I recently stumbled across a story titled Twinkle Twinkle written by Stephen Marche and artificial intelligence, which was fascinating. While some of the stories I’ve read that have been written completely by AI are surprisingly entertaining just because of how hilariously strange they were, this was a bit more interesting. I would find it completely plausible if a fair number of authors were writing in conjunction with artificial intelligence in ten years.

The story isn’t great, but as the author points out, the fact that it is not awful is somewhat of impressive. I’ll admit, part of me was somewhat disgusted that the artificial intelligence here was playing such a large role in the writing process, but I’ve since become more intrigued.

One thing that I think could make it a bit better would be if the AI was more suggestive and less prescriptive. For the sake of the experiment, the Stephen Marche ceded to the AI on its every recommendation, but if it was more recommendation-based I think it would be more helpful and more realistic. Think of a more creative spell-check. Rather than forcing Stephen to use more dialogue, it could suggest that he use more dialogue and keep him in the know regarding his dialogue to non-dialogue ratio.

There are some areas that I think AI could be particularly helpful in. Mostly, I imagine it could be great for aiding the implementation of structure in a number of ways. I found the fact that it forced Stephen to use more adverbs to be interesting, potentially doing a good job to correct the overcorrection caused by understandable but sometimes over the top adverbaphobia. One a larger scale, I wondered what the AI would look like if it worked as a part of software writing like Scrivener. It could help writers all kinds of things, from settings to characters to themes to plot.

Of course, the danger is always that it could trap and limit writing. But it is interesting to consider.