Blog Tour Guest Post: Is Artificial Intelligence Useful for Writers? By Gina Cheyne
Today I am taking part in the blog tour for Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie by Gina Cheyne. Today she is sharing her thoughts on AI and if it is useful for writers. This is the seventh in the SeeMs Detective Agency series, and I am intrigued, I’m going to have to check this series out!
Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie is available now: It was just released April 3rd!
Book Description:
In 1997, high in the alpine resort of Tignes, Cecily celebrates her third wedding anniversary with a night of passion. But in the morning her happiness turns to misery and shock when she finds her husband Nick dead in the bed beside her, the victim of a sudden heart attack.
Six weeks later, Cecily learns she is pregnant.
Twenty-six years later, her son Charlie takes a DNA test alongside his uncle Adam, Nick’s identical twin. The results shatter everything he thought he knew: Charlie is not related to Adam. If Nick wasn’t his father, then who was?
Cecily insists she was faithful, and the timing points only to that single night in Tignes. Desperate for answers, she turns to the SeeMs Detective Agency. Could someone have entered her room that night without her knowing? And if so—who? And why?
As the detectives dig deeper, they uncover a web of conflicting memories, buried secrets, and dangerous lies. Slowly they discover other people are in danger and if they don’t find out very soon what really happened in that wonderful night in Tignes two, or maybe more, lives will be lost.
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Is Artificial Intelligence Useful for Writers?
By Gina Cheyne
The current hot topic for writers as well as everyone else seems to be artificial intelligence (AI). What can it do for you? Should you use it and if so how?
In some way this makes me laugh because questions about AI are particularly aimed at people in the thinking careers: writing, research, science – does anyone ever ask a cricket player if he would like his balls to be trained with AI? Surely that would not be cricket.
Thinking of AI and cricket, my mind, which has a way of taking itself off on tangents even when I’m writing, started to think how you could use AI in skiing, one of the themes in my latest novel. In some ways we already do. When I am borrowing skis and boots I have to stand on a measuring machine programmed with various details about me which resolves what size boots and skis I should have. Inevitably I return a few times to change the boots! But perhaps further to this idea AI could teach the skis to turn and schuss and the skier could become just the passenger. Would that be something skiers would enjoy? I doubt it.
Anyway, diversion ended. AI and writing. Unfortunately, there has been a huge swathe of people writing books with AI, which has skewed the market and led to a distrust of self-published books. In my opinion this is a bit unfair. Self-published writers do not generally make much money and so tend to write for love. When you love something you do not normally replace it with an artificial alternative. How many of us want to be given a bunch of plastic red roses for Valentine’s Day?
In my book, Cecily has been seduced by an unknown man twenty six years earlier, but she would not have had the same night of passion if he had been replaced by an AI doll, would she? Twenty Six Years looking for a lost AI doll? Hum! Maybe not.
Using AI search engines like ChatGPT or CoPilot, for research is certainly a quicker way of getting information, but there are some drawbacks here too. Firstly, AI does sometimes make mistakes when it doesn’t have enough information or – since all it does is scan the knowledge available on the web – when information on the web is wrong. Secondly, one of the joys of doing your own research is that you start looking for one thing and often find a whole lot more related facts that can make a huge difference to your story. Research for this book involved going to Tignes many times, something that allowed me to see far more details about the place and makes a book far more interesting than just finding out about it from the internet.
An area where authors can use AI is in fact checking a final draft of a story. How often have editors received scripts from authors where a minor character has two or more different names because the author has failed to check them or in one part of the story a man has red hair and in another he has randomly become blond. That sort of check is easily made by artificial intelligence and does not upset or change the story. Here I think AI can be a benefit.
AI is now being used by Amazon to turn books into audio books, however I did put my book though the scheme to see what it was like. It was terrible. The voice intoned rather than spoke like a human, and put emphasis on the wrong parts of words, so it became unintelligible. I think it will be a while before AI spoken audio books become enjoyable.
Translation is another sphere being suggested for AI. I tried a page or two of Twenty-Six Years Living a Lie into a Spanish AI translator. It was fun, not least because ‘Bolsow, my man,’ translated into ‘Caramba amigo!’ but you would have to give the translation a full check by someone who speaks the language fluently as many of the ideas and nuances are literally lost in translation, which rather destroys the point of using AI.
So, I don’t think AI will ever become an alternative to people writing novels. Right now the ultimate insult amongst writers is: ‘That sounds as though it was written by AI’. If one day that becomes a compliment instead of an insult then perhaps it will be shared by robots, not humans. Until then: Go get ‘em HUMAN.
About the Author:
This is Gina Cheyne’s seventh novel in the SeeMs Detective series (the agency that looks behind what seems to be true). Gina’s family are keen and dedicated skiers and this book was inspired by a holiday in Tignes in France.
Gina has worked as a physiotherapist, a pilot, freelance writer and a dog breeder.
As a child, Gina’s parents hated travelling and never went further than Jersey. As a result she became travel-addicted and spent the year after university bumming around SE Asia, China and Australia, where she worked in a racing stables in Pinjarra, South of Perth. After getting stuck in black sand in the Ute one time too many (and getting a tractor and trailer caught in a tree) she was relegated to horse-riding work only. After her horse bolted down the sand, straining a fetlock and falling in the sea, she was further relegated to swimming the horses only in the pool. It was with some relief the race horse stables posted her off to Thailand… after all what could go wrong there?
In the north of Thailand, she took a boat into the Golden Triangle and got shot at by bandits. Her group escaped into the undergrowth and hid in a hill tribe whisky still where they shared the ‘bathroom’ with a group of pigs. Getting a lift on a motorbike they hurried back to Chiang Rai, where life seemed calmer.
After nearly being drowned in a fiesta in Ko Pha Ngan, and cursed by a witch in Malaysia, she decided to go to Singapore and then to China where she only had to battle with the language and regulations.
Since marrying life has been calmer. She became a writer because her first love was always telling a good yarn!
Contact Gina:
Instagram @ginacheynewriter
Substack @ginacheyne
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