So when I was a kid I really wished that I had a
robot to do my chores for me. Now I have a robot to do my work for me but is this as cool as it
sounds or should we be worried? This is Legends of the Shadow Woods, and though I am publishing
it I didn't really write it. Or did I? [Music] I used ChatGPT to write this Novella and
it's available on Amazon for 99 cents right now. "Embark on a journey through the mystical
Shadow Woods with Legends of the Shadow Woods, a collection of tales based on Greek mythology.
Follow the hero Ajax as he battles sorceresses and monsters, uncovers ancient artifacts, and
discovers his true destiny. These action-packed and thrilling stories will keep you on the edge
of your seat as you delve deeper into the rich world of the Shadow Woods." AI wrote that blurb
too. Along with using AI to write the book I also used a different AI to make the cover. I'm
sure everybody has heard of ChatGPT by now, but if you're not familiar, "ChatGPT is a computer
program that can understand and respond to written language like a human it can generate text that
is coherent and contextually relevant by making use of the input it receives and by learning
from the examples of text it has been trained on." And guess what? ChatGPT wrote that part too.
I've seen people using ChatGPT for all kinds of things lately from writing essays and resumes
to creating poetry and songs. In early January I saw a video of somebody using ChatGPT to write
a children's picture book and got the idea that "hey I can do that too." So I did but instead
of a children's book I wrote a fantasy Novella. Initially I wasn't even planning on sharing this,
I just wanted to play around with the technology but as I started working on it I realized that I
was putting kind of a decent amount of time into it and I had so many notes that I thought maybe
somebody else would find it interesting too. So in this video I'll just talk about my process for
creating this Novella and also some of my thoughts on the program in general. So first getting
into the generating process I started using using ChatGPT January 5th and I was just kind of
learning how it works and generally playing around with it. On the ninth I started working on this
project I didn't influence it too much with story direction or characters when creating a world
for these stories to take place in I straight up asked it "What kind of fantasy world should
I write about?" And here's the responses that it gave me. "1. a world with multiple intelligent
species living together such as humans elves dwarfs and dragons. 2. a world with a unique
Magic system such as one where magic is fueled by emotions or one where only certain people are
born with the ability to use magic. 3. a world that is inspired by a particular historical time
period or culture such as ancient Egypt or fetal Japan. 4. a world that is entirely made up of one
biome such as a world entirely covered in dense rainforest or a world made up of floating islands
in the sky." So this is actually a really good example of what most of my prompts and answers
look like. I would ask ChatGPT for some options and I'd choose from the ones that I thought would
work best. I went with a fantasy world based on Greek mythology because I thought it would give
the stories the best chance of succeeding. So I'll get more into the limits later but I thought
that Greek mythology would work well well because ChatGPT would already have a really large base of
information to work off of. Another reason is that with the samples of text that I got it to produce
previously were kind of vague in style. It kind of reminded me of how stories from mythology are told
so I thought the style would actually kind of fit it pretty well. So I think in its current state it
would be pretty difficult to get ChatGPT to write something like a contemporary novel. I figured
a collection of short stories would be easier to manage because just of the format of using ChatGPT
it makes it kind of difficult to refer to earlier details especially when regenerating prompts
multiple times there's just a lot of content to sift through. So it's easier if I can work in
smaller pieces the first story in the collection is called The Golden Feather of Friendship
and the AI actually named every story every chapter and the entire collection. So creating
the first story was a lot more trial and error than the later ones as it surprisingly took a lot
of patience and time to learn exactly what prompts to do to get what I'm looking for. Initially I
worked in larger chunks of multiple paragraphs but after a while I realized that this was kind
of making it a lot more difficult. It was was much easier to work in pieces of three paragraphs
or less so making the first story was very much seat of the pants as far as characters went but I
did have it create a basic outline before I began because I'm an outliner I can't have zero outline,
that doesn't work for me. So I would just give it one or two of the story points that it had already
generated and ask it to create a chapter outline, and then I would just ask it to make adjustments
when it came up with things that didn't really fit, and I'd save the outline for future use.
After that it was a really repetitive process of prompting for a few paragraphs at a time, copy
and pasting, regenerating, making adjustments, and prompting some more. And eventually I had a
very rough draft of a short story. I'll get into a little bit of the editing process now so like
I said I started generating on January 9th and I was done generating, editing, and proofreading
the book by January 21st. The final product is just shy of 25,000 words. I worked on one story
at a time so I don't actually have a starting word count so my estimate is there were 35,000 to
40,000 words of generated content before I really took any big editing steps. My goal with editing
this project wasn't to bring it up to my standard or to use my style but to work with what I
had. I wanted to just produce something that was readable. That's it. Not good, not awesome,
just readable. And I think for the most part I attained that. I really wanted to and tried to
preserve the generated content wherever possible as this is kind of a showcase for what the AI
can do. My editing process for this project was not too dissimilar from my typical editing of
my own novels. First a rough edit, then a more detailed pass using editing software, and finally
a proofread. Out of these three steps the rough edit most definitely took the longest as there was
just so much generated content to cut out. There's two main reasons for this. Firstly is that I would
regenerate sections of the text multiple times and then kind of Frankenstein the different
version together to get something I liked. So editing these into a semi-coherent chapter
was pretty time consuming. But secondly is that ChatGPT has a tendency to repeat itself a lot.
for a while at the end of every single paragraph it would summarize the character's goals of the
chapter or of the whole story, so most paragraphs ended with a phrase like "And with that Ajax knew
he had to defeat the dragon once and for all." So I definitely did not put as much time into editing
this project as I do other books mostly because the more time I spent editing this book the more
I wanted to change. I had to work through it very carefully to try and preserve without overdoing
my edits there were things that I really wanted to change but I left them there because they were
kind of... part of it. there are sentences that are out of place there are lines of dialogue that
are out of character or totally unnecessary but I left them in whenever they weren't intrusive.
I did change a lot while I was editing this, I think in places I maybe took the editing a little
farther than I originally intended, but there were times when it was easier for me to just write
a few lines of transition, or fix the dialogue myself instead of having ChatGPT generating
something better. But overall the majority of the content was written by AI. if I look at the time
I spent on this project it's about equally split between generating and editing time which actually
surprised me a lot. I was expecting the generating to take longer than the editing but with all the
regenerating it makes sense. And obviously I did not do any professional editing and I didn't have
any Beta Readers for this thing either. Plus I only spent a couple hours proofreading it. While
ChatGPT can do a lot of things it still has some limitations. So firstly they have a Content Policy
that says you can't use the program to generate certain types of content. Obviously they have
to have these kind of policies for a multitude of reasons, but the limit to violence makes
generating action fantasy stories a little bit challenging. Once while I was generating content
for these stories I got a little warning that said "This content may violate our content policy."
And my prompt was not detailed or specifically asking for any kind of violent content, so in
the context I understand why it went there, but also it's not exactly what I asked for. Anyway
I didn't use any of the content generated from that prompt just in case. So I think a much bigger
limit for me is its clumsy sentence structure. This this is a limit that I think is going to be
improved rapidly but for now it makes generating stories kind of difficult and requires a lot of
editing. I actually expected the generated text to have better grammar, flow, and structure than
it actually does, but a lot of what it generates is wordy, repetitive, and kind of overall
clumsy. But I guess it is good to know that real robots struggle with clumsy writing as much
as I do. So on January 9th ChatGPT had an update with improvements to the model for improvements
across a broad range of subjects. This was the day I started generating for these stories, but
I was using ChatGPT for a few days before that, and I think I saw some improvements so I don't
really have enough data to say for sure. Another limit or problem for me is the repeated phrases
on the OpenAI website you can find some other known limitations but this is the one I ran into
the most. On their website they say "the model is often excessively verbose and over uses certain
phrases". I'll have a link to the full page below, but overall as I said earlier, it caused a lot
of extra editing time to cut out the "excessively verbose" content. One more issue or limit that I
ran into was that sometimes the AI forgets what it already wrote. When I generating it would
change details along the way, like the color of a character's eyes. Now this wasn't something
I was expecting at all especially considering how complex of concepts that it can keep track of at
other times. Kind of my last little section here, what does this mean for the future of authors?
And honestly I don't really know. I've been watching programs like DallE2 and Mid-journey
freak out artists for months. Suddenly anyone with a few bucks for generator credits can
create artwork with a few keystrokes that just a few years ago would have taken hours, days,
or even weeks for someone who's worked years and years to grow their art scale to produce. To
an indie author trying to get things rolling, technology like this could rapidly change the
industry. If we thought KDP was a shake-up to the publishing industry this is a whole different
ball game. Now this is obviously all my opinion, and I still don't really know what to think. For
businesses it's pretty frightening, honestly. But I think creatively it's kind of amazing I think
ChatGPT and other similar programs that are bound to be on their way could be incredible tools
for people who have stories they want to tell. Anyone can write a story or for that matter draw
a picture but it often takes years of practice to gain and sharpen your skills to be able to bring
the image or the story in your mind onto the page. With technology like this things are a little
different. I won't say the barrier to entry is lower, but it's definitely different. Now I can
do some basic photo manipulation but I'm not an artist. This cover was the first thing I made in
DallE2. I watched the videos about how to use it, but with only a handful of generations I had
images that were basically exactly what I wanted. After that I spent a couple of hours
in Photoshop putting a few of the generated pictures together to make this cover. What I'm
getting at is that soon I think ChatGPT could be as easy for non-writers to use as DallE2 is
for non-artists. While I can't see this being a huge threat to authors with large fan bases
and followings, I think midlisters and us little guys will see the most change. What exactly that
might be I don't know we'll just have to wait and find out I guess. I also see the possibility of
Amazon banning AI content like this in the future, or at least at some point in the future,
so if that happens I will put the ebook on our website sydneyfaith.com instead. So if you
would like to read Legends of the Shadow Woods you can check it out on Amazon link down below,
and there are some of my other original, non-ai generated work there as well. Alright that's
all I got for you, so thanks for watching. Bye.
