Catholic Anonymous

At any one moment, I have about five things I want to do and have time to do none of them well. I want to write, record music, make films, but I need to also maintain my day job and be there for my family.

It’s frustrating. Raising a family in California typically requires two incomes, and we don’t have that. But I have these stories in me. These burning thoughts. These creative impulses that don’t go away just because I’m ignoring them.

In these circumstances, AI has been the siren singing to me. I find it fascinating to begin with (add that to the list further up of things I don’t have time for). But beyond that, with it I’m able to take my meager amount of time and create something interesting – or at least not painfully boring – with it.

The process isn’t as simple as, “Write me a cool story in the style of X” or “Write me a think-piece on Pope Leo XIV that’s anti-woke” or something like that. That is soulless. The whole point of being restlessly creative is that you want your vision to shine through in what you do. You want your point to be made. Asking the LLM to think for you won’t cut it.

So how do I use it? Or, maybe more accurately, how much of my soul do I outsource to ChatGPT? It depends on the project.

Currently, I’ve been working on two fiction projects. One is a reworking of a short story I wrote years ago. It’s about three characters, a mother, father, and daughter, who each have an illuminating conversation with God, their stories intertwining.

I wanted ChatGPT to redo it because I suck at dialogue, mostly. Also, I just suck at fiction writing in general. I see the slop I come up with, and I know it could be more engaging, but I don’t know how to make it so.

So I gave the AI my draft and let it tell me where to change things. Then, instead of changing them myself, I asked it to change those things. If I didn’t like the draft it gave me, I asked it to change it in the way I wanted, and it redid the work. (I’ll put the final copy up on this blog over the coming weeks)

In a second fiction work I’m doing, I write the first draft, but from there, I work with it in ChatGPT. I basically ask the LLM to assess the chapter, explain where its weaknesses are and then make changes depending on the weaknesses.

In both cases, I already have the plot, characters, and general structure in my head. In both cases, also, I can’t just let the bot do its thing and walk away. Sometimes I’ll ask it to change one thing, and it changes ten other things that didn’t need changing. So it can be a little unwieldy.

But overall, it has astonished me. I feel conflicted. I know it’s not me pouring hours upon hours of work into trying to find just the right words. If I think a section needs to be more descriptive or that the world being built needs to feel more grounded and lived-in, I ask it to do the work and, presto, there it is. I don’t think I can take all the credit for writing the work, obviously. And what percentages should be assigned to it and me I probably couldn’t tell you definitively.

But I also know that this process is… fun. And, especially in light of the fact that this site is anonymous anyway, I suppose I wouldn’t take credit for it even if I did the work of writing it all myself – editing and all.

And to be honest, these stories, these thoughts, this creative work is worthwhile to me not because I am the one who is creating them (or partly creating them), but because it gives me the opportunity to create at all – and to hopefully create something beautiful. If you read a book and it moves you, does it really matter who (or what) wrote it?

Anyway, if LLM’s bother you, I don’t blame you for not reading anything I post here out of principle. Just know that I’ll try to be honest about when I’m using AI to write.

By the way, I’m not using it in this post. Perhaps you can sense the 100% “soul” in it.

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