6/3/ai-in-fiction-and-the-future-of-war
Chubb, J., Reed, D., & Cowling, P. I. (2022). Expert views about missing AI narratives: is there an AI story crisis? AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01548-2
NovelAI - the AI storyteller. (n.d.). NovelAI. https://novelai.net/
Zhou, D., & Sterman, S. (2023). Creative Struggle: Arguing for the Value of Difficulty in Supporting Ownership and Self-Expression in Creative Writing. In2Writing. https://cdn.glitch.global/d058c114-3406-43be-8a3c-d3afff35eda2/paper11_2023.pdf
Секрет [Sekret]. (1986). Моя любовь на пятом этаже [My love is on the fifth floor] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLLf-PAnnvE
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