I've been writing on CrazyKinux's Musings in one form or another since 2005. Long before ChatGPT, Claude, image generators, or any of the current AI tools existed, I was writing about EVE Online, about the community of players & bloggers, sharing things I had learned, interviewing people and generally following whatever rabbit hole happened to interest me.
So AI didn't suddenly make me creative, but it's definitely changed how I create.
Take The Safe Spot, the EVE podcast I co-host with Rixx. The conversation itself is ours. We decide the topics, who we want to talk to and what we're curious about. But afterward I can take a transcript and use AI to pull out themes, build show notes, identify things worth following up on, or even notice parts of the conversation I'd almost forgotten.
The same thing happens with the EVE guides I write about.
Quite often I'm asking questions because I've returned to the game after a long absence and genuinely need to relearn something. We, that is ChatGPT and I, might work through a ship fitting, a skill queue or some obscure mechanic. I'll challenge the answers, test things in-game and come back with what happened. Eventually I realize: there's probably a guide in here. Other times, I'll use transcripts from EVE players’ YouTube guides as raw material for written guides of my own, especially when I want something easier to reference while playing. When I do, I usually embed or link the original video and clearly credit the creator, while reshaping the information into a format that fits how I learn and how I write.
Fiction does get a tad messier. My recent story involving Caelin and Cassian Drake is a good example. I created the characters, their histories, their relationship, BlackCrystal, the favour between them and the meeting aboard Jita 4-4. But I also used AI to help turn that into drafts. Then I rewrote things. Cut things. Changed dialogue. Rejected ideas that didn't fit the characters. Eventually I even used Claude for another editorial pass.
So no, I didn't type every sentence myself, but I still it as my writing. but I'm also perfectly comfortable calling that AI-assisted writing if push comes to shove.
The visual side works much the same way. By the time I've spent a while exchanging ideas with an AI image tool, I usually have a fairly specific picture in my head. If what comes back doesn't match it, we go again. I change things, reject things, push it in another direction and keep working at it until what I'm looking at feels like the thing I was trying to create. It's a work in progress and so is my learning of these tools.
Final thoughts on AI and a good creative process
Which is why I've become less interested in the question, "Did AI make this?", and more interested in asking: "Where did the creative decisions come from?"
Because whatever AI contributes, I'm still the final editor and the gatekeeper.
Every word, sentence & paragraph gets read, and then reread. Every word can be changed. Every image gets judged against what I had in mind. I'll polish, tweak, reject, rewrite and reiterate until I'm satisfied with it. Sometimes ChatGPT gets me there. Sometimes Claude helps. Sometimes I use a combination of both.
Nothing gets published simply because the AI produced it. That applies to pretty much everything I create with these tools. AI can help me get somewhere faster, explore more directions, or work through ideas I might not have reached on my own, but it doesn’t make the final decision.
So maybe AI hasn’t changed whether I’m creative as much as it has changed what I, or it, can bring into the creative process.
I’m still the final editor, the gatekeeper, and the one deciding what is of good quality so that I'll be proud to put my name on.
And that's good enough for me.
CK out.
1 comment:
Hello! Interesting read. I am also someone who uses AI for editing and grammar. English is not my first language, and I am actually pretty bad with grammar and misstypos.
I can share that, in my experience, keeping all the details that matter to me when I write, while preserving my own prose and voice, has been a huge battle with AI for a very long time.
I tried setting rules and using specific prompts, but it never really delivered what I was hoping for. Doing it chunk by chunk made it even worse because of repetition, and I hate repeating things. I am not a Netflix writer developing a serie that needs to remind you what the plot is every 2 paragraphs. :P
I love what I write and most of it reflects what I actually did or experienced in the game, so keeping it close to that reality matters a lot to me.
I have also struggled with sharing my writing on social media and elsewhere because I am not a big fan of reading fully AI-generated content myself, and I can be very demanding of my own work.
So I understand the struggle of keeping your own personality in the writing while also defending the fact that the ideas and creativity behind it are yours. I think we are entering an era where too much content is generated simply for the sake of publishing something, sometimes without anyone really taking the time to reread it or care about it.
For me, when I write something, it has to come from passion rather than feeling that I have to publish something on time. I tried once and the result was messy. I ended up deleting it because it simply didn't feel like mine.
So you have my support. :) AI should stay a tool that helps us stay on track and shape all the raw, verbose stuff in our heads into something readable, without taking away the personality that made us want to write it in the first place.
Fritte Cornelius o7
Post a Comment