When AI Starts Writing in Circles
Sometimes, when reviewing an AI-assisted draft, you get a lot of gold. And sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes you get hallucinations that move beyond the good hallucinations (i.e. the kind that add inspirational life to your story). And sometimes you get strange tautological compositions that make you laugh. Like this:
She had knocked and Bayan had let her in, the way you let in someone you had decided to let in.
It’s hard to not understand what that’s like. We’ve all been there! I’ve let someone in the way I decided to let them in so many times. Here’s a very similar one:
The corridor did what the corridor did.
In a way, I sympathize with these constructions. There’s something really human about the failure of them! It’s like when you don’t know what to write, so writing anything is better than writing nothing. But then what you write is no good.
My ongoing theory is that AI will write sentences like this when it is struggling to find interesting things to say. And that’s because the planning is off. The drama has dried up. The characters have flattened. The juice—if it ever existed—has been squeezed out of your story.
In my limited experience so far, lines like these are canaries in the coal mine—they are tells that something is off. If you notice them popping into drafts, it’s time to ask yourself whether the chapter or story is headed in the right direction. This can be easier said than done, because who wants to delete a few chapters, backtracking into the abyss? But sometimes moving backwards is the forwards!
There have been times I just threw my hands up and said, “This isn’t working.” Usually I did this when I basically decided that an entire chapter was unsalvageable. The machine had fallen apart.
Depending on your comfort level with confrontation, acknowledging that things have deteriorated can be hard to do. It can be hard to manage. Just as it is in real life. But you’ll need to do it, if you want to be a good creative director, getting the most out of yourself and your AI creative partner.
