Spotting AI Writing Ticks in Fiction Drafts
As you use AI to draft writing, you’ll notice all sorts of phrases and affectations that repeat to the point of cliche.
I’ve taken to calling these “ticks" or “quirks.” So, in my view, it’s best to recognize what these are so that you can remove them during the editing process or even explicitly advise your writing partner to not use them in the first place.
For example:
She had filed this without examining it.
This kind of sentence has popped up more and more. At first I wondered if it was the style of writing that I was interested in or the characters that I was interested in that was producing this kind of phrasing. Am I interested in repressed characters? Maybe! But it might also be a simple of quirk of writing fiction, which demands interiority, because it’s one of the things that sets fiction apart from movies or music or nearly every other art form. You are able to enter another person’s mind through the characters or through the narrator. You are able to observe them thinking or suppressing what they should be thinking about, as is the case here.
Thinking of this particular quirk, I suspect it’s because of a lack of dramatic action or emotion. The character is not doing anything other than noticing and thinking, nor does she have any emotion to play off of other than her own desire to suppress her emotions. And in order to make this moment somehow feel important (or deeper), the AI leans on this quirk of the character noticing something and filing it away, a kind of office-like rendering of the act of repression.
Maybe this creates some dramatic tension in that the reader suspects the character will have to deal with that repressed thought or feeling at some point. Maybe AIs are doing this constantly with us, noticing and filing away slights and agressions both macro and micro, so that this is a kind of projection. That’s a scary thought! In any case, I’m not fond of this sentence construction or this dramatic instinct. Trust the reader to notice that something has happened that should be remembered.
