Can you write a novel with ChatGPT?

When I started this blog in 2020, I didn’t think I’d end up writing about whether artificial intelligence can write novels or not. And yet, here we are.

People who actually understand writing fiction aren’t worried about AI. Rather, we’re annoyed, and we can already see Amazon being flooded with computer-written garbage, but we know that’ll pass eventually. I know this post will probably piss off a few marketing bros who are selling their courses about how to use ChatGPT to write everything from wedding vows to the great American novel, but to them I say, tough.

So can you write a novel with ChatGPT? In short, no. Read this post to find out why, exactly, that is.

What is ChatGPT?

I’m more interested in talking about fiction than about ChatGPT, so I asked Chatty-G himself to write an introduction:

Hello Readers,

Meet ChatGPT, a sophisticated language model created by OpenAI. It’s a product of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology called GPT-3.5, which stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5.” Now, don’t let the complex name intimidate you – let me break it down for you.

ChatGPT is essentially a giant virtual brain that has been trained on a vast amount of diverse internet text, absorbing knowledge on various topics up until its last training cut-off in January 2022. It can understand context, generate human-like responses, and carry on conversations in a remarkably coherent manner. It’s like having a virtual chat companion that can provide information, answer questions, and even engage in creative discussions.

But, and this is crucial, ChatGPT doesn’t possess a personal understanding or consciousness. It doesn’t have real-world experiences, emotions, or opinions. It doesn’t “know” things in the way humans do. Instead, it relies on patterns and information present in the data it was trained on to generate responses.

Now, ChatGPT isn’t the only way to use artificial intelligence, but since you can use it for free, it’s definitely the most commonly used one. There are AI software that deal with writing in particular, like Jasper, but they aren’t any better at writing fiction, for the reasons I will be detailing in this post.

What is a “novel” anyway?

Let’s see what Merriam-Webster has to say about what a novel is:

an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events

Ah, human experience. If you skipped the explanation on what ChatGPT is, let me remind you that it doesn’t have human experiences. It doesn’t have any experience. And yes, you can write about things that you’ve never experienced personally, that’s why we have fiction and not just memoirs and textbooks, but artificial intelligence also can’t invent experiences.

Another thing you need to look at in that definition is connected sequence of events. Let’s talk more about that:

A novel is more than just words on pages

A novel written in English generally has more than fifty thousand words. And yet, a novel isn’t just enough words on enough pages. You would need to be pretty inexperienced with the world of fiction to think it’s enough just to fill out a book with grammatically correct sentences.

A story is about change. You need the right events to bring the right kind of change in your characters. People and events can be connected in multiple, incredible ways, and humans are great at understanding and creating those connections. Computers… not so much.

Most stories you’ve come across in your life have been structured in a specific way, and although AI can imitate this structure, it can’t actually understand plot development. It can’t understand how and why things and people change. And that is the problem with the “connected sequence of events” part of the deal.

Artificial intelligence has no original ideas

Like I said, AI can’t invent anything. You need to feed it material so it can recycle it and regurgitate you your answers. And listen, I’m not at all discounting the work that is behind creating these things. They can be massively beneficial, especially when it comes to finding and understanding information, but AI should not be used for everything. Definitely not for writing novels. Please don’t use it for your homework either.

And what about the legal side of things? To be able to teach AI anything, you need to feed it material written by other people. That’s what machine learning is. Many authors have already rightfully complained that their copyrighted material is being scraped by OpenAI without their permission and then reused to replicate their writing. Is that really what you want to participate in? In the real world, we call this plagiarism, or stealing.

Although it might be legal to use ChatGPT to write a novel, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. There might also be legal consequences in the future for claiming to have written something that you didnt actually write. Amazon is also taking steps to stop the marketplace from being flooded by AI-generated books and hopefully more will be done in the future.

And actually, you can’t copyright AI-generated content

So let’s say you write a book with AI and then someone copies your book. The best you can do is be annoyed because you don’t actually own your AI-generated writing. Anything in your book that isn’t the product of “human authorship” won’t belong to you. Obviously different countries will have different laws about this, but I suspect we’ll largely be following what the US does.

In other words, you probably don’t want to take any chances. Protect your writing. Even if you wrote the most boring and unoriginal story yourself, it would automatically be copyrighted because you made it.

A story is not just events

We already touched on this subject, but it really can’t be emphasised too much. A story is not just events after another.

For one, those events need to be connected by cause and effect, whether you present these events in a chronological order or not. Anything that happens in your story needs to have its roots in something that happened earlier, or else your readers will go “WTF, that doesn’t make any sense”. Anything that happens also needs to have consequences. Are you sure ChatGPT has any concept of this?

Something else you also find in stories are lessons. They aren’t just for preachy stories that warn us about the dangers of casual sex in broom cabinets, lessons are everywhere. Sometimes, unaware and inexperienced writers don’t exactly make the point they want to make. They might think they’re making a point about, say, how hunting for foxes is bad but they actually end up glamourising fox-hunting. AI can’t have any opinions – what kind of a point could its story have?

When you write a story, you can also allude to existing works or you could write something that’s a metaphor for something in the real world. You can be inspired by anything you’ve seen and put your own spin on it, but AI can’t be inspired by anything and it doesn’t have its own spin at all. It’s a pretty bad storyteller in that regard. It’s like a comedian who steals other people’s jokes.

If you don’t know how to write, how would you know your book is any good?

Yes, I’m making an assumption here, but I don’t think people who genuinely consider “writing a novel” with ChatGPT actually know much about writing fiction. It’s just people who can’t write and don’t actually want to write, but who want to make a quick buck on Amazon with their “book”.

That probably sounds incredibly judgemental, but come on. We’re now even getting people saying that you could create an entire online course with ChatGPT even without any personal experience on the subject, simply because they’re so certain that grammatically correct sentences after another are good enough and that people won’t notice or care. It’s so gross and I’m looking forward to seeing the end of it.

Anyway, if you don’t know anything about what makes a good novel, how would you know your AI-generated drivel is any good? Or is the point that you don’t even care? Actually, don’t answer…

Your story needs specificity

I’ve played around with ChatGPT a little because as a fan of words and languages I’m curious of how it works. When I’ve asked it to create pieces of writing for me, it doesn’t matter how great my prompts are, the content it generates is always very general.

See, stories need specificity for them to really touch their readers. You might think that a very general story with regular, everyman characters will be relatable for more people, but actually it’s the opposite. When we write something very specific, there’s more chances that other people will connect with it.

Let’s say your main character’s father has “a very stressful job”. Just saying that doesn’t really bring any specific images to our minds, and in any case, your readers would have to take your word for it. But maybe they’re a supervisor at a factory that is working way beyond its capacity, the head chef in the most popular restaurant in the country or a social worker in a city with a high crime rate – these things invoke specific images and say something about the character as well.

In my experience, ChatGPT also isn’t very good at coming up with motives for characters’ actions. Your characters shouldn’t be doing things “just because”, but even after digging and prodding, I couldn’t get that little computer brain come up with anything usable when I tried to get it to plot a story for me.

And sure, you could put all those details in your story yourself, but if you’re capable of that, why not do the writing yourself instead of re-writing AI-generated text?

“Oh, but you need to edit AI-generated text, not just use it as it is!”

Okay, but do you know how?

If you’ve never made the effort to learn anything about how stories work and what makes great writing, how could you edit anything to make it readable? Just changing some words here or there, or “making it sound like you”, won’t make it any better. The problems with AI-generated “fiction” are also structural, and I don’t think anyone seriously consering using ChatGPT to write a novel actually have the skills or understanding to deal with those problems. Sorry!

Again, if you knew how, why wouldn’t you just write the book yourself? I’m not saying that because I’m just a bitter old author who’s scared of modern times (I’m scared of many things but not that, mainly spiders) but because novels are written by humans. It’s as simple as that. You can’t outsource it.

AI can’t draw from personal experiences when you write a novel with ChatGPT

This was already mentioned in the beginning of this post, but I need to tell you how important this is for writing fiction.

Anything that you come across in your life can be used for your stories. Anything. Any events and any people, any thoughts and memories. Even if two people witness the same event, their interpretation of it is never the same and neither are its effects. That’s why it doesn’t matter that there are no unique stories left in the world because you writing the story will always make it unique. That’s why it’s so important to be yourself when you’re writing – you’re the special unique component in your story.

Artificial intelligence… is no one. It doesn’t have that unique lense through which it sees the world. That’s actually kind of sad, though only if you’re kind of sleep-deprived and think artificial intelligence looks like WALL-E. (It doesn’t.)

Does AI really understand writing fiction?

Artificial intelligence can’t understand writing fiction because it doesn’t actually understand anything. It recognises and repeats patterns, and writing a story about bloodthirsty poodles isn’t any different to it from writing an essay about the history of spoons.

For us humans, stories are our thing. There’s always been stories, much before we could actually write them down, and our stories serve many purposes. To me, a story is a bridge between people. To artificial intelligence, a story is nothing.

Why would you want to write a novel with artificial intelligence anyway?

Being a writer is great. I get to invent and imagine, and I can spend ages just thinking about which words will be the best ones to convey what I have inside my head. It’s a craft and it’s a game. It’s also my job.

If you don’t feel that way about writing novels, why would you even bother using AI to write a novel? Why would you want to publish a book that you didn’t actually write? Are you that desperate to self-publish something when you could use your time and energy to earn money some other, less dishonest way? I’m genuinely curious.

Most importantly, who do you think will read your AI-generated book? Do you think they won’t notice? Or are you looking to just grab their money and run?

Readers WILL get sick of AI books eventually

There are many kinds of readers in the world and that’s a good thing even if I don’t agree with all of them. There will always be people who absolutely adore hastily written books with crappy plots and even worse characters because they connected with something and because not everyone is very critical of what they read.

And yet, I genuinely don’t think you can fool these people for very long. If you try to saturate the market with AI-generated “novels”, there will be a breaking point and it won’t take long. Even if AI developes so much that it becomes undetectable, the issues I’ve mentioned in this post still persist. You see, readers care about a great story more than they care about great writing. Even the most beautifully written sentences can’t replace a great story, whether they’ve written by humans or computers.

Please have some respect for your readers. I would say this to anyone who’s trying to rush through the process of writing a novel, whether they’re doing it the proper way or with AI. Don’t be an arse.

Can you use AI for anything when you’re writing a novel?

I don’t hate ChatGPT or AI in general. I’m not in the least bit angry when I’m writing this post and my main motivation for writing about this subject at all is the fact that it gets searched on Google a lot. Let me be the one to talk about it instead of some bro marketer who’s only in it to make a quick buck.

So is artificial intelligence competely useless when writing a novel? Of course not, actually, I’ve even used ChatGPT myself when writing a novel! I just use it for research and brainstorming, not writing.

Sometimes you might have a question that isn’t easy to find an answer for with Google and you might not want to spend a lot of time researching a small detail. For example, I’ve needed to know if you could call abroad from a phone box and how much did chocolate bars cost in the UK in 1993. You do need to keep in mind that the answers might not be accurate, so if you’re researching something that’s very prominent and important in your story, you should probably fact-check from other sources.

I’m also very bad at coming up with names for places in my stories. It’s bizarre, really, but there you go. I’ve found that ChatGPT is great when you need to come up with a list of names and your poor human brain just isn’t braining at the moment. You could also use it for coming up with appropriate character names instead of using a character name generator.

You could also brainstorm different outcomes or obstacles for situations if you’re feeling stuck, and even if you don’t use the actual results, the effect is pretty much the same as using a friend as a sounding board. Sometimes that’s enough to unlodge something in your brain. And sure, feel free to use ChatGPT to come up with story ideas, though I suspect you’d do a better job of it yourself.

Okay, so what do you do if you’re ready to learn how to write that book yoursef?

You could claim that I only wanted to write this post to promote my own courses, but that would be kind of silly because a) I would promote them anyway because that’s my job, and b) me doing that is not dependent on the existence of ChatGPT and AI at all.

Writing fiction is my passion. I care very little about other things. Reading amazing books is also a favourite thing of mine, which is why I want more of those books to be birthed into the world. That’s why I want to make it easy to learn how to write unforgettable stories, I want to make writing real novels accessible. Actual stories, that is, not just enough words on enough pages.

If you’re an aspiring author and you want help and guidance for every step of the novel-writing process, my course Writing Your First Novel 2.0 is a great place to get started. If you’d just like the best tools and quick guides for writing a great novel, check out this Novel Writing Starter Kit in my Etsy shop.

Yes, this is how I make my living, but I’m not here just to make money. I want your stories to be heard and no one else can tell them but you.

The last words on using GPT-3.5 to write a novel

I feel like I’ve spent enough time talking in this blog post. Let’s give ChatGPT a chance to say the final words:

So, why can’t you use ChatGPT to write a novel? While it’s a fantastic tool for generating creative content and ideas, it lacks the deep understanding, creativity, and emotional nuance that human authors bring to their work. It doesn’t grasp the intricacies of plot development, character depth, or the subtle nuances that make a novel truly captivating.

In essence, ChatGPT is a brilliant assistant for various tasks, but writing a novel requires the unique touch of human creativity, emotion, and experience that an AI model can’t replicate. It’s a tool to complement human intelligence, not replace it.

I think that says it all.

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Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.